Although virtual reality, video entertainment, and computer games are dependent on the three-dimensional reproduction of sound, it remains unclear whether 3D-audio formats actually intensify the emotional listening experience. There is currently no valid inventory for the objective measurement of immersive listening experiences resulting from audio playback formats with increasing degrees of immersion. The development of the Immersive Music Experience Inventory could close this gap. An initial item list was derived from studies in virtual reality and spatial audio, supplemented by researcher-developed (...) items and items extracted from historical descriptions. Psychometric evaluation was conducted by an online study. The N = 222 Participants were recruited via mailing lists and via a panel provider. Based on controlled headphone playback, participants listened to four songs/pieces, each in the three formats of mono, stereo, and binaural 3D audio. The latent construct “immersive listening experience” was determined by probabilistic test theory and by means of the many-facet Rasch measurement. As a result, the specified MFRM model showed good model fit. The final one-dimensional inventory consists of 10 items and will be made available in English and German. (shrink)

Iedereen komt ze weleens tegen in eigen kring of kent ze uit ondervinding: de bully op het schoolplein, de gewelddadige levenspartner, de maniakale manager, de tirannieke geestelijk leider, de crimineel. In het dagelijks spraakgebruik bestempelen we ze zonder aarzeling als 'gevaarlijke gekken'. We weten maar al te goed hoe ontwrichtend of traumatiserend zo'n gek kan zijn. Maar kan de impact van zo'n gevaarlijke gek niet ook op grotere schaal spelen? Op de schaal van de politiek, de samenleving, de wereld of (...) de geschiedenis? Met deze vraag organiseerden Gijsbert de Reuver en Stephan Sanders bij de Universiteit van Amsterdam, in samenwerking met 'De Groene Amsterdammer', een spannende collegereeks, die een vervolg heeft gekregen in het boek 'Gevaarlijke gekken?' In dit boek staan stukken van docenten uit de collegereeks, maar ook bijdragen die speciaal zijn geschreven voor de bundel, bijvoorbeeld die over Donald Trump en Vladimir Poetin. (shrink)

The adoption of web-based telecare services has raised multifarious ethical concerns, but a traditional principle-based approach provides limited insight into how these concerns might be addressed and what, if anything, makes them problematic. We take an alternative approach, diagnosing some of the main concerns as arising from a core phenomenon of shifting trust relations that come about when the physician plays a less central role in the delivery of care, and new actors and entities are introduced. Correspondingly, we propose an (...) applied ethics of trust based on the idea that patients should be provided with good reasons to trust telecare services, which we call sound trust. On the basis of this approach, we propose several concrete strategies for safeguarding sound trust in telecare. (shrink)

During the past few decades, a radical shift has occurred in how philosophers conceive of the relation between science and philosophy. A great number of analytic philosophers have adopted what is commonly called a ‘naturalistic’ approach, arguing that their inquiries ought to be in some sense continuous with science. Where early analytic philosophers often relied on a sharp distinction between science and philosophy—the former an empirical discipline concerned with fact, the latter an a priori discipline concerned with meaning—philosophers today largely (...) follow Willard Van Orman Quine (1908-2000) in his seminal rejection of this distinction. -/- This book offers a comprehensive study of Quine’s naturalism. Building on Quine’s published corpus as well as thousands of unpublished letters, notes, lectures, papers, proposals, and annotations from the Quine archives, this book aims to reconstruct both the nature (chapters 2-4) and the development (chapter 5-7) of his naturalism. As such, this book aims to contribute to the rapidly developing historiography of analytic philosophy, and to provide a better, historically informed, understanding of what is philosophically at stake in the contemporary naturalistic turn. (shrink)

in april 1933, two bright young Ph.D.s were elected to the Harvard Society of Fellows: the psychologist B. F. Skinner and the philosopher/logician W. V. Quine. Both men would become among the most influential scholars of their time; Skinner leads the "Top 100 Most Eminent Psychologists of the 20th Century," whereas philosophers have selected Quine as the most important Anglophone philosopher after the Second World War.1 At the height of their fame, Skinner and Quine became "Edgar Pierce twins"; the latter (...) obtaining the endowed chair at Harvard's department of philosophy, the former taking up the position at Harvard's psychology department.2Besides these biographical parallels, there also... (shrink)

I try in this essay to accomplish two things. First I offer some first thoughts toward a clarification of the ethical foundations of private property rights that avoids pitfalls common to more strictly Lockean theories, and is thus better prepared to address arguments posed by critics of standard private property arrangements. Second, I'll address one critical argument that has become pretty common over the years. While versions of the argument can be traced back at least to Pierre Joseph Proudhon, I'll (...) focus on a formulation given it by Jeremy Waldron. The basic idea is that the only sound arguments for private property rights lead to the conclusion that society has an obligation to insure that every citizen possess private property. In Waldron's formulation, what is justifiable is a general, rather than a special, right to private property. I shall try to suggest that this conclusion is unwarranted. (shrink)

Recently, some philosophers have argued that we should take quantification of any (finite) order to be a legitimate and irreducible, sui generis kind of quantification. In particular, they hold that a semantic theory for higher-order quantification must itself be couched in higher-order terms. Øystein Linnebo has criticized such views on the grounds that they are committed to general claims about the semantic values of expressions that are by their own lights inexpressible. I show that Linnebo’s objection rests on the assumption (...) of a notion of semantic value or contribution which both applies to expressions of any order, and picks out, for each expression, an extra-linguistic correlate of that expression. I go on to argue that higher-orderists can plausibly reject this assumption, by means of a hierarchy of notions they can use to describe the extra-lingustic correlates of expressions of different orders. (shrink)

In this paper we present a new proposal for defining actual causation, i.e., the problem of deciding if one event caused another. We do so within the popular counterfactual tradition initiated by Lewis, which is characterised by attributing a fundamental role to counterfactual dependence. Unlike the currently prominent definitions, our approach proceeds from the ground up: we start from basic principles, and construct a definition of causation that satisfies them. We define the concepts of counterfactual dependence and production, and put (...) forward principles such that dependence is an unnecessary but sufficient condition for causation, whereas production is an insufficient but necessary condition. The resulting definition of causation is a suitable compromise between dependence and production. Every principle is introduced by means of a paradigmatic example of causation. We illustrate some of the benefits of our approach with two examples that have spelled trouble for other accounts. We make all of this formally precise using structural equations, which we extend with a timing over all events. (shrink)

A commonly held idea regarding the nature of time is that the future is open and the past is fixed or closed. This article investigates the notion that there is an asymmetry in openness between the past and the future. The following questions are considered: How exactly is this asymmetry in openness to be understood? What is the relation between an open future and various ontological views about the future? Is an open future a branching future? What is the relation (...) between an open future and the question of whether contingent statements about the future are true or false? Is an open future compatible with a single determinate future? (shrink)

Expressive-Assertivism, a metaethical theory championed by Daniel Boisvert, is sometimes considered to be a particularly promising form of hybrid expressivism. One of the main virtues of Expressive-Assertivism is that it seems to offer a simple solution to the Frege-Geach problem. I argue, in contrast, that Expressive-Assertivism faces much the same challenges as pure expressivism.

Pearl opened the door to formally defining actual causation using causal models. His approach rests on two strategies: first, capturing the widespread intuition that X = x causes Y = y iff X = x is a Necessary Element of a Sufficient Set for Y = y, and second, showing that his definition gives intuitive answers on a wide set of problem cases. This inspired dozens of variations of his definition of actual causation, the most prominent of which are due (...) to Halpern & Pearl. Yet all of them ignore Pearl’s first strategy, and the second strategy taken by itself is unable to deliver a consensus. This paper offers a way out by going back to the first strategy: it offers six formal definitions of causal sufficiency and two interpretations of necessity. Combining the two gives twelve new definitions of actual causation. Several interesting results about these definitions and their relation to the various Halpern & Pearl definitions are presented. Afterwards the second strategy is evaluated as well. In order to maximize neutrality, the paper relies mostly on the examples and intuitions of Halpern & Pearl. One definition comes out as being superior to all others, and is therefore suggested as a new definition of actual causation. (shrink)

Carnap and Quine first met in the 1932-33 academic year, when the latter, fresh out of graduate school, visited the key centers of mathematical logic in Europe. In the months that Carnap was finishing his Logische Syntax der Sprache, Quine spent five weeks in Prague, where they discussed the manuscript “as it issued from Ina Carnap’s typewriter”. The philosophical friendship that emerged in these weeks would have a tremendous impact on the course of analytic philosophy. Not only did the meetings (...) effectively turn Quine into Carnap's disciple, they also paved the way for their seminal debates about meaning, language, and ontology---the very discussions that would change the course of analytic philosophy in the decades after the Second World War. -/- Yet surprisingly little is known about these first meetings. Although Quine has often acknowledged the impact of his Prague visit, there appears to be little information about these first encounters, except for the fact that the Quines “were overwhelmed by the kindness of the Carnaps” and that it was Quine’s “most notable experience of being intellectually fired by a living teacher”. Neither their correspondence nor their autobiographies offer a detailed account of these meetings. In this paper, I shed new light on Carnap’s and Quine’s first encounters by examining a set of previously unexplored material from their personal and academic archives. Why did Quine decide to visit Carnap? What did they discuss? And in what ways did the meetings affect Quine’s philosophical development? In what follows, I address these questions by means of a detailed reconstruction of Quine’s year in Europe based on a range of letters, notes, and reports from the early 1930s. (shrink)

Coherence considerations play an important role in science and in everyday reasoning. However, it is unclear what exactly is meant by coherence of information and why we prefer more coherent information over less coherent information. To answer these questions, we first explore how to explicate the dazzling notion of ``coherence'' and how to measure the coherence of an information set. To do so, we critique prima facie plausible proposals that incorporate normative principles such as ``Agreement'' or ``Dependence'' and then argue (...) that the coherence of an information set is best understood as an indicator of the truth of the set under certain conditions. Using computer simulations, we then show that a new probabilistic measure of coherence that combines aspects of the two principles above, but without strictly satisfying either principle, performs particularly well in this regard. (shrink)

In der neueren Sprachphilosophie ist wiederholt der soziale Charakter des Redens betont worden. Das Buch versucht, diese These auf der Grundlage einer genauen Untersuchung der Abfolge einzelner sprachlicher Handlungen zu verteidigen. Die orthodoxe Sprechakttheorie hat sich bislang weitgehend auf die Gelingensbedingungen einzelner sprachlicher Vollzüge konzentriert. Isolierte Redehandlungen stellen allerdings in der kommunikativen Praxis einen Ausnahmefall dar: Ein kompetenter Sprecher muss nicht nur die vom sprachlichen Kontext unabhängigen Korrektheitsstandards kennen; vielmehr muss er auch in der Lage sein, die eigenen Sprechakte im (...) Rahmen eines Textes kohärent miteinander zu verknüpfen und auf Redehandlungen anderer so zu reagieren, dass ein genuiner Diskurs zwischen den Parteien entsteht – im Gegensatz zu einer bloßen Aneinanderreihung “für sich” korrekter Äußerungen. Das Buch verfolgt das Ziel, das für die Struktur derartiger Rede(handlungs)sequenzen einschlägige Reglement in seinen wesentlichen Aspekten zu rekonstruieren und insbesondere die für ein solches Projekt relevanten sprachphilosophischen Grundfragen zu klären. (shrink)

There is currently disagreement about whether the phenomenon of first-person, or de se, thought motivates a move towards special kinds of contents. Some take the conclusion that traditional propositions are unable to serve as the content of de se belief to be old news, successfully argued for in a number of influential works several decades ago.1 Recently, some philosophers have challenged the view that there exist uniquely de se contents, claiming that most of the philosophical community has been under the (...) grip of an attractive but unmotivated myth.2 At the very least, this latter group has brought into question the arguments in favor of positing special kinds of content for de se belief; I think they have successfully shown that these arguments are not as conclusive, or fully articulated, as many have taken them to be. In this paper I will address these challenges directly and I will present and defend an argument for the conclusion that the phenomenon of de se thought does indeed motivate the move to a special kind of content, content that is uniquely de se. First, I characterize a notion of de se belief that is neutral with respect to friends and foes of uniquely de se content. I then argue for a determination thesis relating de se belief to belief content: that there is no difference in de se belief without a difference in belief content. I argue that various proposals for rejecting this determination thesis are unsuccessful. In the last part of the paper, I employ this determination thesis to argue for the existence of a type of belief content that is uniquely de se. (shrink)

Many scholars claim that Frege's theory of colouring is committed to a radical form of subjectivism or emotivism. Some other scholars claim that Frege's concept of colouring is a precursor to Grice's notion of conventional implicature. I argue that both of these claims are mistaken. Finally, I propose a taxonomy of Fregean colourings: for Frege, there are purely aesthetic colourings, communicative colourings or hints, non-communicative colourings.

While Quine’s linguistic behaviorism is well-known, his Kant Lectures contain one of his most detailed discussions of behaviorism in psychology and the philosophy of mind. Quine clarifies the nature of his psychological commitments by arguing for a modest view that is against ‘excessively restrictive’ variants of behaviorism while maintaining ‘a good measure of behaviorist discipline…to keep [our mental] terms under control’. In this paper, I use Quine’s Kant Lectures to reconstruct his position. I distinguish three types of behaviorism in psychology (...) and the philosophy of mind: ontological behaviorism, logical behaviorism, and epistemological behaviorism. I then consider Quine’s perspective on each of these views and argue that he does not fully accept any of them. By combining these perspectives we arrive at Quine’s surprisingly subtle view about behaviorism in psychology. (shrink)

Susanne K. Langer is best known as a philosopher of culture and student of Ernst Cassirer. In this chapter, however, I argue that this standard picture ignores her contributions to the development of analytic philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s. I reconstruct the reception of Langer’s first book *The Practice of Philosophy*—arguably the first sustained defense of analytic philosophy by an American philosopher—and describe how prominent European philosophers of science such as Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Herbert Feigl viewed her (...) as one of the most important allies in the United States. In the second half of this chapter, I turn to Langer’s best-selling *Philosophy in a New Key* and reconstruct her attempts to broaden the scope of the, by then, rapidly growing U.S. analytic movement. I argue that her book anticipated various developments in analytic philosophy but was largely ignored by her former colleagues. I end the chapter by offering some clues as to why New Key did not incite the same laudatory responses from analytic philosophers as her earlier work. (shrink)

Dem "Manifestationsargument" zufolge steht eine realistische Semantik der Wahrheitsbedingungen im Widerspruch zu dem Gedanken, dass das Verstehen von Sätzen eine Fähigkeit ist, die sich im Handeln manifestieren können muss. – Der Aufsatz zeigt, dass sowohl Realisten als auch Anti-Realisten die These aufzugeben haben, dass das Verstehen eines Satzes im Erfassen der jeweiligen Wahrheitsbedingungenbesteht. Die realistische Annahme der Existenz verifikationstranszendenter Wahrheiten steht – unabhängig vom Manifestationsprinzip – im Widerspruch zu einer wahrheitskonditionalen Semantik. Die von heutigen Anti-Realisten vertretenen Theorien des Verstehens sind (...) allerdings einem ähnlichen Einwand ausgesetzt, insofern sie gleichfalls nicht unsere Fähigkeit, unentscheidbare Sätze zu verstehen, erklären können. (shrink)

A conjunction of two hypotheses may provide a better explanation than either one of them individually, even if each already provides a good explanation on its own. An appropriate measure of explanatory power should reflect this, but none of the measures discussed in the literature do so because they only consider how much an explanatory hypothesis reduces our surprise at the evidence – which is problematic. This chapter introduces and defends a class of coherentist measures of explanatory power, and shows (...) that one particular such measure that combines different intuitions underlying the epistemological notion of coherence overcomes the aforementioned problems of surprise reduction measures. (shrink)

In the late 1930s, a few years before the start of the Second World War, a small number of European philosophers of science emigrated to the United States, escaping the increasingly perilous situation on the continent. Among the first expatriates were Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach, arguably the most influential logical empiricists of their time. In this two-part paper, I reconstruct Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the (...) impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. This second part traces Reichenbach’s development and focuses on his frequent interactions with American academics throughout the 1930s. I show that Reichenbach was quite ignorant about developments in Anglophone philosophy in the first stages of his career but became increasingly focused on the United States from the late 1920s onwards. I reconstruct Reichenbach’s efforts to find a job across the Atlantic and show that some of his English publications—most notably Experience and Prediction—were attempts to change the American narrative about logical empiricism. Whereas U. S. philosophers identified scientific philosophy with the views of the Vienna Circle, Reichenbach aimed to market his probabilistic philosophy of science as a subtler alternative. (shrink)

In the years before the Second World War, Rudolf Carnap and Hans Reichenbach emigrated to the United States, escaping the quickly deteriorating political situation on the continent. Once in the U. S., the two significantly changed the American philosophical climate. This two-part paper reconstructs Carnap’s and Reichenbach’s surprisingly numerous interactions with American academics in the decades before their move in order to explain the impact of their arrival in the late 1930s. Building on archival material of several key players and (...) institutions, I take some first steps toward answering the question why logical empiricism became so successful in the United States after the War. This first part reconstructs Carnap’s development between 1923, when he first visited New York, and 1936, when he was offered a position at the University of Chicago. I describe Carnap’s first substantive contacts with American philosophers as well as the events leading up to his decision to emigrate. In addition, I argue that some of Carnap’s work from the mid-1930s—in particular “Testability and Meaning”—can be better understood if we take into account his attempts to correct the American narrative about logical positivism and his increasingly desperate efforts to find a position in the United States. (shrink)

Bayesian epistemology addresses epistemological problems with the help of the mathematical theory of probability. It turns out that the probability calculus is especially suited to represent degrees of belief (credences) and to deal with questions of belief change, confirmation, evidence, justification, and coherence. Compared to the informal discussions in traditional epistemology, Bayesian epis- temology allows for a more precise and fine-grained analysis which takes the gradual aspects of these central epistemological notions into account. Bayesian epistemology therefore complements traditional epistemology; it (...) does not re- place it or aim at replacing it. (shrink)

De se attitudes seem to play a special role in action and cognition. This raises a challenge to the traditional way in which mental attitudes have been understood. In this chapter, we review the case for thinking that de se attitudes require special theoretical treatment and discuss various ways in which the traditional theory can be modified to accommodate de se attitudes.

The relation of global supervenience is widely appealed to in philosophy. In slogan form, it is explained as follows: a class of properties A supervenes on a class of properties B if no two worlds differ in the distribution of A-properties without differing in the distribution of B-properties. It turns out, though, that there are several ways to cash out that slogan. Three different proposals have been discussed in the literature. In this paper, I argue that none of them is (...) adequate. Furthermore, I present a puzzle that reveals a tension in our concept of global supervenience. (shrink)

Among the questions to be raised under the heading of “personal identity” are these: “What are we?” (fundamental nature question) and “Under what conditions do we persist through time?” (persistence question). Against the dominant neo-Lockean approach to these questions, the view known as animalism answers that each of us is an organism of the species Homo sapiens and that the conditions of our persistence are those of animals. Beyond describing the content and historical background of animalism and its rivals, this (...) entry explores some of the arguments for and objections to this controversial account of our nature and persistence. (shrink)

The counterfactual tradition to defining actual causation has come a long way since Lewis started it off. However there are still important open problems that need to be solved. One of them is the (in)transitivity of causation. Endorsing transitivity was a major source of trouble for the approach taken by Lewis, which is why currently most approaches reject it. But transitivity has never lost its appeal, and there is a large literature devoted to understanding why this is so. Starting from (...) a survey of this work, we will develop a formal analysis of transitivity and the problems it poses for causation. This analysis provides us with a sufficient condition for causation to be transitive, a sufficient condition for dependence to be necessary for causation, and several characterisations of the transitivity of dependence. Finally, we show how this analysis leads naturally to several conditions a definition of causation should satisfy, and use those to suggest a new definition of causation. (shrink)

The ethical concerns regarding the successful development of an Artificial Intelligence have received a lot of attention lately. The idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of an AI causing extreme human suffering is important enough to warrant serious consideration. Others look at this problem from the opposite perspective, namely that of the AI itself. Here the idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that (...) it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of humanity causing extreme suffering to an AI is important enough to warrant serious consideration. This paper starts from the observation that both concerns rely on problematic philosophical assumptions. Rather than tackling these assumptions directly, it proceeds to present an argument that if one takes these assumptions seriously, then one has a moral obligation to advocate for a ban on the development of a conscious AI. (shrink)

Darwin’s fifth chapter, “The Laws of Variation,” may stand in the shadow of the first four that climax with his presentation of “Natural Selection,” but its importance should not be underestimated. It deals with philosophical and methodological issues in the study of variation that would be hotly debated for decades after the publication of the book, many of which are still unsettled today. As the chapter title suggests, Darwin felt that a proper scientific study of variation had to discover the (...) laws of nature that governed it. He could not simply let it be random. He looked for laws in the patterns of co-occurrence of changes in different parts of the body or the same part in different species and also in the apparent consistencies in the effects of environment and habit. There is no one main line of argument in this chapter, but rather an exploration of multiple possible conceptions, patterns, and laws of variation—all ways in which variation might not be entirely random. For example: To what extent was variation responsive to environmental changes or to the organism’s needs and habits? And if Darwin admitted such responses, then how was his theory any different from Lamarck’s? Do all parts of the organism vary freely and independently or are there hidden connections, correlations, or trade-offs between varying parts of the body? Why do related species seem often to vary in similar ways? Many of these questions are still with us, in modern evolutionary developmental biology (“evo-devo”) and studies of epigenetics. (shrink)

This comprehensive new book introduces the core history of phenomenology and assesses its relevance to contemporary psychology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. From critiques of artificial intelligence research programs to ongoing work on embodiment and enactivism, the authors trace how phenomenology has produced a valuable framework for analyzing cognition and perception, whose impact on contemporary psychological and scientific research, and philosophical debates continues to grow. The first part of _An Introduction to Phenomenology_ is an extended overview of the history (...) and development of phenomenology, looking at its key thinkers, focusing particularly on Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty, as well as its cultural and intellectual precursors. In the second half Chemero and Käufer turn their attention to the contemporary interpretations and uses of phenomenology in cognitive science, showing that phenomenology is a living source of inspiration in contemporary interdisciplinary studies of the mind. Käufer and Chemero have written a clear, jargon-free account of phenomenology, providing abundant examples and anecdotes to illustrate and to entertain. This book is an ideal introduction to phenomenology and cognitive science for the uninitiated, as well as for philosophy and psychology students keen to deepen their knowledge. (shrink)

What are we? What is the nature of the human person? Animalism has a straightforward answer to these long-standing philosophical questions: we are animals. After being ignored for a long time in philosophical discussions of our nature, this idea has recently gained considerable support in metaphysics and philosophy of mind. Containing mainly new papers as well as two highly important articles that were recently published elsewhere, this volume's contributors include both emerging voices in the debate and many of those who (...) have been instrumental in shaping it. Some of their contributions defend animalism, others criticize it, still others explore its more general implications. The book also contains a substantial introduction by the editors explaining what animalism is, identifying leading issues that merit attention, and highlighting many of the issues that the contributors have raised. (shrink)

In the opinion of most philosophers, the capacity to entertain I-thoughts is grounded on a basic capacity to self-consciousness. It is because a creature has a concept of herself that she is able to say “I”. The aim of that book is to reverse the order of dependence and to show that the capacity to form I-thoughts is the primitive aptitude that transforms an impersonal consciousness into a Self.

Conditionals pervade every aspect of our thinking, from the mundane and everyday such as ‘if you eat too much cheese, you will have nightmares’ to the most fundamental concerns as in ‘if global warming isn’t halted, sea levels will rise dramatically’. Many decades of research have focussed on the semantics of conditionals and how people reason from conditionals in everyday life. Here it has been rather overlooked how we come to such conditionals in the first place. In many cases, they (...) are learned through testimony: someone warns us about the ill-effects of cheese. Any full account of the conditional must consequently incorporate such learning. Here, we provide a new formal account of belief change in response to a testimonial conditional. (shrink)

Logical positivism is often characterized as a set of naive doctrines on meaning, method, and metaphysics. In recent decades, however, historians have dismissed this view as a gross misinterpretation. This new scholarship raises a number of questions. When did the standard reading emerge? Why did it become so popular? And how could commentators have been so wrong? This essay reconstructs the history of a “caricature” and rejects the hypothesis that it was developed by ill-informed Anglophone scholars who failed to appreciate (...) the subtleties of European scientific philosophy. It argues that the received view has a more complicated history and was frequently promoted by the European positivists themselves. The essay shows that the view has roots in both American and European scientific philosophy and emerged as a result of the complex interplay between the two communities in the years before the intellectual migration. (shrink)

This entry sketches the theory of personal identity that has come to be known as animalism. Animalism’s hallmark claim is that each of us is identical with a human animal. Moreover, animalists typically claim that we could not exist except as animals, and that the (biological) conditions of our persistence derive from our status as animals. Prominent advocates of this view include Michael Ayers, Eric Olson, Paul Snowdon, Peter van Inwagen, and David Wiggins.

" Le normal a pris la relève de l'ancestral ". C'est en ces termes que Michel Foucault salua l'avènement d'une nouvelle ère, celle des disciplines - moment où les sujets cessent de s'identifier par leurs généalogies et leurs positions dans un système d'alliances, par des mécanismes historico-rituels, mais sont plutôt voués à l'interminable hantise de la norme, à ne plus se connaître et se reconnaître que par le détour de l'altérité de l'anormal : voués à ne ressaisir leur identité et (...) à n'être auprès d'eux-mêmes qu'au plus proche du spectre inquiétant de ce tout autre qu'ils repoussent au plus loin. Alors, l'enfance de l'homme n'est plus la mémoire de son innocence perdue, mais la forme première de son insoumission ; le primitif n'est plus celui qui, depuis l'autre rive d'un quelconque voyage, lui fait signe vers le mirage de sa bonté native, mais celui qui indique, sous les espèces de la plus honteuse barbarie, le danger qu'il représente pour sa propre race ; et la folie n'est plus le masque grotesque ou sublime d'un au-delà de la raison, mais le miroir tendu de sa propre faiblesse. Car, si le temps est venu où " l'homme calculable " a remplacé " l'homme mémorable ", il n'en reste pas moins que le travail de la norme ne consiste pas, comme on le croit trop souvent, à produire un effet d'uniformisation sociale, mais fait bien plutôt jouer un complexe système de codage différentiel des conduites, à l'intérieur duquel nous sommes pris et advenons comme sujets. Pour autant qu'il engage notre mode d'être de sujets modernes, il nous appartient donc d'explorer ce code étrange et familier : c'est la tâche que se fixe l'auteur, à partir de l'un des concepts-clé de l'œuvre de Foucault. (shrink)

Quine’s argument for a naturalized epistemology is routinely perceived as an argument from despair: traditional epistemology must be abandoned because all attempts to deduce our scientific theories from sense experience have failed. In this paper, I will show that this picture is historically inaccurate and that Quine’s argument against first philosophy is considerably stronger and subtler than the standard conception suggests. For Quine, the first philosopher’s quest for foundations is inherently incoherent; the very idea of a self-sufficient sense datum language (...) is a mistake as there is no science-independent perspective from which to validate science. I will argue that a great deal of the confusion surrounding Quine’s argument is prompted by certain phrases in his seminal ‘Epistemology Naturalized’. Scrutinizing Quine’s work both before and after the latter paper provides a better key to understanding his remarkable views about the epistemological relation between theory and evidence. -/- . (shrink)

This paper reconstructs the origins of Gettier-style epistemology, highlighting the philosophical and methodological debates that led to its development in the 1960s. Though present-day epistemologists assume that the search for necessary and sufficient conditions for knowledge began with Gettier’s 1963 argument against the JTB-definition, I show that this research program can be traced back to British discussions about knowledge and analysis in the 1940s and 1950s. I discuss work of, among others, Bertrand Russell, G. E. Moore, A. J. Ayer, Norman (...) Malcom, and A. D. Woozley, showing how exchanges between different schools of analytic philosophy gave rise to new ideas about the nature of knowledge and analysis. Finally, I turn to Gettier's intellectual development and argue that his paper was influenced by some of these debates, suggesting that even his interpretation of Plato’s definition of knowledge can be traced back to discussions in this period. (shrink)

There is a long philosophical tradition of addressing questions in philosophy of science and epistemology by means of the tools of Bayesian probability theory (see Earman (1992) and Howson and Urbach (1993)). In the late '70s, an axiomatic approach to conditional independence was developed within a Bayesian framework. This approach in conjunction with developments in graph theory are the two pillars of the theory of Bayesian Networks, which is a theory of probabilistic reasoning in artificial intelligence. The theory has been (...) very successful over the last two decades and has found a wide array of applications ranging from medical diagnosis to safety systems for hazardous industries. (shrink)

Rortyian Hope This is a paper about Richard Rorty's notion of hope, and the role that it plays in breaking down Rorty's public/private distinction, and connecting philosophy to politics. The argument that philosophy can be engaged in and with the social-political world is one that is coherent with Rorty's position if philosophy is understood as striving towards its goals with a sense of contextualism and fallibilism. Placing Rorty within the tradition of the classic pragmatists, James and Dewey, I will argue (...) that pluralism can and should serve as a contextual foundation for liberalism. Through an examination and analysis of Rorty's liberal ironist and anti-foundationalism, I will explore how Rortyian hope can be understood as socially and politically transformative, transforming our conception of knowledge from one based on certainty to one based on fallibility. (shrink)

The Repugnant Conclusion served an important purpose in catalyzing and inspiring the pioneering stage of population ethics research. We believe, however, that the Repugnant Conclusion now receives too much focus. Avoiding the Repugnant Conclusion should no longer be the central goal driving population ethics research, despite its importance to the fundamental accomplishments of the existing literature.

The present article reviews modern research on the psychology of emotion regulation. Emotion regulation determines the offset of emotional responding and is thus distinct from emotional sensitivity, which determines the onset of emotional responding. Among the most viable categories for classifying emotion-regulation strategies are the targets and functions of emotion regulation. The emotion-generating systems that are targeted in emotion regulation include attention, knowledge, and bodily responses. The functions of emotion regulation include satisfying hedonic needs, supporting specific goal pursuits, and facilitating (...) the global personality system. Emotion-regulation strategies are classified in terms of their targets and functions and relevant empirical work is reviewed. Throughout this review, emotion regulation emerges as one of the most far-ranging and influential processes at the interface of cognition and emotion. (shrink)

Andreas & Günther have recently proposed a difference-making definition of actual causation. In this paper I show that there exist conclusive counterexamples to their definition, by which I mean examples that are unacceptable to everyone, including AG. Concretely, I show that their definition allows c to cause e even when c is not a causal ancestor of e. I then proceed to identify their non-standard definition of causal models as the source of the problem, and argue that there is no (...) viable strategy open to AG to fixing it. I conclude that their definition of causation is damaged beyond repair. (shrink)

In this paper I consider two strategies for providing tenseless truth-conditions for tensed sentences: the token-reflexive theory and the date theory. Both theories have faced a number of objections by prominent A-theorists such as Quentin Smith and William Lane Craig. Traditionally, these two theories have been viewed as rival methods for providing truth-conditions for tensed sentences. I argue that the debate over whether the token-reflexive theory or the date theory is true has arisen from a failure to distinguish between conditions (...) for the truth of tensed tokens and conditions for the truth of propositions expressed by tensed tokens. I demonstrate that there is a true formulation of the token-reflexive theory that provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of tensed tokens, and there is a true formulation of the date theory that provides necessary and sufficient conditions for the truth of propositions expressed by tensed tokens. I argue that once the views are properly formulated, the A-theorist’s objections fail to make their mark. However, I conclude by claiming that even though there is a true formulation of the token-reflexive theory and a true formulation of the date theory, the New B-theory nonetheless fails to provide a complete account of the truth and falsity of tensed sentences. (shrink)

The ethical concerns regarding the successful development of an Artificial Intelligence have received a lot of attention lately. The idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of an AI causing extreme human suffering is important enough to warrant serious consideration. Others look at this problem from the opposite perspective, namely that of the AI itself. Here the idea is that even if we have good reason to believe that (...) it is very unlikely, the mere possibility of humanity causing extreme suffering to an AI is important enough to warrant serious consideration. This paper starts from the observation that both concerns rely on problematic philosophical assumptions. Rather than tackling these assumptions directly, it proceeds to present an argument that if one takes these assumptions seriously, then one has a moral obligation to advocate for a ban on the development of a conscious AI. (shrink)