This paper considers three package deals combining views in philosophy of mind, meta-philosophy, and experimental philosophy. The most familiar of these packages gives center-stage to pumping intuitions about fanciful cases, but that package involves problematic commitments both to a controversial descriptivist theory of reference and to intuitions that “negative” experimental philosophers have shown to be suspiciously variable and context-sensitive. In light of these difficulties, it would be good for future-minded experimental philosophers to align themselves with a different package deal. This (...) paper suggests two alternatives. Experimentalists might help fans of “naturalized” approaches discover what natural kinds have been playing an appropriate role in causing us to use concepts as we do. Or, better still, experimentalists might instead help pragmatists and teleo-semanticists discover how our concept usage regularly yields beneficial outcomes, so that we can then craft philosophical analyses that will.. (shrink)

A number of authors have suggested that a conditional analysis of dispositions must take roughly the following form: Thing X is disposed to produce response R to stimulus S just in case, if X were exposed to S and surrounding circumstances were auspicious, then X would produce R. The great challenge is cashing out the relevant notion of ‘auspicious circumstances’. I give a general argument which entails that all existing conditional analyses fail, and that there is no satisfactory way to (...) define ‘auspicious circumstances’ just in terms of S, R, and X. Instead, I argue that the auspicious circumstances C for the manifestation of a disposition constitute a third irreducible element of that disposition, and that to pick out (or to ‘individuate’) that disposition one must specify C along with S and R. This enables a new conditional analysis of dispositions that gives intuitively satisfying answers in cases that pose problems for other approaches. (shrink)

This paper contributes to an ongoing debate regarding the cognitive processes involved when one person predicts a target person's behavior and/or attributes a mental state to that target person. According to simulation theory, a person typically performs these tasks by employing some part of her brain as a simulation of what is going on in a corresponding part of the brain of the target person. I propose a general intuitive analysis of what 'simulation' means. Simulation is a particular way of (...) using one process to acquire knowledge about another process. What distinguishes simulation from other ways of acquiring knowledge is that simulation requires, for its non-accidental success, that the simulating process reflect significant aspects of the simulated process. This conceptual work is of independent philosophical interest, but it also enables me to argue for two conclusions that are of great significance to the debate about mental simulation theory. First, I argue that, in order to stake a non-trivial claim, simulation theory must hold that mental simulation involves what I call concretely similar processes. Second, I argue for the surprising conclusion that a significant class of cases that simulation theorists have claimed as intuitive cases of simulation do not actually involve simulation, after all. I close by sketching an alternative account that might handle these problematic cases. (shrink)

Mental internalists hold that an individuals mental features at a given time supervene upon what is in that individuals head at that time. While many people reject mental internalism about content and justification, mental internalism is commonly accepted regarding such other mental features as rationality, emotion-types, propositional-attitude-types, moral character, and phenomenology. I construct a counter-example to mental internalism regarding all these features. My counter-example involves two creatures: a human and an alien from Pulse World. These creatures environments, behavioral dispositions and (...) histories are such that it is intuitively clear that they are mentally quite different, even while they are, for a moment, exactly alike with respect to whats in their heads. I offer positive reasons for thinking that the case I describe is indeed possible. I then consider ways in which mental internalists might attempt to account for this case, but conclude that the only plausible option is to reject mental internalism and to adopt a particular externalist alternative a history-oriented version of teleo-functionalism. (shrink)

considers what I call free-floating chances—objective chances that obtain at a given time despite the fact that their values are not determined by the laws of nature together with the full history of non-chancy facts up to that time. I offer an intuitive example of this phenomenon, and use it to argue that free-floating chances are indeed possible. Their possibility violates three quite widely held principles about chances: the lawful magnitude principle, the principle that chances evolve by conditionalization and a (...) version of David Lewis' principal principle. I argue that we should reject common formulations of each of these principles, though I offer revised understandings of each which retain much of the intuitive attractiveness of the originals and are consistent with the possibility of free-floating chances. I conclude by arguing that, while considerations of free-floating chances are important, they will not sustain the extravagant conclusions Lange attempts to draw from them. Introduction First- and Higher-Order Chances Free-Floating Chances Support for the Intuitive Assessment Three Principles Violated What to do? COND as a Default Hypothesis A More Principled Principal Principle Conclusion. (shrink)

This paper defends Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis , a proposed empirical methodology for explicating philosophical concepts. This methodology attributes to our shared concepts whatever application conditions they would need to have in order best to continue delivering benefits in the ways they have regularly delivered benefits in the past. In the first stage of my argument I argue that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis has what I call normative authority : we have practical and epistemic reason to adopt the explications that it delivers (...) even if we think doing so requires stipulative revisions in the meanings of our concepts. I then use this normative authority to argue that Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis also has what I call descriptive authority : when we understand concept-meaning in the way we ought to understand it (in the way licensed by the normative authority of Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis) we see that, rather than being revisionary, Pragmatic Conceptual Analysis is a semantically conservative tool that uncovers (what we should think of as being) the meanings our concepts already have. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to answer the following question: When we have mental states that represent certain things as being colored, what properties are our mental states representing these things as having?

I develop and defend a version of what I call Disposition-Based Decision Theory (or DBDT). I point out important problems in David Gauthier’s (1985, 1986) formulation of DBDT, and carefully develop a more defensible formulation. I then compare my version of DBDT to the currently most widely accepted decision theory, Causal Decision Theory (CDT). Traditional intuition-based arguments fail to give us any strong reason to prefer either theory over the other, but I propose an alternative strategy for resolving this debate. (...) I argue that we should embrace DBDT because it does better than CDT at the work that we, as a matter of empirical fact, commonly call upon a notion of rationality to do. (shrink)

I. Introduction. II. Ratiocination vs. Cognition. III. Emotions as Modes of Cognition. IV. Four Competing Proposals. V. The Impact of Emotion on Cognition. VI. The Kinematics of Ratiocination. VII. Competing Cognitive Theories. VIII. Why think Emotions are Beliefs? IX. The Intentionality of Emotions. X. The Kinematics of Emotions. XI. A Unified Account of the Emotions. XII. The Rationality of Emotions.

I consider the question of whether success-linked theories of content – theories like those of Ramsey (1927), Millikan (1984) and Blackburn (2005) which take there to be a definitional link between representational content and behavioral success – are consistent with the plausible claim that we can use content-attributions to explain behavioral success. Peter Godfrey-Smith (1996) argues that success-linked theories of content are too closely linked to success to be able to explain it. Against this, I present a plausible account of (...) how content-attributions make available good explanations of behavioral success, and argue that if we want our content-attributions to be able to do this explanatory work, then we actually need to embrace a success-linked theory of content. (shrink)

The objective of the OSCAR Project is twofold. On the one hand, it is to construct a general theory of rational cognition. On the other hand, it is to construct an artificial rational agent (an "artilect") implementing that theory. This is a joint project in philosophy and AI.

The dissemination of models across disciplinary lines has become a phenomenon of interest to philosophers of science. To account for this phenomenon, philosophers have invented two units of analysis. The first identifies to the thing that transfers, model templates. The second identifies the thing to which transferable templates apply, landing zones. There exists a dynamic between the thing that is transferred and the thing to which transferrable templates apply. The use of a transferable template in a new domain requires reconception (...) of domain-specific phenomena. This paper examines two cases of model transfer, the use of the ideal gas law in biology by R.A. Fisher and the use of the virial theorem in chemistry by Richard Bader. These two stories of model transfer in biology and chemistry indicate a dimension to conceptual progress related to this dynamic. Using discourse on model transfer affords philosophers a novel approach for depicting the invention of, for instance, chemical concepts and resulting disputes. (shrink)

The dissemination of models across disciplinary lines has become a phenomenon of interest to philosophers of science. To account for this phenomenon, philosophers have invented two units of analysis. The first identifies to the thing that transfers, model templates. The second identifies the thing to which transferable templates apply, landing zones. There exists a dynamic between the thing that is transferred and the thing to which transferrable templates apply. The use of a transferable template in a new domain requires reconception (...) of domain-specific phenomena. This paper examines two cases of model transfer, the use of the ideal gas law in biology by R.A. Fisher and the use of the virial theorem in chemistry by Richard Bader. These two stories of model transfer in biology and chemistry indicate a dimension to conceptual progress related to this dynamic. Using discourse on model transfer affords philosophers a novel approach for depicting the invention of, for instance, chemical concepts and resulting disputes. (shrink)

The dissemination of models across disciplinary lines has become a phenomenon of interest to philosophers of science. To account for this phenomenon, philosophers have invented two units of analysis. The first identifies to the thing that transfers, model templates. The second identifies the thing to which transferable templates apply, landing zones. There exists a dynamic between the thing that is transferred and the thing to which transferrable templates apply. The use of a transferable template in a new domain requires reconception (...) of domain-specific phenomena. This paper examines two cases of model transfer, the use of the ideal gas law in biology by R.A. Fisher and the use of the virial theorem in chemistry by Richard Bader. These two stories of model transfer in biology and chemistry indicate a dimension to conceptual progress related to this dynamic. Using discourse on model transfer affords philosophers a novel approach for depicting the invention of, for instance, chemical concepts and resulting disputes. (shrink)

According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon (typically, a kind of conscious experience). In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experimental studies have provided evidence that the ordinary (‘folk’) (...) concept of pain is more complex than previously assumed: rather than tracking only bodily or only mental aspects of pain, the ordinary concept of pain can actually track either of these aspects. The polyeidic (or ‘many ideas’) analysis of the folk concept of pain, as proposed by Emma Borg et al., captures this complexity. Whereas previous empirical support for the polyeidic view has focused on the context-sensitivity of the folk concept of pain, here we discuss individual differences in people’s ‘pain priors’—namely, their standing tendencies to think of pain in relatively mind-centric or body-centric ways. We describe a preliminary empirical study and present a small number of findings, which will be explored further in future work. The results we discuss are part of a larger programme of work which seeks to integrate philosophical pain research into clinical practice. For example, we hypothesise that variations in how patients with chronic pain are thinking about pain could help predict their responses to treatment. (shrink)

According to standard philosophical and clinical understandings, pain is an essentially mental phenomenon. In a challenge to this standard conception, a recent burst of empirical work in experimental philosophy, such as that by Justin Sytsma and Kevin Reuter, purports to show that people ordinarily conceive of pain as an essentially bodily phenomenon—specifically, a quality of bodily disturbance. In response to this bodily view, other recent experimental studies have provided evidence that the ordinary concept of pain is more complex than (...) previously assumed: rather than tracking only bodily or only mental aspects of pain, the ordinary concept of pain can actually track either of these aspects. The polyeidic analysis of the folk concept of pain, as proposed by Emma Borg et al., captures this complexity. Whereas previous empirical support for the polyeidic view has focused on the context-sensitivity of the folk concept of pain, here we discuss individual differences in people’s ‘pain priors’—namely, their standing tendencies to think of pain in relatively mind-centric or body-centric ways. We describe a preliminary empirical study and present a small number of findings, which will be explored further in future work. The results we discuss are part of a larger programme of work which seeks to integrate philosophical pain research into clinical practice. For example, we hypothesise that variations in how patients with chronic pain are thinking about pain could help predict their responses to treatment. (shrink)

Justin makes a novel case, based on reflection on the “telos” of color vision, for a dispositional theory of colors. Justin’s case is highly suggestive, and comes tantalizingly close to resolving the debate in the metaphysics of color. But I have a few questions which I would like to see answered before I am converted.

Justin Fisher (2007) has presented a novel argument designed to prove that all forms of mental internalism are false. I aim to show that the argument fails with regard to internalism about phenomenal experiences. The argument tacitly assumes a certain view about the ontology of phenomenal experience, which (inspired by Alva Noe) I call the “snapshot conception of phenomenal experience.” After clarifying what the snapshot conception involves, I present Fisher with a dilemma. If he rejects the snapshot (...) conception, then his argument against phenomenal internalism collapses. But if he embraces the snapshot conception, then internalists may argue that in light of the snapshot conception, their view is not so implausible—and that if Fisher still disagrees, he owes us an argument that shows why phenomenal internalism is false even given the snapshot conception. I conclude the paper by showing that Fisher cannot escape my criticism by adjusting his argument so that it no longer depends on the snapshot conception. (shrink)

In his recent critical notice of The Bounds of Cognition in this journal, Justin Fisher advances a set of concerns that favor the hypothesis that, under certain circumstances, cognitive processes span the brain, body, and world. One is that it is too much to require that representations in cognitive process must have non-derived content. A second is that it is possible that extended objects bear non-derived content. A third is that extended cognition might advocate the extension of certain (...) general categories of cognition. A fourth is that Bounds misapplies Andy Clark and David Chalmers’ so-called “parity principle.” The purpose of this rejoinder is to show how Fisher’s concerns can be, or have already been, addressed. (shrink)

Trope theory is a leading metaphysical theory in analytic ontology. One of its classic statements is found in the work of Donald C. Williams who argued that tropes qua abstract particulars are the very alphabet of being. The concept of an abstract particular has been repeatedly attacked in the literature. Opponents and proponents of trope theory alike have levelled their criticisms at the abstractness of tropes and the associated act of abstraction. In this paper I defend the concept of a (...) trope qua abstract particular by rejecting arguments that purport to show that tropes should not be understood as abstract and by arguing that the abstractness of tropes plays an indispensable role in one of our more promising trope-theoretic analyses of universals and of concrete objects. (shrink)

Since the time of Hippocrates, madness has typically been viewed through the lens of disease, dysfunction, and defect. In 'Madness', philosopher of science Justin Garson presents a radically different paradigm for conceiving of madness and the forms that it takes. In this paradigm, which he calls madness-as-strategy, madness is neither a disease nor a defect, but a designed feature, like the heart or lungs.

In this book, Naomi Fisher provides a cohesive interpretation of Schelling's philosophical work from 1792-1802 as a mystical Platonism. According to this interpretation, Schelling is guided by two overarching commitments during this time. First, Schelling is committed to mysticism regarding the absolute. That is, the absolute is ineffable; it cannot be described in conceptual terms. For this reason, it remains inferentially external to any given philosophical system. Second, Schelling is committed to a priority monism: All things are grounded in (...) the absolute, but finite things possess an integral unity all their own, and so have a distinct and relatively independent existence. This book shows how these two commitments cohere in a project that fulfils the distinctive aims of post-Kantian philosophy, and it traces their inspiration to Schelling's early engagement with Plato's dialogues and to his education, which was Neoplatonic in orientation. In presenting Schelling's philosophy of this decade as guided by these two fundamental commitments, this book poses a challenge to those readings of Schelling's philosophy according to which it shifts frequently in its basic commitments during this time. According to the interpretation presented in this book, Schelling's appropriations of various strands of Platonism distinguish him from his contemporaries and give rise to his idiosyncratic approach to the projects of post-Kantian philosophy. Mysticism, Platonism, monism, Schelling, Neoplatonism, philosophy of nature, identity philosophy, German Idealism, Romanticism In this book, Naomi Fisher provides a cohesive interpretation of Schelling's philosophical work from 1792-1802 as a mystical Platonism. According to this interpretation, Schelling is guided by two overarching commitments during this time. First, Schelling is committed to mysticism regarding the absolute. That is, the absolute is ineffable; it cannot be described in conceptual terms. For this reason, it remains inferentially external to any given philosophical system. Second, Schelling is committed to a priority monism: All things are grounded in the absolute, but finite things possess an integral unity all their own, and so have a distinct and relatively independent existence. This book shows how these two commitments cohere in a project that fulfils the distinctive aims of post-Kantian philosophy, and it traces their inspiration to Schelling's early engagement with Plato's dialogues and to his education, which was Neoplatonic in orientation. In presenting Schelling's philosophy of this decade as guided by these two fundamental commitments, this book poses a challenge to those readings of Schelling's philosophy according to which it shifts frequently in its basic commitments during this time. According to the interpretation presented in this book, Schelling's appropriations of various strands of Platonism distinguish him from his contemporaries and give rise to his idiosyncratic approach to the projects of post-Kantian philosophy. Mysticism, Platonism, monism, Schelling, Neoplatonism, philosophy of nature, identity philosophy, German Idealism, Romanticism In this book, Naomi Fisher provides a cohesive interpretation of Schelling's philosophical work from 1792-1802 as a mystical Platonism. According to this interpretation, Schelling is guided by two overarching commitments during this time. First, Schelling is committed to mysticism regarding the absolute. That is, the absolute is ineffable; it cannot be described in conceptual terms. For this reason, it remains inferentially external to any given philosophical system. Second, Schelling is committed to a priority monism: All things are grounded in the absolute, but finite things possess an integral unity all their own, and so have a distinct and relatively independent existence. This book shows how these two commitments cohere in a project that fulfils the distinctive aims of post-Kantian philosophy, and it traces their inspiration to Schelling's early engagement with Plato's dialogues and to his education, which was Neoplatonic in orientation. In presenting Schelling's philosophy of this decade as guided by these two fundamental commitments, this book poses a challenge to those readings of Schelling's philosophy according to which it shifts frequently in its basic commitments during this time. According to the interpretation presented in this book, Schelling's appropriations of various strands of Platonism distinguish him from his contemporaries and give rise to his idiosyncratic approach to the projects of post-Kantian philosophy. Mysticism, Platonism, monism, Schelling, Neoplatonism, philosophy of nature, identity philosophy, German Idealism, Romanticism. (shrink)

Using the latest cognitive and psychological scientific data and theory, this book answers the question "why would anyone believe in God?".

The Oxford Handbook of Chinese Philosophy is a collection of essays on important texts and figures in the history of Chinese thought. The essays cover both well-known texts such as the Analects and the Zhuangzi as well as many of the lesser-known thinkers in the classical and post-classical Chinese tradition. Most of the chapters focus on thinkers or texts in one of three important historical movements: Classical ("pre-Qin") Chinese philosophy, Chinese Buddhism, and the Confucian response to Buddhism ("neo-Confucianism" broadly construed).

This is a short overview of the biological functions debate in philosophy. While it was fairly comprehensive when it was written, my short book ​A Critical Overview of Biological Functions has largely supplanted it as a definitive and up-to-date overview of the debate, both because the book takes into account new developments since then, and because the length of the book allowed me to go into substantially more detail about existing views.

The downsides of monogamy are felt by most people engaged in long-term relationships, including restrictions on self-discovery, limits on friendship, sexual boredom, and a circumscribed understanding of intimacy. Yet, a "happily ever after" monogamy is assumed to be the ideal form of romantic love in many modern societies: a relationship that is morally ideal and will bring the most happiness to its two partners. -/- In Why It’s OK to Not Be Monogamous, Justin L. Clardy deeply questions these assumptions. (...) He rejects the claim that non-monogamy among honest, informed and consenting adults is morally impermissible. He shows instead how polyamorous relationships can actually be exemplars of moral virtue. The book discusses how social and political forces sustain and reward monogamous relationships. The book defines non-monogamy as a privative concept; a negation of monogamy. Looking at its prevalence in the United States, the book explains how common criticisms of non-monogamy come up short. Clardy argues, as some researchers have recently shown―monogamy relies on continually demonizing non-monogamy to sustain its moral status. Finally, the book concludes with a focus on equality, asking what justice for polyamorous individuals might look like. (shrink)

Most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God take the following form: (1) If God exists, the world would not be like this (where 'this' picks out some feature of the world like the existence of evil, etc.) (2) But the world is like this . (3) Therefore, God does not exist. Skeptical theists are theists who are skeptical of our ability to make judgments of the sort expressed by premise (1). According to skeptical theism, if there were a (...) God, it is likely that he would have reasons for acting that are beyond our ken, and thus we are not justified in making all-things-considered judgments about what the world would be like if there were a God. In particular, the fact that we don't see a good reason for X does not justify the conclusion that there is no good reason for X. 1 Thus, skeptical theism purports to undercut most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God. What follows is an account of the nature of skeptical theism, an application of skeptical theism to both the argument from evil and the argument from divine hiddenness, and a review of the cases for and against skeptical theism. (shrink)

Because anticipated and retrospective regret play important roles in practical deliberation and motivation, better understanding them can illuminate the contours of human agency. However, the possibility of self-ignorance and the fact that we change over time can make regret—especially anticipatory regret—not only a poor predictor of where the agent will be in the future but also an unreliable indicator of where the agent stands. Granting these, this paper examines the way in which prospective and, particularly, retrospective regret can nevertheless yield (...) important insight into the sorts of creatures we are, both generally and individually. The experience of retrospective regret can show a person she values something in a way she did not know or that she is (or was) a different person than she had thought, insights which can factor into forward-looking, or prospective, deliberation. Such instances of revelatory regret reveal something to the agent about herself as agent. I examine two cases of agential self-ignorance. In the first, the experience of regret reveals what the agent values, not only to others but even to the agent himself. In the second, the agent anticipates experiencing regret for an action but does not experience the regret, suggesting that the agent did not value the rejected alternative in the way she thought. Anticipatory regret is forward-looking and can play an important role in practical deliberation. But insofar as anticipatory regret flows from one’s imperfect judgment and prospection about oneself, retrospective regret can be an important corrective in helping the agent understand her own standpoint. (shrink)

A crucial tenet of virtue-based or expertise-based theorizing about politics is that there are ways to identify and select morally and epistemically excellent people to hold office. This paper considers historical challenges to this task that come from within Greek and Confucian thought and political practice. Because of how difficult it is to assess character in ordinary settings, we argue that it is even more difficult to design institutions that select for virtue at the much wider political scale. Specifically, we (...) argue that the vast majority of proposals that purport to select for virtue are either (a) unlikely to be effective, (b) not implementable at the scale of most current nations, or (c) have already been incorporated into most democratic states. Thus defenders of meritocratic institutions should take more seriously the practical barriers that will almost certainly arise when trying to implement these proposals at scale. Historical proponents of meritocratic values were well aware of concerns about the feasibility of their political ideals, and we should be too. (shrink)

This chapter focuses on attributions of phenomenal consciousness, leaving to the side interesting questions about how people attribute other types of consciousness. While researchers are not in perfect agreement about how the concept of phenomenal consciousness should be understood, the standard line is that a creature is phenomenally conscious just in case it has phenomenally conscious mental states, and that a mental state is phenomenally conscious just in case it has phenomenal qualities. The chapter explores whether lay people employ the (...) concept of phenomenal consciousness. It begins by looking at the evidence for an affirmative answer to this question, focusing on Joshua Knobe and Jesse Prinz's article, Intuitions About Consciousness: Experimental Studies. The chapter explains the evidence for a negative answer to the target question, focusing on Justin Sytsma and Edouard machery's article, Two Conceptions of Subjective Experience. (shrink)

Contrastivism about ‘ought’ holds that ‘ought’ claims are relativized, at least implicitly, to sets of mutually exclusive but not necessarily jointly exhaustive alternatives. This kind of theory can solve puzzles that face other linguistic theories of ‘ought’, via the rejection or severe restriction of principles that let us make inferences between ‘ought’ claims. By rejecting or restricting these principles, however, the contrastivist takes on a burden of recapturing acceptable inferences that these principles let us make. This paper investigates the extent (...) to which a contrastivist can do this. (shrink)

The aesthetic exception theorises anew the relation between art and politics. It challenges critical trends that discount the role of aesthetic autonomy, to impulsively reassert art as an effective form of social engagement. But it equally challenges those on the flipside of the efficacy debate, who insist that art's politics is limited to a recondite space of 'autonomous resistance'. The book shows how each side of the efficacy debate overlooks art's exceptional status and its social mediations. Mobilising philosophy and cultural (...) theory, and employing examples from visual art, performance, and theatre, it proposes four alternative tests to 'effect' to offer a nuanced account of art's political character. Those tests examine how art relates to politics as a practice that articulates its historical conjuncture, and how it prefigures the 'new' through simulations capable of activating the political life of the spectator. (shrink)

Contemporary metaphysics is dominated by the view that every object belongs to a kind permanently in the sense that it cannot cease to belong to that kind without thereby ceasing to exist. For example, some philosophers think that a person is destroyed if they cease to be a person, a statue is destroyed if it ceases to be a statue, and so on. I believe that this standard view is false. Being a person, or a statue, or etc., is like (...) being a child: just as I did not cease to exist when I ceased to be a child, so people and statues need not cease to exist when they cease to be people and statues. Borrowing a term from Daniel Korman (who uses it in a similar but perhaps not identical way), I call this view phasalism because it entails that the kind-properties which ordinary objects instantiate are phase sortal properties, i.e., kind-properties that an object can instantiate for a temporary phase of its career. This dissertation is a partial defense of phasalism. I develop a phasalist metaphysics in detail, highlighting its virtues and rebutting objections along the way. After some stage-setting (Chapter 1), I defend a phasalist criterion of identity over time for ordinary objects (Chapter 2), as well as a phasalist account of the role that sortal properties play in the identity over time of ordinary objects (Chapter 3). Then I defend a phasalist-friendly approach to the identity over time of lumps, hunks, pieces, etc. of matter (Chapter 4). The material in these chapters amounts to a phasalist solution to certain material coincidence puzzles, such as the puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay. I go on to show that familiar puzzles about undetached parts (Chapter 5) and fission (Chapter 6) can be solved within the confines of my phasalist metaphysics as well. (shrink)

After 1989, capitalism has successfully presented itself as the only realistic political-economic system - a situation that the bank crisis of 2008, far from ending, actually compounded. The book analyses the development and principal features of this capitalist realism as a lived ideological framework. Using examples from politics, films, fiction, work and education, it argues that capitalist realism colours all areas of contemporary experience. But it will also show that, because of a number of inconsistencies and glitches internal to the (...) capitalist reality program capitalism in fact is anything but realistic. (shrink)

Beliefs have genealogies. Can tracing a belief’s genealogy illuminate the epistemic quality of the belief? This paper sets out a general epistemology of genealogies. As it turns out, genealogies for beliefs come in two sorts: those that trace a belief to some mental event that doubles as evidence for the belief and those that do not. The former have the potential to undercut the belief, rebut the belief, or—importantly—both. The latter have the potential to reinforce the belief or rebut the (...) belief but—importantly—not undercut it. The ultimate conclusion is that there is a role for genealogies in the epistemic appraisal of our beliefs, but this role will be circumscribed by the availability of clear and compelling genealogies. (shrink)

A comprehensive collection of the writings of Mark Fisher (1968-2017), whose work defined critical writing for a generation. This comprehensive collection brings together the work of acclaimed blogger, writer, political activist and lecturer Mark Fisher (aka k-punk). Covering the period 2004 - 2016, the collection will include some of the best writings from his seminal blog k-punk; a selection of his brilliantly insightful film, television and music reviews; his key writings on politics, activism, precarity, hauntology, mental health and (...) popular modernism for numerous websites and magazines; his final unfinished introduction to his planned work on "Acid Communism"; and a number of important interviews from the last decade. Edited by Darren Ambrose and with a foreword by Simon Reynolds. (shrink)

In "Saving One Another: Philodemus and Paul on Moral Formation in Community" Justin Reid Allison compares how the Epicurean philosopher Philodemus and the Christian apostle Paul envisioned the members of their communities helping one another to grow into moral maturity. Allison establishes that Philodemus and Paul are more similar than previously noticed in their conception and practice of moral formation in community, and that these similarities offer a critical opportunity to consider important differences between the two as well. By (...) deepening the comparison to include differences alongside similarities, and to include theological and socio-economic facets of communal moral formation, Allison shows that Philodemus and Paul uniquely shed fresh light on one another's texts when understood in comparative perspective. (shrink)

Scholars have suggested that leaders’ ethical failures at the beginning of the twenty-first century have raised awareness about the importance of ethical leadership (EL). Yet, there has been no systematic effort to evaluate whether this awareness indeed led to changes in EL or how followers react to this leadership style over time. To address this gap, we examine the evolution in EL means, variability, and its associations with follower outcomes between 2004 and 2019. Our cross-temporal meta-analysis included 359 independent samples (...) from 314 studies published between 2005 and 2020 and focused on followers’ ratings of their leaders using the Ethical Leadership Scale (ELS; Brown et al., in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 97(2), 117–134, 2005). Using cubic spline meta-regressions, our results indicated no global changes in EL mean levels and variability across the 15-year period. Nevertheless, country-level comparisons revealed different EL-trends in China (i.e. decrease) versus the United States (i.e. stable), and further moderation analyses highlighted the role of cultural value dimensions and national corruption rates. Finally, we also found that the relationship between EL and desirable follower outcomes (e.g. organizational citizenship behavior) became gradually stronger over time on a global level. These results provide a solid empirical basis to evaluate cross-temporal trends in EL and its (changing) impact on follower outcomes across the globe. (shrink)