The generality problem is one of the most pressing challenges for reliabilism. The problem begins with this question: of all the process types exemplified by a given process token, which types are the relevant ones for determining whether the resultant belief counts as knowledge? As philosophers like Earl Conee and Richard Feldman have argued, extant responses to the generality problem have failed, and it looks as if no solution is forthcoming. In this paper, I present a new response to the (...) generality problem that illuminates the nature of knowledge-enabling reliability. My response builds upon the insights of Juan Comesaña’s well-founded solution to the generality problem, according to which relevant types are content–evidence pairs, i.e., descriptions of both the target belief’s content and the evidence on which the belief was based. While most responses to the generality problem, including Comesaña’s, only posit one relevant type for any given process token, I argue that knowledge-enabling reliability requires a process token to be reliable with respect to multiple content–evidence pairs, each with varying degrees of descriptive specificity. I call this solution multi-type evidential reliabilism. After offering a clear formulation of MTE, I conclude by arguing that MTE is sufficiently informative to rebut Conee and Feldman’s generality problem objection to a reliability condition on knowledge. (shrink)

Proper functionalism claims that a belief has epistemic warrant only if it’s formed according to the subject’s truth-aimed cognitive design plan. The most popular putative counter-examples to proper functionalism all involve agents who form beliefs in seemingly warrant-enabling ways that don’t appear to proceed according to any sort of design. The Swampman case is arguably the most famous scenario of this sort. However, some proper functionalists accept that subjects like Swampman have warrant, opting instead to adopt a non-standard account of (...) design. But critics of proper functionalism hold that this strategy comes at a high cost: the design-plan condition now seems explanatorily superfluous. James Taylor construes cases like Swampman as posing a dilemma for the proper functionalist: either deny warrant in these cases and concede that proper functionalism doesn’t capture our intuitions, or affirm warrant and undermine the explanatory power of the design-plan condition. Proper functionalists have replied to both horns of this dilemma. Recently, Kenny Boyce and Andrew Moon have argued that warrant-affirming intuitions on cases like Swampman are motivated by a principle that has a clear counter-example. Also, Alvin Plantinga presents a set of cases that supposedly cause problems for any analysis of warrant that lacks a design-plan condition. In this essay, I present a counter-argument to Boyce and Moon’s argument, and show that a more robust reliability condition can accommodate Plantinga’s problem cases. I conclude that we’re left with no good reason to doubt that cases like Swampman raise a troubling dilemma for the proper functionalist. (shrink)

The generality problem is commonly seen as one of the most pressing issues for process reliabilism. The generality problem starts with the following question: of all the process types exemplified by a given process token, which type is the relevant one for measuring reliability? Defenders of the generality problem claim that process reliabilists have a burden to produce an informative account of process type relevance. As they argue, without such a successful account, the reasonability of process reliabilism is significantly undermined. (...) One way for the reliabilist to respond is to attempt to construct such a theory of type relevance. But another way of responding is to argue that, if finding an account of type relevance is a burden for the reliabilist, then it is also a burden for everyone else. Thus, the generality problem doesn’t present some unique reason to reject process reliabilism. I call this latter strategy a parrying response. In this essay, I examine the contemporary parrying responses of Michael Bishop and Juan Comesaña, which have both faced recent criticism. I respond to these critics, and argue that parrying responses are far stronger than defenders of the generality problem have appreciated. (shrink)

Matthew Frise claims that reliabilist theories of justification have a temporality problem—the problem of providing a principled account of the temporal parameters of a process’s performance that determine whether that process is reliable at a given time. Frise considers a representative sample of principled temporal parameters and argues that there are serious problems with all of them. He concludes that the prospects for solving the temporality problem are bleak. Importantly, Frise argues that the temporality problem constitutes a new reason to (...) reject reliabilism. On this point, I argue that Frise is mistaken. There are serious interpretive difficulties with Frise’s argument. In this essay, I show that there are principled and reasonable temporal parameters for the reliabilist to adopt that successfully undermine the interpretations of Frise’s argument that only invoke plausible premises. There are interpretations of Frise’s argument that leave reliabilism without a clear parameter solution. However, I argue that these interpretations invoke controversial premises that are at best unmotivated, and at worst they merely re-raise older disputes about reliabilism. In any event, the temporality problem fails to constitute a new reason to reject reliabilism. (shrink)

The generality problem is one of the most pressing challenges for process reliabilism about justification. Thus far, one of the more promising responses is James Beebe’s tri-level statistical solution. Despite the initial plausibility of Beebe’s approach, the tri-level statistical solution has been shown to generate implausible justification verdicts on a variety of cases. Recently, Samuel Kampa has offered a new statistical solution to the generality problem. Kampa argues that the new statistical solution overcomes the challenges that undermined Beebe’s original statistical (...) solution. However, there’s good reason to believe that Kampa is mistaken. In this paper, I show that Kampa’s new statistical solution faces problems that are no less serious than the original objections to Beebe’s solution. Depending on how we interpret Kampa’s proposal, the new statistical solution either types belief-forming processes far too narrowly, or the new statistical solution fails to clarify the epistemic implications of reliabilism altogether. Either way, the new statistical solution fails to make substantive progress towards solving the generality problem. (shrink)

Matthew Braddock’s argument from false god beliefs (AFG) is one of the most significant debunking arguments to emerge from the growing literature on Cognitive Science of Religion (CSR). This argument aims to produce a defeater for any basic theistic belief. In this essay, I reply to AFG by defending a counter-example to AFG’s crucial premise. In particular, I argue that the cognitive mechanisms posited by CSR do not “significantly contribute” to perceptually based theistic belief formation in the way that AFG (...) claims. As a result, a large class of basic theistic beliefs remains undefeated in the face of AFG. (shrink)

Reliabilism about knowledge states that a belief-forming process generates knowledge only if its likelihood of generating true belief exceeds 50 percent. Despite the prominence of reliabilism today, there are very few if any explicit arguments for reliabilism in the literature. In this essay, I address this lacuna by formulating a new independent argument for reliabilism. As I explain, reliabilism can be derived from certain key knowledge-closure principles. Furthermore, I show how this argument can withstand John Turri’s two recent objections to (...) reliabilism: the argument from explanatory inference and the argument from achievements. (shrink)

There are two main ways in which things with minds, like us, differ from things without minds, like tables and chairs. First, we are conscious--there is something that it is like to be us. We instantiate phenomenal properties. Second, we represent, in various ways, our world as being certain ways. We instantiate representational properties. Jeff Speaks attempts to make progress on three questions: What are phenomenal properties? What are representational properties? How are the phenomenal and the representational related?

Two distinguished social and political philosophers take opposing positions in this highly engaging work. Louis P. Pojman justifies the practice of execution by appealing to the principle of retribution while Jeffrey Reiman argues that although the death penalty is a just punishment for murder, we are not morally obliged to execute murderers.

Hegel reads the poet Novalis as an expression of terminal irony, a pathological case of Gemüt, where the conscious mind is alienated from reality and turns its negativity inwards on the contents of its own natural soul. The condition of self-feeling, presented in Hegel’s “Anthropology”, is a self-consumption that manifests itself somatically in the physical disease (consumption) from which Novalis dies. The poet’s literary production represents a pathological fixation that impedes the dynamic organicity of Hegelian Science. As such, Novalis’s mental (...) illness and death constitute an expression of romantic irony and an ongoing threat to Hegel’s philosophy. (shrink)

Jeffrey E. Brower presents and explains the hylomorphic conception of the material world developed by Thomas Aquinas, according to which material objects are composed of both matter and form. In addition to presenting and explaining Aquinas's views, Brower seeks wherever possible to bring them into dialogue with the best recent literature on related topics. Along the way, he highlights the contribution that Aquinas's views make to a host of contemporary metaphysical debates, including the nature of change, composition, material constitution, (...) the ontology of stuff vs. things, the proper analysis of ordinary objects, the truthmakers for essential vs. accidental predication, and the metaphysics of property possession. (shrink)

The justice of racial profiling is addressed in the original position first for a society without racism, then for a society marked by racism. In the first case, the practice is argued to be just if carried out respectfully and expeditiously and likely to contribute to effective crime control. Thus it is not intrinsically racist. Addressing the second case, the idea that the harms of racial profiling are modest because expressive is critiqued. The practice is shown to carry the danger (...) of producing rights-violations by increasing the incidence of racist attitudes and practices. It is argued to be just in a society marked by racism if done under special supervision, and only to aid in apprehending dangerous criminals. (shrink)

Informed consent is the single most important concept for understanding decision-making capacity. There is a steady pull in the clinical world to transform capacity into a technical concept that can be tested objectively, usually by calling for a psychiatric consult. This is a classic example of medicalization. In this article I argue that is a mistake, not just unnecessary but wrong, and explain how to normalize capacity assessment.Returning the locus of capacity assessment to the attending, the primary care doctor, and (...) even to ethics consultation in today's environment will require a substantial effort to undo a strong but illusory impression of capacity assessment. Hospital attorneys as well as clinical ethicists with a sophisticated understanding of health law can be in the vanguard of this reorientation. (shrink)

Hegel uses the term Einsicht (‘insight’) throughout several key subsections of Chapter Six of the Phenomenology of Spirit (notably in ‘Faith and Pure Insight’ and ‘The Struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition’). Nowhere else in his work does the term enjoy such a sustained treatment. Commentators generally accept Hegel’s use of the term in the Phenomenology as simply referring to the type of counter-religious reasoning found in the French Enlightenment. I show how Hegel derives the term, through the lens of (...) Kant’s essay, ‘What Does It Mean to Orient Oneself in Thinking?’ from the Pantheismusstreit, the philosophical debate between Mendelssohn and Jacobi about knowledge of God. The Aufklärung provenance of Einsicht shows how a deep complicity between faith and reason, in the form of immediate knowing, leads beyond the Terror to a happier outcome in the Morality section. Finally, passing reference to Einsicht in the Vorbegriff of the Encyclopaedia Logic confirms its role in the ethical and political vocation of Hegel’s Science. (shrink)

There exists a very particular grasp of the relation between language and objectivity in the work of G.W.F. Hegel (1770-1831), one that rejects the idea of truth as the reflection between words and what they represent.Jeffrey Reid's Real ...

I begin by defending Heinrich Gustav Hotho’s foundational edition of the Lectures on Aesthetics (LA) contra Gethmann-Siebert and others who argue for a non-systematic view of Hegel’s aesthetics generally and music specifically. I defend Hegel against the common conceit that his comprehension of music was somehow deficient and introduce the Hegelian idea of absolute agency as performative in art and music. Reference to Kant’s transcendental aesthetics then allows us to grasp how, in Hegel, meaningful tones arise from the vibratory oscillation (...) between selfhood’s presiding unity and its temporal self-positing. I then trace back further elements of musical architecture, such as rhythm, harmony and melody to the temporal oscillation arising from within selfhood. The fundamental ambiguity within temporal oscillation is the source of meaningfulness in music, the feeling that its experience is meaningful without telling us exactly what that meaning is. Meaningfulness forms the absolute Ur-Ton of beautiful music, which arises as determinate tones within selfhood and resonates into the soul of the listener. The temporal vanishing of musical tones within a compositional framework is a pre-linguistic expression of meaning, performative of the ambiguous oscillation between the human and the divine. (shrink)

Reliabilism—the view that a belief is justified iff it is produced by a reliable process—is often characterized as a form of consequentialism. Recently, critics of reliabilism have suggested that since it is a form of consequentialism, reliabilism condones a variety of problematic trade-offs involving cases where someone forms an epistemically deficient belief now that will lead her to more epistemic value later. In the present paper, we argue that the relevant argument against reliabilism fails because it equivocates. While there is (...) a sense in which reliabilism is a kind of consequentialism, it is not of a kind on which we should expect problematic trade-offs. (shrink)

There is one critical way we honor great tragedies: by never forgetting. Collective remembrance is as old as human society itself, serving as an important source of social cohesion, yet as Jeffrey Andrew Barash shows in this book, it has served novel roles in a modern era otherwise characterized by discontinuity and dislocation. Drawing on recent theoretical explorations of collective memory, he elaborates an important new philosophical basis for it, one that unveils profound limitations to its scope in relation (...) to the historical past. Crucial to Barash’s analysis is a look at the radical transformations that symbolic configurations of collective memory have undergone with the rise of new technologies of mass communication. He provocatively demonstrates how such technologies’ capacity to simulate direct experience—especially via the image—actually makes more palpable collective memory’s limitations and the opacity of the historical past, which always lies beyond the reach of living memory. Thwarting skepticism, however, he eventually looks to literature—specifically writers such as Walter Scott, Marcel Proust, and W. G. Sebald—to uncover subtle nuances of temporality that might offer inconspicuous emblems of a past historical reality. (shrink)

In Zadig , published in 1748, Voltaire wrote of “the great principle that it is better to run the risk of sparing the guilty than to condemn the innocent.” At about the same time, Blackstone noted approvingly that “the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” In 1824, Thomas Fielding cited the principle as an Italian proverb and a maxim of English law. John Stuart Mill endorsed it in an address to (...) Parliament in 1868. General acceptance of this maxim continues into our own period, yet it is difficult to find systematic attempts to defend the maxim. It is treated as a truism in no need of defense. But the principle within it is not at all obvious; and since it undergirds many of our criminal justice policies, we should be sure that it is justifiable. First, however, we must clarify what the principle means. (shrink)

Entrepreneurship is a critical need in society, and an entrepreneur's life can be a life wonderfully lived. However, most of the literature examining entrepreneurship takes an overly narrow financial viewpoint when examining entrepreneurship and entrepreneurial success. Our paper surveys the current entrepreneurial literature on what constitutes successful entrepreneurship. We then engage key conceptual ideas within the Catholic social tradition to analyze what we see as an undeveloped notion of success. We then move to construct a richer notion of success through (...) the framework of virtue. (shrink)

In Abortion and the Ways We Value Human Life, Jeffrey Reiman argues that an overlooked clue to the solution of the moral problem of abortion lies in the unusual way in which we value the lives of individual human beings_namely, that we value them irreplaceably. We think it is not only wrong to kill an innocent child or adult, but that it would not be made right by replacing the dead one with another living one, or even several. Reiman (...) argues that there are only a limited number of facts that could justify such valuing, with the result that human children and adults have the fullest right to protection of their lives, infants have a lesser but substantial right to such protection, and fetuses do not qualify at all. Leading up to this argument, Reiman presents a survey of Western attitudes and laws about abortion from Hammurabi's Code to Roe v. Wade, and a critical analysis of all the major philosophical arguments on the issue, pro and con. The book is written in straightforward, jargon-free language that makes it accessible to college students at all levels and to the educated lay reader as well. (shrink)

In Zadig, published in 1748, Voltaire wrote of “the great principle that it is better to run the risk of sparing the guilty than to condemn the innocent.” At about the same time, Blackstone noted approvingly that “the law holds that it is better that ten guilty persons escape, than that one innocent suffer.” In 1824, Thomas Fielding cited the principle as an Italian proverb and a maxim of English law. John Stuart Mill endorsed it in an address to Parliament (...) in 1868. General acceptance of this maxim continues into our own period, yet it is difficult to find systematic attempts to defend the maxim. It is treated as a truism in no need of defense. But the principle within it is not at all obvious; and since it undergirds many of our criminal justice policies, we should be sure that it is justifiable. First, however, we must clarify what the principle means. (shrink)

"Neofunctionalism and After" brings together for the first time in one volume all of Alexander's writings on neofunctionalism, the present volume also contains ...

The paper explores Hegel's theory of language, from the Subjective Spirit book of his Encyclopedia. Hegel distinguishes between linguistic signs, as arbitrary signifiers and words, which occur when the signs are filled with thought or meaning. Words have greater objectivity than signs. The words of the positive, empirical sciences are taken up into Hegelian Science (system), affording it greater objectivity, which it, reciprocally re-confers on its linguistic contents.

This paper deals with the problematic relationship between thought and nature in Hegel. This entails looking at the philosophy of nature and discovering to what extent it claims to incorporate natural otherness or contingency and how it does so. I briefly summarize other approaches to this question (Maker, Winfield, Braun, Wandschneider, Hoffheimer...) while putting forward my own solution. This is expressed in an argument articulated around the three Hegelian images (and their texts) in the paper’s title. We discover how the (...) relation between philosophy and nature is a dynamic one, mediated by the actual content of the positive natural sciences. In other words, thought and nature are mediated by the human activity of scientific knowing, within the systematic project of knowing all of nature. This raises the possibility of conceiving Hegel’s system as open to the future. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the largely ignored ethical dimension in the first section of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Sense-certainty, which tends to be understood exclusively as an epistemological critique of sense-data empiricism. I approach the ethical aspect of the chapter through Hegel’s analysis of language, there, as unable to refer to individual things. I then show that the position Hegel analyses is akin to the one presented by Thomas Hobbes in his Leviathan, as well as in his De Corpore, (...) and which serves to ground his naturalistic ethics. The linguistic juxtaposition consequently allows me to relate the ethics of sense-certainty to Hobbes, not only to his “shallow” empiricism, as Hegel puts it, but to the ethical vision Hobbes presents in his state of nature. (shrink)

Mettre en rapport des textes de Hegel sur l’amour érotique avec quelques passages du penseur romantique Friedrich Schlegel permet de mettre en relief la méfiance hégélienne à l’égard du désir sexuel. Selon l’échelle hiérarchique de désirs chez Hegel, le désir érotique fait preuve d’un déséquilibre entre le sujet désirant et l’objet désiré, ce qui est typique d’un rapport purement naturel et non spirituel. C’est dire que la connaissance charnelle, avec son objet dénué de Soi propre, représente pour Hegel une forme (...) inférieure de savoir. L’inégalité sujet-objet propre à l’amour érotique n’est dépassée que par la participation à la substance éthique, ce qui exige la reconnaissance réciproque de consciences de soi égales. Dans ce contexte, il s’agit du mariage. Juxtaposing some of Hegel’s texts on erotic love with certain passages from the romantic thinker Friedrich Schlegel throws light on Hegel’s problematic relationship with sexual desire. According to his hierarchy of types of desire, erotic desire betrays an imbalance between the desiring subject and the object of desire, typical of a purely natural, non-spiritual relation. This means that carnal knowledge, with its self-less object, represents an inferior form of knowing. The inequality between subject and object, inherent in erotic love, is only surpassed through participation in the ethical substance, requiring the reciprocal recognition of equal self-consciousnesses. In the present context, this means marriage. (shrink)

Hegel's critique of Schleiermacher as the embodiment of two currents of romantic irony: empiricist skepticism (Schlegel) and feeling (Novalis), are explicitly presented as "absolute presupposition of our time". The article associates these "presuppositions" with features of postmodernity, as presented by Lyotard. Thus, the Hegelian critique of Schleiermacher might be read as a critique of postmodernity.

Social theory between progress and apocalypse -- Autonomy and domination: Weber's cage -- Barbarism and modernity: Eisenstadt's regret -- Integration and justice: Parsons' utopia -- Despising others: Simmel's stranger -- Meaning evil -- De-civilizing the civil sphere -- Psychotherapy as central institution -- The frictions of modernity and their possible repair.

Grafting the Marxian idea that private property is coercive onto the liberal imperative of individual liberty, this new thesis from one of America's foremost intellectuals conceives a revised definition of justice that recognizes the harm inflicted by capitalism's hidden coercive structures. Maps a new frontier in moral philosophy and political theory Distills a new concept of justice that recognizes the iniquities of capitalism Synthesis of elements of Marxism and Liberalism will interest readers in both camps Direct and jargon-free style opens (...) these complex ideas to a wide readership. (shrink)