Santayana, whose early writings are hostile to the Faustian spirit, used a quotation from IFaust, Part IID as epigraph to IThe Realm of SpiritD. This suggest a possible affinity of late Santayana, and aspects of Goethe. The speech of the Earth-Spirit in IFaustD has an amoralism similar to passages in IThe Realm of MattesD. A certain ironical, detached spirituality links the poet-sages as well. Each uses some of the symbolism of Christian dogma (e.g., the last chapter of IThe Realm of (...) SpiritD and the end of IFaust, Part IID) to convey the religious mystery of existence, but with no strict adherence to Christianity. (shrink)

BackgroundSome people with progressive neurological diseases find they need additional support with eating and drinking at mealtimes, and may require artificial nutrition and hydration. Decisions concerning artificial nutrition and hydration at the end of life are ethically complex, particularly if the individual lacks decision-making capacity. Decisions may concern issues of life and death: weighing the potential for increasing morbidity and prolonging suffering, with potentially shortening life. When individuals lack decision-making capacity, the standard processes of obtaining informed consent for medical interventions (...) are disrupted. Increasingly multi-professional groups are being utilised to make difficult ethical decisions within healthcare. This paper reports upon a service evaluation which examined decision-making within a UK hospital Feeding Issues Multi-Professional Team.MethodsA three month observation of a hospital-based multi-professional team concerning feeding issues, and a one year examination of their records. The key research questions are: a) How are decisions made concerning artificial nutrition for individuals at risk of lacking decision-making capacity? b) What are the key decision-making factors that are balanced? c) Who is involved in the decision-making process?ResultsDecision-making was not a singular decision, but rather involved many different steps. Discussions involving relatives and other clinicians, often took place outside of meetings. Topics of discussion varied but the outcome relied upon balancing the information along four interdependent axes: Risks, burdens and benefits; Treatment goals; Normative ethical values; Interested parties.ConclusionsDecision-making was a dynamic ongoing process with many people involved. The multiple points of decision-making, and the number of people involved with the decision-making process, mean the question of ‘who decides’ cannot be fully answered. There is a potential for anonymity of multiple decision-makers to arise. Decisions in real world clinical practice may not fit precisely into a model of decision-making. The findings from this service evaluation illustrate that within multi-professional team decision-making; decisions may contain elements of both substituted and supported decision-making, and may be better represented as existing upon a continuum. (shrink)

Anthony Everett () argues that those who embrace the reality of fictional entities run into trouble when it comes to specifying criteria of character identity. More specifically, he argues that realists must reject natural principles governing the identity and distinctness of fictional characters due to the existence of fictions which leave it indeterminate whether certain characters are identical and the existence of fictions which say inconsistent things about the identities of their characters. Everett's critique has deservedly drawn much attention (...) and a number of defensive moves have been made by, or on the behalf of, fictional realists. My goal in this paper is to move this debate on a further step. I have three goals: to clarify the importance of Everett's discussion of identity criteria within the context of fictional realism, to reassess Everett's objections to realism in light of the resultant literature, and to develop a novel strategy for responding to Everett's concerns. On the approach to be developed, the problems emerge due to an indeterminacy inherent in the concept of a fictional character itself. (shrink)

Michael Strevens’ Depth: An Account of Scientific Explanation is an impressive recent contribution to the philosophical literature on explanation. While clearly influenced by several of the leading theories of the later twentieth century, Strevens’ account of explanation is firmly rooted in the causal tradition. His most notable intellectual debts in this regard owe to David Lewis, Wesley Salmon and James Woodward. Still, Strevens sees the work of these theorists as flawed in important respects, and his “kairetic account” of explanation (...) is meant to provide answers to problems his predecessors left unresolved (or poorly resolved, as the case may be). Before examining Strevens’ account in detail we should identify the more significant of these problems and briefly survey the contexts in which they arose. (shrink)

Literary people have had less difficulty in understanding George Santayana than have philosophers, and it is particularly we Anglo-American philosophers who complain that he is enigmatic. We have read his books as arguments of a professor of philosophy, and failed to recognize that he was a sage, one who sought wisdom and found redemption. Anthony Woodward's Living in the Eternal succeeds as no other book on Santayana in showing how to understand this philosophy as the confessions of the (...) freedom and joy of spiritual ascent. Santayana is like no modern philosopher, save Spinoza, and passing over the medieval and Renaissance wise men who were well known to Santayana, but to whom Woodward has no reference, he is most like "some Gnostic Christian of Alexandria, in the early centuries of the faith, for whom love has been swallowed up in knowledge and the believer consummated in the sage". We are apt, at first reading of the "attempt to be godlike," to explode: "but Santayana was a materialist and an atheist! How can he, more than any other modern philosopher, have more to say about spirit?". (shrink)

Some passages throughout Spinoza’s body of works suggest that an attribute in its absolute nature provides a sufficient condition for all of its modes, including the finite ones. Other passages suggest that an attribute in its absolute nature fails to provide a sufficient condition for its finite modes. My aim is to dispel this apparent tension. I argue that all finite modes are ultimately entailed by the absolute nature of their attribute. Furthermore, I explain how the Spinozistic positions that appear (...) incompatible with this view are in fact compatible. As I see it, we should read those passages where Spinoza says that no finite mode ultimately follows from the absolute nature of its attribute as saying merely that no finite mode ultimately follows in one-by-one fashion, independent of an infinite series of other modes, from the absolute nature of its attribute. (shrink)

Fictional realists maintain that fictional characters are part of the world’s ontology. In an influential article, Anthony Everett argues that the fictional realist is thereby committing herself to problematic entities. Among these are entities that are indeterminately identical. Recently, Ross Cameron and Richard Woodward have answered Everett’s worry using the same strategy. They argue that the fictional realist can bypass the problematic identities by contending that they are merely semantically indeterminate. This paper concisely surveys Everett’s original argument, Cameron’s (...) and Woodward’s responses, and then argues that the strategy employed by Cameron and Woodward fails to satisfactorily answer Everett’s worries. (shrink)

This paper attempts to elucidate three characteristics of causal relationships that are important in biological contexts. Stability has to do with whether a causal relationship continues to hold under changes in background conditions. Proportionality has to do with whether changes in the state of the cause “line up” in the right way with changes in the state of the effect and with whether the cause and effect are characterized in a way that contains irrelevant detail. Specificity is connected both to (...) David Lewis’ notion of “influence” and also with the extent to which a causal relation approximates to the ideal of one cause–one effect. Interrelations among these notions and their possible biological significance are also discussed. (shrink)

This paper describes an alternative to the common view that explanation in the special sciences involves subsumption under laws. According to this alternative, whether or not a generalization can be used to explain has to do with whether it is invariant rather than with whether it is lawful. A generalization is invariant if it is stable or robust in the sense that it would continue to hold under a relevant if it is stable or robust in the sense that it (...) would continue to hold under a relevant class of changes. Unlike lawfulness, invariance comes in degrees and has other features that are well suited to capture the characteristics of explanatory generalizations in the special sciences. For example, a generalization can be invariant even if it has exceptions or holds only over a limited spatio-temporal interval. The notion of invariance can be used to resolve a number of dilemmas that arise in standard treatments of explanatory generalizations in the special sciences. (shrink)

Issues concerning scientific explanation have been a focus of philosophical attention from Pre- Socratic times through the modern period. However, recent discussion really begins with the development of the Deductive-Nomological (DN) model. This model has had many advocates (including Popper 1935, 1959, Braithwaite 1953, Gardiner, 1959, Nagel 1961) but unquestionably the most detailed and influential statement is due to Carl Hempel (Hempel 1942, 1965, and Hempel & Oppenheim 1948). These papers and the reaction to them have structured subsequent discussion concerning (...) scientific explanation to an extraordinary degree. After some general remarks by way of background and orientation (Section 1), this entry describes the DN model and its extensions, and then turns to some well-known objections (Section 2). It next describes a variety of subsequent attempts to develop alternative models of explanation, including Wesley Salmon's Statistical Relevance (Section 3) and Causal Mechanical (Section 4) models and the Unificationist models due to Michael Friedman and Philip Kitcher (Section 5). Section 6 provides a summary and discusses directions for future work. (shrink)

This paper explores some issues about the choice of variables for causal representation and explanation. Depending on which variables a researcher employs, many causal inference procedures and many treatments of causation will reach different conclusions about which causal relationships are present in some system of interest. The assumption of this paper is that some choices of variables are superior to other choices for the purpose of causal analysis. A number of possible criteria for variable choice are described and defended within (...) a broadly interventionist approach to causation. (shrink)

This paper responds to recent criticisms of the idea that true causal claims, satisfying a minimal “interventionist” criterion for causation, can differ in the extent to which they satisfy other conditions—called stability and proportionality—that are relevant to their use in explanatory theorizing. It reformulates the notion of proportionality so as to avoid problems with previous formulations. It also introduces the notion of conditional independence or irrelevance, which I claim is central to understanding the respects and the extent to which upper (...) level explanations can be “autonomous”. (shrink)

This paper presents a counterfactual account of what a mechanism is. Mechanisms consist of parts, the behavior of which conforms to generalizations that are invariant under interventions, and which are modular in the sense that it is possible in principle to change the behavior of one part independently of the others. Each of these features can be captured by the truth of certain counterfactuals.

This paper discusses some issues concerning the relationship between the mental and the physical, including the so-called causal exclusion argument, within the framework of a broadly interventionist approach to causation.

This chapter explores the possibility of weakening the criteria for causal explanation in Making Things Happen to yield various forms of non-causal explanation. These include the following: retaining the idea that explanations must answer what if things had been different questions but dropping the requirement the answers to such questions must take the form of claims about what would happen under interventions. Retaining the w- question requirement but allowing generalizations that hold for mathematical or conceptual reasons to figure in explanations. (...) Dropping the w-question requirement to accommodate the role of information about irrelevance in explanation. (shrink)

Manipulablity theories of causation, according to which causes are to be regarded as handles or devices for manipulating effects, have considerable intuitive appeal and are popular among social scientists and statisticians. This article surveys several prominent versions of such theories advocated by philosophers, and the many difficulties they face. Philosophical statements of the manipulationist approach are generally reductionist in aspiration and assign a central role to human action. These contrast with recent discussions employing a broadly manipulationist framework for understanding causation, (...) such as those due to the computer scientist Judea Pearl and others, which are non-reductionist and rely instead on the notion of an intervention. This is simply an appropriately exogenous causal process; it has no essential connection with human action. This interventionist framework manages to avoid at least some of these difficulties faced by traditional philosophical versions of the manipulability theory and helps to clarify the content of causal claims. (shrink)

This paper defends an interventionist account of causation by construing this account as a contribution to methodology, rather than as a set of theses about the ontology or metaphysics of causation. It also uses the topic of causation to raise some more general issues about the relation between, on the one hand, methodology, and, on the other hand, ontology and metaphysics, as these are understood in contemporary philosophical discussion, particularly among so-called analytic metaphysicians. It concludes with the suggestion that issues (...) about the ontology of causation often can be fruitfully reconstrued as methodological proposals. (shrink)

This essay advocates a “functional” approach to causation and causal reasoning: these are to be understood in terms of the goals and purposes of causal thinking. This approach is distinguished from accounts based on metaphysical considerations or on reconstruction of “intuitions.”.

This paper discusses some procedures developed in recent work in machine learning for inferring causal direction from observational data. The role of independence and invariance assumptions is emphasized. Several familiar examples including Hempel’s flagpole problem are explored in the light of these ideas. The framework is then applied to problems having to do with explanatory direction in non-causal explanation.

What is the relationship between, on the one hand, the sorts of causal claims found in the special sciences (and in common sense) and, on the other hand, the world as described by physics? A standard picture goes like this: the fundamental laws of physics are causal laws in the sense that they can be interpreted as telling us that realizations of one set of physical factors or properties “causes” realizations of other properties. Causal claims in the special sciences are (...) then true (to the extent that they are) in virtue of “instantiating” these underlying causal laws; as it is often put, the latter serve as “truth-makers” for the former. The picture is thus one according to which the notion of cause, as it occurs in the special sciences, is reflected or “grounded” in a fairly straightforward and transparent way in a similar notion that occurs in fundamental physics. This paper explores some alternatives to this picture. (shrink)

This paper defends a counterfactual account of explanation, according to which successful explanation requires tracing patterns of counterfactual dependence of a special sort, involving what I call active counterfactuals. Explanations having this feature must appeal to generalizations that are invariant--stable under certain sorts of changes. These ideas are illustrated by examples drawn from physics and econometrics.

The publication brings together contributions by many scholars, academics and researchers on the work of the German philosopher from a variety of perspectives and approaches. Prominent thinkers from various disciplines engage in a fascinating dialogue with the work of Martin Heidegger in an attempt to explain and critically evaluate his controversial legacy. The volume is an attempt to go beyond the polarised perceptions about the philosophy of Heidegger and present a neo-humanist reading of what can be still considered "livable" in (...) it. Contributions also examine the consequences of Heidegger's thinking for a wide range of modes of cultural production and aspects of philosophical enterprise. Finally the volume attempts the first post-political interpretation of his work by focusing on the texts themselves for the conceptual values they formulate and the modes of thinking they established. Contributors are: Gianni Vattimo, Jeff Malpas, Anthony Stephens, Peter Murphy, Elizabeth Grierson, Paolo Bartoloni, John Dalton, Colin Hearfield, Jane Mummery, Robert Sinnerbrink, Ashley Woodward, Peter Williams, George Vassilacopoulos and Vrasidas Karalis. (shrink)

Fictional realists claim that fictional characters like Spiderman exist in reality. Against this view, Anthony Everett (2005; 2013) argues that fictional realists cannot determine whether characters α and β are identical if the relevant fiction states that α and β are identical and distinct at the same time. Some fictional re-alists, such as Ross Cameron (2013) and Richard Woodward (2017), respond to this objection by saying that the sense in which α and β are identical differs from the (...) sense in which they are distinct. In this paper, I argue that Cameron and Woodward cannot handle all cases without undermining the theoretical foundation of their approach, namely, the thesis that the identity of fictional characters must be determined by the content of the relevant fiction. (shrink)

This article discusses the role of simplicity and the notion of a best balance of simplicity and strength within the best systems account (BSA) of laws of nature. The article explores whether there is anything in scientific practice that corresponds to the notion of simplicity or to the trade-off between simplicity and strength to which the BSA appeals. Various theoretical rationales for simplicity preferences and their bearing on the identification of laws are also explored. It is concluded that there are (...) a number of issues about the role of simplicity within the BSA and its relation to strength that need to be addressed before the BSA can be regarded as an adequate account of laws. 1 Introduction2 The Best Systems Account3 The Trade-Off between Simplicity and Strength: Preliminary Considerations4 Alternative Conceptions of the Relationship between Simplicity and Strength5 Two Roles for Simplicity6 Simplicity in the Best Systems Account: Curve-Fitting7 Simplicity as a Corrective for Overfitting8 Descriptive Simplicity in the Best Systems Account?9 Simplicity as Due to Human Intellectual Limitations10 Summary11 Concluding Remarks. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of explanation in biology which does not involve appeal to laws of nature, at least as traditionally conceived. Explanatory generalizations in biology must satisfy a requirement that I call invariance, but need not satisfy most of the other standard criteria for lawfulness. Once this point is recognized, there is little motivation for regarding such generalizations as laws of nature. Some of the differences between invariance and the related notions of stability and resiliency, due respectively to (...) Sandra Mitchell and Brian Skyrms, are explored. (shrink)

In this paper I criticize the commonly accepted idea that the generalizations of the special sciences should be construed as ceteris paribus laws. This idea rests on mistaken assumptions about the role of laws in explanation and their relation to causal claims. Moreover, the major proposals in the literature for the analysis of ceteris paribus laws are, on their own terms, complete failures. I sketch a more adequate alternative account of the content of causal generalizations in the special sciences which (...) I argue should replace the ceteris paribus conception. (shrink)

This paper defends an interventionist treatment of mechanisms and contrasts this with Waskan (forthcoming). Interventionism embodies a difference-making conception of causation. I contrast such conceptions with geometrical/mechanical or “actualist” conceptions, associating Waskan’s proposals with the latter. It is argued that geometrical/mechanical conceptions of causation cannot replace difference-making conceptions in characterizing the behavior of mechanisms, but that some of the intuitions behind the geometrical/mechanical approach can be captured by thinking in terms of spatio-temporally organized difference-making information.

This paper explores how data serve as evidence for phenomena. In contrast to standard philosophical models which invite us to think of evidential relationships as logical relationships, I argue that evidential relationships in the context of data-to-phenomena reasoning are empirical relationships that depend on holding the right sort of pattern of counterfactual dependence between the data and the conclusions investigators reach on the phenomena themselves.

In this essay I propose an environmental ethic in the pragmatic vein. I begin by suggesting that the contemporary debate in environmental ethics is forced into a familiar but highly restrictive set of distinctions and problems by the traditional notion of intrinsic value, particularly by its demands that intrinsic values be self-sufficient, abstract, and justified in special ways. I criticize this notion and develop an alternativewhich stresses the interdependent structure of values, a structure which at once roots them deeply in (...) our selves and at the same time opens them to critical challenge and change. Finally, I apply this alternative view back to environmental ethics. It becomes easy to justify respect for other life forms and concern for the natural environment, and indeed many of the standard arguments only become stronger, once the demand to establish intrinsic values is removed. (shrink)

The question of the cognitive role of fictionality is this: what is the correct cognitive attitude to take to p, when it is fictional that p? We began by considering one answer to this question, implicit in the work of Kendall Walton, that the correct response to a fictional proposition is to imagine that proposition. However, this approach is silent in cases of fictional incompleteness, where neither p nor its negation are fictional. We argue that that Waltonians should embrace a (...) pluralistic account of the cognitive role of fictional incompleteness: in some cases of fictional incompleteness, we are permitted to resolve the incompleteness during our engagement with the target fiction, and in other cases, we are obliged not to resolve the incompleteness. But though pluralism is accommodated by Walton’s wider account of fictionality, it puts tension on his motivating idea that fictionality stands to the imagination as truth stands to belief. And so we develop a rival conception of the cognitive role of fictionality that is built around a different analogy: on this evidentialist approach, (known) fictionality stands to the imagination as evidence stands to credence. (shrink)

When we engage with a work of fiction we gain knowledge about what is fictionally true in that work. Our grasp of what is true in a fiction is central to our engagement with representational works of art, and to our assessments of their merits. Of course, it is sometimes difficult to determine what is fictional – it is a good question whether the main character of American Psycho is genuinely psychotic or merely delusional, for instance. (And even in this (...) case, our ignorance itself is crucial to how we engage with the story and assess its qualities.) But in the vast majority of cases, we have no difficulty distinguishing what is fictionally true from what is not. Every attentive reader of Bleak House knows that it is fictional that Esther is Lady Dedlock’s daughter, but not fictional that Ada is the daughter of John Jarndyce. Moreover, we do not think that our judgements about what is fictional are based on guesswork. We have a folk theory of fictional truth, in the sense that we have a relatively stable framework upon which we rely when we engage with fiction, and we face the challenge of characterizing that theory systematically. (shrink)

Introspective evidence is still treated with great suspicion in cognitive science. This work is designed to encourage cognitive scientists to take more account of the subject's unique perspective.

This paper provides an overview of the account of fictionality — i.e. the phenomenon of things being true “in” or “according to” fictions — that lies at the heart of Kendall Walton's account of representational art. Walton's central idea is that what it is for a proposition to be fictional is for there to be a prescription to imagine that proposition. As we shall see, however, properly understanding this proposal requires an antecedent grasp of Walton's picture of games of make-believe (...) and the relations that artworks bear to appreciators. Having explicated these connections, we will then examine the extensional accuracy of Walton's account of fictionality and its connections to the wider debate about the interpretation of artworks. (shrink)

This paper explores some issues concerning the nature and structure of causal explanation in psychiatry and psychology from the point of view of the “interventionist” theory defended in my book, Making Things Happen. Among the issues is explored is the extent to which candidate causal explanations involving “upper level” or relatively coarse-grained or macroscopic variables such as mental/psychological states (e.g. highly self critical beliefs or low self esteem) or environmental factors (e.g. parental abuse) compete with explanations that instead appeal to (...) underlying, “lower level” or more fine gained neural, genetic, or biochemical mechanisms. (shrink)

This article defends the use of interventionist counterfactuals to elucidate causal and explanatory claims against criticisms advanced by James Bogen and Peter Machamer. Against Bogen, I argue that counterfactual claims concerning what would happen under interventions are meaningful and have determinate truth values, even in a deterministic world. I also argue, against both Machamer and Bogen, that we need to appeal to counterfactuals to capture the notions like causal relevance and causal mechanism. Contrary to what both authors suppose, counterfactuals are (...) not "unscientific" - a substantial tradition within statistics and the causal modelling literature makes heavy use of them. (shrink)