Setting the stage -- Relationality in contemporary theology -- Separateness in classical physics -- Entanglement in quantum physics -- Philosophical perspectives -- Entanglement, theologically speaking.

Accession Number: ATLA0001712122; Hosting Book Page Citation: p 156-171.; Language(s): English; General Note: Bibliography: p 169-171.; Issued by ATLA: 20130825; Publication Type: Essay.

In one of its most urgent folds, Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible juxtaposes negative theology with relational theology for the sake of thinking constructively about today's global climate of religious conflict and ecological upheaval. The tension between these two theological approaches reflects her desire to unsay past harmful theological speech but also to speak into the present silences about the possibility of a future that is not only to be feared. Suffusing Keller's Cloud is the related possibility of living (...) out one's life in conversation with a religious tradition having accepted the nonknowing character of its wisdom. Here, I develop the notion of “hypothetical faith” as an epistemic posture that commits itself to some particular religious tradition even as it acknowledges the unverifiability of that tradition's deepest truths. Understood as operating at the opposite end of the testability spectrum from science, religion-as-hypothesis provides a way of saying and unsaying one's tradition at the same time. (shrink)

Freely falling point-like objects converge toward the center of the Earth. Hence the gravitational field of the Earth is inhomogeneous, and possesses a tidal component. The free fall of an extended quantum mechanical object such as a hydrogen atom prepared in a high principal-quantum-number state, i.e. a circular Rydberg atom, is predicted to fall more slowly than a classical point-like object, when both objects are dropped from the same height above the Earth’s surface. This indicates that, apart from transitions between (...) quantum states, the atom exhibits a kind of quantum mechanical incompressibility during free fall in inhomogeneous, tidal gravitational fields like those of the Earth.A superconducting ring-like system with a persistent current circulating around it behaves like the circular Rydberg atom during free fall. Like the electronic wavefunction of the freely falling atom, the Cooper-pair wavefunction is quantum mechanically incompressible. The ions in the lattice of the superconductor, however, are not incompressible, since they do not possess a globally coherent quantum phase. The resulting difference during free fall in the response of the nonlocalizable Cooper pairs of electrons and the localizable ions to inhomogeneous gravitational fields is predicted to lead to a charge separation effect, which in turn leads to a large Coulomb force that opposes the convergence caused by the tidal gravitational force on the superconducting system.A “Cavendish-like” experiment is proposed for observing the charge separation effect induced by inhomogeneous gravitational fields in a superconducting circuit. The charge separation effect is determined to be limited by a pair-breaking process that occurs when low frequency gravitational perturbations are present. (shrink)

Morality after Calvin' examines the development of ethical thought in the Reformed tradition immediately following the death of Calvin. The book explores a previously unstudied work of Theodore Beza, the Cato Censorius Christianus (1591). When read in conjunction with the works and correspondence of Beza and his colleagues (Simon Goulart, Lambert Daneau, Peter Martyr Vermigli, among others), the poems of the Cato reveal the theoretical underpinnings of the disciplinary activity during the period. Kirk M. Summers shows how the moral (...) fervor of the latter half of the sixteenth century had its genesis in a well-formulated theology that viewed a Christian's sanctification as a process of restoration to an original order created by God. 00. (shrink)

The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality is the first of its kind, synthesizing research from several disciplines for all students and professionals interested in better understanding the nature and structure of social reality. The contents of the volume are divided into eight sections, each of which begins with a short introduction: Collective Action and Intention Shared and Joint Attitudes Epistemology and Rationality in the Social Context Social Ontology Collectives and Responsibility Collective Intentionality and Social Institutions The Extent, Origins, and Development (...) of Collective Intentionality Semantics of Collectivity The eight sections contain a total of 40 accessible chapters, all written exclusively for this volume by a team of internationally recognized experts. Each chapter ends with a References and a Further Reading section as well as cross-references to other germane chapters in the volume. A longer General Introduction provides an initial overview of the history as well as the current issues and problems in collective intentionality, the range of topics and their interconnections, and the organization of the _Handbook_. Systematic in its approach and thorough and detailed in its coverage_, The Routledge Handbook of Collective Intentionality_ provides readers with a valuable reference to this rapidly growing, cross-disciplinary research area and a trailhead to its most promising future directions. (shrink)

Kirk Ludwig develops a novel reductive account of plural discourse about collective action and shared intention. Part I develops the event analysis of action sentences, provides an account of the content of individual intentions, and on that basis an analysis of individual intentional action. Part II shows how to extend the account to collective action, intentional and unintentional, and shared intention, expressed in sentences with plural subjects. On the account developed, collective action is a matter of there being multiple (...) agents of an event and it requires no group agents per se. Shared intention is a matter of agents in a group each intending that they bring about some end in accordance with a shared plan. Thus their participatory intentions differ from individual intentions not in their mode but in their content. Joint intentional action then is a matter of a group of individuals successfully executing a shared intention. (shrink)

This book presents an original discussion and analysis of epistemic peer disagreement. It reviews a wide range of cases from the literature, and extends the definition of epistemic peerhood with respect to the current one, to account for the actual variability found in real-world examples. The book offers a number of arguments supporting the variability in the nature and in the range of disagreements, and outlines the main benefits of disagreement among peers i.e. what the author calls the benefits to (...) inquiry argument. (shrink)

Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states. He argues that it can be fully understood in terms of the agency of individuals, and concepts derived from our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism.

This chapter introduces readers to the empirical questions at issue in debates over gendered pronouns and assesses the plausibility of various possible answers to these questions. It has two parts. The first is a general introduction to the linguistics and psychology of grammatical gender. The second focuses on the meanings of gendered pronouns in English. It begins with a discussion of some methodological limitations of empirical approaches to the topic and the normative implications of those limitations. It then argues against (...) three simple theories of the semantics of gendered pronouns in English and proposes an alternative that fares better: the Gender-First View. Finally, it discusses the singular use of 'they' and its connection to nonbinary gender identities. (shrink)

By definition zombies would be physically and behaviourally just like us, but not conscious. This currently very influential idea is a threat to all forms of physicalism, and has led some philosophers to give up physicalism and become dualists. It has also beguiled many physicalists, who feel forced to defend increasingly convoluted explanations of why the conceivability of zombies is compatible with their impossibility. Robert Kirk argues that the zombie idea depends on an incoherent view of the nature of (...) phenomenal consciousness. His book has two main aims. One is to demolish the zombie idea once and for all. There are plenty of objections to it in the literature, but they lack intuitive appeal. He offers a striking new argument which reveals fundamental confusions in the implied conception of consciousness. The book's other main contribution is to develop a fresh and original approach to the true nature of phenomenal consciousness. Kirk argues that a necessary condition is a 'basic package' of capacities. An important component of his argument is that the necessary cognitive capacities are not as sophisticated as is often assumed. By focusing on humbler creatures than ourselves he avoids some of the distracting complications of our sophisticated forms of cognition. The basic package does not seem to be sufficient for phenomenal consciousness. What is also needed is 'direct activity' - a special feature of the way the events which constitute incoming perceptual information affect the system. This is an integrated process, to be conceived of holistically, and contrasts sharply with what is often called the 'availability' or 'poisedness' of perceptual information. This original, penetrating, and readable book will be of interest to all who have a serious concern with the nature of consciousness: not only professional philosophers and students, but psychologists and neuroscientists. (shrink)

Kirk Ludwig presents a philosophical account of institutional action, such as action by corporations and nation states, arguing that it can be understood exhaustively in terms of the agency of individuals and concepts constructed out of materials that are already at play in our understanding of individual action. He thus argues for a strong form of methodological individualism. The book provides a new account of the logical form of grammatically singular group action sentences (e.g. 'Company laid off 10,000 workers'), (...) and features new analyses of the concepts of a constitutive rule, status function, status role, collective acceptance, and proxy agency. He also provides an analysis of the structure of corporate action, including the status of corporations as legal persons, and of the nature of state action in relation to its citizens. This is the companion volume to From Individual to Plural Agency (OUP 2016), extending the multiple-agents account of collective action set out in the earlier volume. (shrink)

This book explores the value impact that theist and other worldviews have on our world and its inhabitants. Providing an extended defense of anti-theism - the view that God’s existence would (or does) actually make the world worse in certain respects - Lougheed explores God’s impact on a broad range of concepts including privacy, understanding, dignity, and sacrifice. The second half of the book is dedicated to the expansion of the current debate beyond monotheism and naturalism, providing an analysis of (...) the axiological status of other worldviews such as pantheism, ultimism, and Buddhism. -/- A lucid exploration of contemporary and relevant questions about the value impact of God’s existence, this book is an invaluable resource for scholars interested in axiological questions in the philosophy of religion. (shrink)

The sources that we have conveying information about the early Greek philosophers are far removed from the original texts. Manuscripts from the era were disseminated by scribes, making copies of a text. The text that formed the basis for the scribe was more likely than not a copy of a copy of a copy. Scribes are imperfect conduits of information. In addition to the challenges faced in ascertaining accuracy of the base text, there are errors that often occur in transcription (...) of the base text. There are errors of omission: Homeoteleuton occurs when a transcription skips words because a subsequent word has the same or a similar ending. Homeoarchy occurs when the transcriber skips lines, because of the similarity of the beginning of the lines. Haplography occurs when the transcriber copies once a term that appears twice in the base text. There are errors of addition. Dittography occurs when the transcriber writes a term twice that appeared once in the base text. Contamination occurs when a transcriber inserts text that was not in the base text. There are errors of transposition. Metathesis occurs when a transcriber reverses letters, words, or phrases from the base text. Finally, but not exhaustively, there are errors of alteration. These errors occur when a transcriber attempts, deliberately or not, to make sense of the base text in the transcription. (shrink)

Professional, Ethical, Legal, and Educational Lessons in Medicine: A Problem Based Approach provides a comprehensive review of the complex and challenging field of professional medical practice. Its problem-based format incorporates a vast pool of practical, board-exam-style multiple-choice questions for self-assessment, and is an ideal resource for exam preparation as well as ongoing clinical education among trainees and clinicians The practice of medicine is not only about clinical care of patients. Physicians must navigate ethical conundrums, legal pitfalls, and quality improvement issues (...) while maintaining scrupulous professionalism and being exemplary educators. This volume addresses common issues in the realm of professional medical practice not typically covered in other texts. Each of the 73 chapters presents a problem-based case that branches out into an oral board examination type stem questions. A discussion section with brief review articles summarizes the most recent literature. Multiple-choice questions with answers allows for comprehensive self-assessment or interactive group quizzes. This book will appeal to medical and allied health professionals in all specialties of medicine. It is an excellent and hands-on reference for the related but diverse domains associated with professional healthcare practice by students, physicians, and other healthcare providers compacted into one volume. (shrink)

Herein, I clarify my concern regarding Raelin’s Leadership-as-Practice and argue that inconsistent moral philosophies undermine the veracity of leadership theory, especially more recent democratic, shared, collective, and practice oriented theories; that this problem seems to be proliferating in the social sciences, and that this is especially concerning in socio-psychologically oriented theories. I contend that the moral foundations of L-A-P remain philosophically disquieting, unless it is understood as excluding moral agents other than those of a genealogical tradition, and that such exclusionary (...) consequences in practice may lead to moral disengagement, which might then lead to cognitive dissonance and even self-harm. (shrink)

Only a few studies have disaggregated homicide rates by relationship type or gender, with little investigation of homicide trends in adult marital and other intimate relationships. The current study documents patterns of homicide between opposite gender relational partners for the twelve years of 1976 through 1987 based on Supplementary Homicide Report Data, comparing rates between couples in marital and nonmarital relationships. Analyses reveal that the homicide rate for married couples declined somewhat during this period, although the drop in the rate (...) of wives killing husbands was greater than the drop in the rate of husbands killing wives. However, homicides involving unmarried couples followed a very different pattern. Whereas the lethal victimization rate for men in unmarried relationships varied unsystematically over time from 1976 through 1987, the rate of unmarried women being killed by their male partners increased significantly. Findings demonstrate the importance of disaggregating homicide data by gender and relationship type so that crucial differences can be detected. (shrink)

This chapter explains the mechanism of proxy agency whereby a group (or individual) acts through another authorized to represent it.

Kant’s philosophy of mathematics presents two fundamental problems of interpretation: (1) Kant claims that mathematical truths or “judgments” are synthetic a priori; and (2) Kant maintains that intuition is required for generating and/or understanding mathematical statements. Both of these problems arise for us because of developments in mathematics since Kant. In particular, the axiomatization of geometry--Kant’s paradigm of mathematical thinking--has made it seem to some commentators as, for example, Russell, that both (1) and (2) are false (Russell 1919, p. 145).2 (...) If virtually all of mathematics, including geometry, is axiomatizable, it would seem that mathematics results in analytic judgments that are totally independent of sensibility, the source, according to Kant, of intuition. In this paper I will address both of these difficulties. I shall argue that Kant’s understanding of both “synthetic” and “intuition” make his position immune to these criticisms. (shrink)

Recent advances in natural language processing have given rise to a new kind of AI architecture: the language agent. By repeatedly calling an LLM to perform a variety of cognitive tasks, language agents are able to function autonomously to pursue goals specified in natural language and stored in a human-readable format. Because of their architecture, language agents exhibit behavior that is predictable according to the laws of folk psychology: they function as though they have desires and beliefs, and then make (...) and update plans to pursue their desires given their beliefs. We argue that the rise of language agents significantly reduces the probability of an existential catastrophe due to loss of control over an AGI. This is because the probability of such an existential catastrophe is proportional to the difficulty of aligning AGI systems, and language agents significantly reduce that difficulty. In particular, language agents help to resolve three important issues related to aligning AIs: reward misspecification, goal misgeneralization, and uninterpretability. (shrink)

Assertoric sentences are sentences which admit of truth or falsity. Non-assertoric sentences, imperatives and interrogatives, have long been a source of difficulty for the view that a theory of truth for a natural language can serve as the core of a theory of meaning. The trouble for truth-theoretic semantics posed by non-assertoric sentences is that, prima facie, it does not make sense to say that imperatives, such as 'Cut your hair', or interrogatives such as 'What time is it?', are truth (...) or false. Thus, the vehicle for giving the meaning of a sentence by using an interpretive truth theory, the T-sentence, is apparently unavailable for non-assertoric sentences. This paper shows how to incorporate non-assertoric sentences into a theory of meaning that gives central place to an interpretive truth theory for the language, without, however, reducing the non-assertorics to assertorics, or treating their utterances as semantically equivalent to one or more utterances of assertoric sentences. Four proposals for how to incorporate non-assertoric sentences into a broadly truth-theoretic semantics are reviewed. The proposals fall into two classes, those that attempt to explain the meaning of non-assertoric sentences solely by appeal to truth conditions, and those that attempt to explain the meaning of non-assertroic sentences by appeal to compliance conditions, which can be treated as one variety of fulfillment conditions for sentences of which truth conditions are another variety. The paper argues that none of the extant approaches is successful, but develops a version of the generalized fulfillment approach which avoids the difficulties of previous approaches and still exhibits a truth theory as the central component of a compositional meaning theory for all sentences of natural language. (shrink)

Recent work on the semantics and pragmatics of slurs has explored a variety of ways of explaining their potential to derogate, with the most popular family of approaches appealing to either: (i), the doxastic or evaluative attitudes or commitments expressed by — or (ii), the propositions concerning such attitudes or commitments semantically or pragmatically communicated by — the speakers who use them. I begin by arguing that no such speaker-oriented approach can be correct. I then propose an alternative treatment of (...) slurs, according to which they are semantically associated with both descriptive and directive content. On the view I defend, when speakers use slurs, they simultaneously propose to add an at-issue proposition to the conversational common ground and issue a not-at-issue directive to their interlocutors to adopt a derogatory perspective toward members of the targeted group. This proposal both avoids the problems faced by other accounts and opens up a novel way of thinking about the phenomenon of appropriation. (shrink)

Much of the recent movement organized under the heading “Experimental Philosophy” has been concerned with the empirical study of responses to thought experiments drawn from the literature on philosophical analysis. I consider what bearing these studies have on the traditional projects in which thought experiments have been used in philosophy. This will help to answer the question what the relation is between Experimental Philosophy and philosophy, whether it is an “exciting new style of [philosophical] research”, “a new interdisciplinary field that (...) uses methods normally associated with psychology to investigate questions normally associated with philosophy” (Knobe et al. 2012), or whether its relation to philosophy consists, as some have suggested, in no more than the word ‘philosophy’ appearing in its title, or whether the truth lies somewhere in between these two views. I first distinguishes different strands in Experimental Philosophy, negative and positive x-phi, and x-phi pursuing philosophy as opposed to x-phi as cognitive science. Next I review some ways in which Experimental Philosophy has been criticized. Finally, I consider what would have to be true for Experimental Philosophy to have one or another sort of relevance to philosophy, whether the assumptions required are true, how we could know it, and the ideal limits of the usefulness Experimental Philosophy to philosophy. I conclude x-phi cannot in principle be a replacement for traditional first person approaches because it yields the wrong kind of knowledge and that it can nonetheless be a practical aid in conducting philosophical thought experiments. n. (shrink)

Under what conditions would an artificially intelligent system have wellbeing? Despite its obvious bearing on the ethics of human interactions with artificial systems, this question has received little attention. Because all major theories of wellbeing hold that an individual’s welfare level is partially determined by their mental life, we begin by considering whether artificial systems have mental states. We show that a wide range of theories of mental states, when combined with leading theories of wellbeing, predict that certain existing artificial (...) systems have wellbeing. While we do not claim to demonstrate conclusively that AI systems have wellbeing, we argue that our metaphysical and moral uncertainty about AI wellbeing requires us dramatically to reassess our relationship with the intelligent systems we create. (shrink)

In my recent book, The Epistemic Benefits of Disagreement, I develop a defense of non-conciliationism, but one that only applies in research contexts: Epistemic benefits are more likely in the offi...

This reviews, motivates, and extends the event analysis of action sentences and shows how it explains the compositionally of adverbial modification of action verbs and event verbs more generally. It includes a treatment of intensional adverbs like 'intentionally' and how it can be extended to the collective reading of plural action sentences.

This work provides a text and an extended study of those fragments of Heraclitus' philosophical utterances whose subject is the world as a whole rather than man and his part in it. Professor Kirk discusses fully the fragments which he finds genuine and treats in passing others that were generally accepted as genuine but here considered paraphrased or spurious. In securing his text, Professor Kirk has taken into account all the ancient testimonies, and in his critical work he (...) attached particular importance to the context in which each fragment is set. To each he gives a selective apparatus, a literal translation and and an extended commentary in which problems of textual and philosophical criticism are discussed. Ancient accounts of Heraclitus were inadequate and misleading, and as Kirk wrote, understanding was often hindered by excessive dogmatism and a selective use of the fragments. Professor Kirk's method is critical and objective, and his 1954 work marks a significant advance in the study of Presocratic thought. (shrink)

Conciliationism is the view that says when an agent who believes P becomes aware of an epistemic peer who believes not-P, that she encounters a defeater for her belief that P. Strong versions of conciliationism pose a sceptical threat to many, if not most, religious beliefs since religion is rife with peer disagreement. Elsewhere I argue that one way for a religious believer to avoid sceptical challenges posed by strong conciliationism is by appealing to the evidential import of religious experience. (...) Not only can religious experience be used to establish a relevant evidential asymmetry between disagreeing parties, but reliable reports of such experiences also start to put pressure on the religious sceptic to conciliate toward her religious opponent. Recently, however, Asha Lancaster-Thomas poses a highly innovative challenge to the evidential import of religious experience. Namely, she argues that an evil God is just as likely to explain negative religious experiences as a good God is able to explain positive religious experiences. In light of this, religious believers need to explain why a good God exists instead of an evil God. I respond to Lancaster-Thomas by suggesting that, at least within the context of religious experience, that the evil God hypothesis is only a challenge to certain versions of theism; and that the existence of an evil God and good God are compossible. (shrink)

In my comments, I address two issues that are important but not central to the paper under review here. First, I present a reading of the postphenomenological concept of multistability by going back to Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the primacy of perception. I conclude that assertions affirming the multistability of technologies should not be seen as merely empirical. Second, I address the adequacy of using the language of ‘empirical’ and ‘transcendental’ as a means to categorize exclusionary approaches in philosophy of technology.

In proxy assertion an individual or group asserts something through a spokesperson. The chapter explains proxy assertion as resting on the assignment of a status role to a person (that of spokesperson) whose utterances acts in virtue of that role have the status function of signaling that the principal is committed in a way analogous to an individual asserting that in his own voice. The chapter briefly explains how status functions and status roles are grounded and then treats, in turn, (...) the case of a spokesperson for an individual and a group and the differences in the significance of what the spokesperson does in each case. Finally, it reviews complications introduced by spokesperson autonomy, where the spokesperson is given leave to represent her principal’s views or positions in her own words and to respond to questions on his behalf. (shrink)

Corporations have often been taken to be the paradigm of an organization whose agency is autonomous from that of the successive waves of people who occupy the pattern of roles that define its structure, which licenses saying that the corporation has attitudes, interests, goals, and beliefs which are not those of the role occupants. In this essay, I sketch a deflationary account of agency-discourse about corporations. I identify institutional roles with a special type of status function, a status role, in (...) which the collectively accepted function is expressed in part through its occupier’s intentional expression of her agency in that role. I identify institutions as systems of status roles and show how this is compatible with seeing the agency of institutions generally, even over time periods in which there is complete change in role occupiers, as a matter of the contributions only of individual agents. I explain how the reduction of the institution to its members is compatible with its potentially having had a completely different membership. I show in the case of the corporation in particular that, once we see its origins and function, the surface features of legal discourse about corporate agency are misleading and are compatible with a deflationary account of corporate agency. I show in connection with this that the corporation is to be identified with its shareholders, and that where a corporation separates ownership and control, its managers and employees are proxy agents of the shareholders doing business under the corporate form. Finally, I canvass the legitimate ways of construing ordinary talk about corporate intention, belief, and so on, in light of this, none of which support the attribution of genuine agency or intentionality to any group per se associated with the corporation. (shrink)

How should we conceive of physicalism? Does it have to involve more than some kind of supervenience, or must it be reductionist or even eliminativist? Does it commit you to the psychophysical identity theory? Does it entail that all events are explicable in terms of physics? And what is to count as the physical—indeed, what is to count as physics? Jeffrey Poland offers well-argued answers to several of these questions, and a solidly constructed framework in terms of which we may (...) reasonably aim to answer the rest. His book is impressively systematic. He acknowledges debts to Post and to Hellman and Thompson, among others, but his conception of what physicalism should be is distinctive. I find it compelling. Anyone with an interest in physicalism, for or against, should read the book. (shrink)

An important belief in African Traditional Religion holds that everything, both animate and inanimate objects, are imbued with an imperceptible energy known as life force. Since life force is the greatest value, it is the grounds of morality. However, it is undertheorized in contemporary African ethics, with work on personhood and harmonious relationships taking centerstage. I seek to fill this gap in the literature by further developing an entirely secular and naturalistic moral theory of life force that avoids metaphysical controversies (...) and is known as liveliness, which was first gestured at by Thaddeus Metz (2012, 2022). I demonstrate that while a series of objections that Metz levels against liveliness affect teleological versions, they do not apply with equal force to deontological versions. Liveliness, particularly deontological versions, ought to be considered as a contender for the best African moral theory alongside those that focus on personhood or harmonious relationships. (shrink)

While there has long been philosophical thinking on the African continent, it was not until the middle of the 20th century that professional philosophy emerged on the continent. Though traditional African cultures have rich oral histories that some contemporary philosophers explicitly draw upon, it was not until universities emerged that there was philosophy conducted by professional philosophers who published their findings in academic venues. To date, much of this work has been conducted in English. The emphasis this tradition places on (...) the community and social harmony will probably stand out immediately to any reader steeped in the Western philosophical tradition. The articles in this issue represent different styles of conducting African philosophy, such as employing analytic methods in order to develop moral theories, questioning the use of Western epistemic standards, and mining ideas from the history of Africa. (shrink)

David Benatar argues that one important consideration in favour of anti-natalism is based on the fact that all humans lack cosmic meaning; we will never transcend space and time such that we will have an impact on the entire universe, forever. Instead of denying Benatar’s claim that we lack cosmic meaning, Thaddeus Metz recently argues that our lack of cosmic meaning is not that significant because we ought not to regret lacking a good that we could not have in the (...) first place. He explains the principle behind this idea in modal terms: “the closer the world in which one could access a benefit, the more reasonable are attitudes such as sadness, disappointment, regret when does not acquire it.” I argue that this principle faces a serious counterexample in the form of death. The possible worlds in which one doesn’t die are incredibly distant. Yet, it is appropriate to express deep sadness, disappointment, and regret at the fact that one must inevitably face death. Metz is wrong that we shouldn’t regret lacking a good unavailable to us in the first place. His criticism of Benatar therefore fails. While it might be objected that immortality is not good, my basic point still stands when considering the fact that our lives are not significantly longer. Benatar’s claims about the significance of our lack of cosmic meaning might not be true, but not for the reasons suggested by Metz. (shrink)

The topic of the sublime is making a return to contemporary discourse on aesthetics and cognition. In Sublime Understanding, Kirk Pillow makes sublimity the center of an alternative conception of aesthetic response and interpretation. He draws an aesthetics of sublimity from Kant's Critique of Judgment, bolsters it with help from Hegel, and establishes its place in a broadened conception of human understanding. He argues that sublime reflection provides a model for an interpretive response to the uncanny Other outside our (...) conceptual grasp; it advances our sense-making pursuits but eschews unified, conceptual determination. Thus "sublime understanding" is the always partial, indeterminate grasping of contextual wholes through which we make sense of the uncanny particular in both art and the lived world.The book is divided into three parts. In the first two parts, Pillow presents insightful reinterpretations of Kant's and Hegel's aesthetics. In the third part he develops his own model of an aestheticized understanding, which illuminates contemporary discussions of metaphor and interpretation, while bridging Anglo-American and continental treatments of these issues. The presentation is a model of clear and well-crafted exposition, exemplifying the practice of aesthetically reflective sublime understanding that it articulates. (shrink)

This book offers a unique comparative study of ubuntu, a dominant ethical theory in African philosophy, and western monotheism. It is the first book to bring ubuntu to bear on the axiology of theism debate in contemporary analytic philosophy of religion. A large motivating force behind this book is to explore the extent to which there is intersubjective ethical agreement and disagreement between ubuntu and Western worldviews like monotheism and naturalism. First, the author assesses the various arguments for anti-theism and (...) pro-theism on the assumption that ubuntu is true. Ubuntu's communitarian focus might be so different from the Western tradition that it completely changes how we evaluate theism and atheism. Second, the author assesses the advantages and disadvantages of the truth of ubuntu for the world. Third and finally, he assesses the axiological status of faith for both monotheism and ubuntu. Ubuntu and Western Monotheism will be of interest to scholars and advanced students specializing in philosophy of religion, African religion and philosophy, and religious ethics. (shrink)

The inclusion problem for theories of gender arises when those theories inappropriately fail to include certain individuals in the gender categories to which they ought to belong. The inclusion problem affects both of the most influential traditions in feminist theorizing about gender: social-position accounts and identity accounts. I argue that the inclusion problem can be solved by adopting a structured theory of gender which incorporates aspects of both social-position accounts and identity accounts. According to the theory I favor, an individual’s (...) gender is determined by their gender identity if they have one; otherwise, it is determined by their social position. My structured approach to gender offers a more direct solution to the gender inclusion problem than alternatives recently advocated by Barnes (2020), Jenkins (2023), and others. It also points the way to a simple solution to inclusion problems that arise at the level of gendered language. (shrink)

The term 'covert mixed quotation' describes cases in which linguistic material is interpreted in the manner of mixed quotation — that is, used in addition to being mentioned — despite the superficial absence of any commonly recognized conventional devices indicating quotation. After developing a novel theory of mixed quotation, I show that positing covert mixed quotation allows us to give simple and unified treatments of a number of puzzling semantic phenomena, including the projective behavior of conventional implicature items embedded in (...) indirect speech reports and propositional attitude ascriptions, so-called 'c-monsters,' metalinguistic negation, metalinguistic negotiation, and 'in a sense' constructions. (shrink)

This chapter argues that Davidson's truth-theoretic semantics was not intended to replace the traditional pursuit of providing a compositional meaning theory but rather to achieve the same aim indirectly by placing conditions on a truth theory that would enable someone who understood it to understand its object language. The chapter argues that by placing constraints on the axioms of a Tarski-style truth theory, namely, that they interpret the terms for which they give satisfaction conditions, and specifying a suitable canonical proof (...) procedure that issues in T-sentence that remove all the metalanguage semantic terms from the right hand side and draw intuitively only on the content of the axioms, we can use the theory to interpret object language sentences. It further argues that if we ask what body of knowledge one must be in possession of to interpret the language, it turns out to be a set of propositions about the truth theory but not the axioms of the truth theory itself. This shows how to avoid the problem of the semantic paradoxes and the problem of vagueness. (shrink)