We defend Joseph Melia's thesis that the role of mathematics in scientific theory is to ‘index’ quantities, and that even if mathematics is indispensable to scientific explanations of concrete phenomena, it does not explain any of those phenomena. This thesis is defended against objections by Mark Colyvan and Alan Baker.

We defend Joseph Melia's thesis that the role of mathematics in scientific theory is to 'index' quantities, and that even if mathematics is indispensable to scientific explanations of concrete phenomena, it does not explain any of those phenomena. This thesis is defended against objections by Mark Colyvan and Alan Baker.

This article defends novel approaches to what we are and how we persist. First it is claimed that we have disjunctive persistence conditions: we can persist by way of either biological continuity or psychological continuity. Then it is claimed that we are neither human beings nor persons essentially. Rather, we are essentially bio-psycho-continuers, a concept to be explained along the way. A variety of objections are considered and found wanting.

According to philosophical orthodoxy, there are informative criteria of identity over time. Anti-criterialism rejects this orthodoxy and claims that there are no such criteria. This paper examines anti-criterialism in the light of recent attacks on the thesis by Matt Duncan, Sydney Shoemaker and Dean Zimmerman. It is argued that those attacks are not successful. Along the way, a novel strategy to defend anti-criterialism against the critics’ most challenging objection is developed. Under-appreciated difficulties for criterialism are also raised which, I claim, (...) there is no obvious way to solve. It is concluded that anti-criterialism may be a much stronger rival to criterialism than is often supposed. (shrink)

David Lewis's cohabitation theory suffered damaging criticism from Derek Parfit. Though many have defended versions of Lewis's theory Parfit's criticism has not been answered. This paper shows how to defend the cohabitation theory against Parfit's criticism.

This paper considers two strategies for undermining indispensability arguments for mathematical Platonism. We defend one strategy (the Trivial Strategy) against a criticism by Joseph Melia. In particular, we argue that the key example Melia uses against the Trivial Strategy fails. We then criticize Melia’s chosen strategy (the Weaseling Strategy.) The Weaseling Strategy attempts to show that it is not always inconsistent or irrational knowingly to assert p and deny an implication of p . We argue that Melia’s case for this (...) strategy fails. (shrink)

The threshold problem for knowledge is the problem of saying where the threshold for knowledge lies in various cases and explaining why it lies there rather than elsewhere. Pragmatic encroachment is the idea that the knowledge-threshold is sensitive to practical factors. The latter idea seems to help us make progress on the former problem. However, Jessica Brown has argued that appearances are deceiving in this case: the threshold problem is still a thorny one even for those who accept pragmatic encroachment. (...) This paper takes a look at Brown’s arguments and at Michael Hannon’s recent attempt to respond to them. Hannon’s response is shown to face serious difficulties and a novel alternative response to Brown is provided. The paper also takes up an issue Brown raises very briefly concerning cases in which a proposition is relevant to multiple stakes which a subject faces at a given time. It turns out that there is a good deal more to be said about how defenders of pragmatic encroachment should try to handle such cases than Brown permits. (shrink)

Trenton Merricks has argued that given endurantism personal identity is unanalysable in terms of psychological continuity, while Anthony Brueckner has argued against this claim. This article shows that neither philosopher has made a compelling case and also shows what it would take to settle the issue either way. It is then argued that whether personal identity is analysable or not may not be of crucial importance to those wanting to defend a psychological continuity approach to personal identity.

André Gallois (1998) attempts to defend the occasional identity thesis (OIT), the thesis that objects which are distinct at one time may nonetheless be identical at another time, in the face of two influential lines of argument against it. One argument involves Kripke’s (1971) notion of rigid designation and the other, Leibniz’s law (affirming the indiscernibility of identicals). It is reasonable for advocates of (OIT) to question the picture of rigid designation and the version of Leibniz’s law that these arguments (...) employ, but, the problem is, some form of rigidity is required for one to affirm the occasional identity of objects, and some (restricted) version of Leibniz’s law must be conceded if identity really is involved. Gallois accordingly recommends an account of rigidity and a version of Leibniz’s law to this end.1 We find Gallois’ proposals entirely inadequate to their task. We aim in this paper is to explicate and defend an alternative approach for occasional identity theorists. We do not seek to defend (OIT) per se; our aim, rather, is simply to show that the arguments from rigid designation and Leibniz’s law are inconclusive. Let’s begin with an outline of these arguments. (shrink)

The cohabitation theory is a popular solution to the problem of personal fission. It affirms that all the people who result from fission were there cohabiting the pre-fission body all along. Adopting this solution is an uncontroversial move for four-dimensionalists, but is it open to three-dimensionalists too? Some have thought so, but Katherine Hawley, Mark Johnston, and Eric Olson have argued to the contrary. They claim three-dimensionalists simply cannot be cohabitation theorists. In this paper, I explain how they can.

Pragmatic encroachment in epistemology is the idea that whether one knows some proposition depends on whether one can rely on it practically. Total pragmatic encroachment affirms that practical considerations of this sort encroach not just on knowledge but on all interesting normative epistemic statuses a belief might have. Ichikawa, Jarvis, and Rubin (2012) have argued that this stronger thesis conflicts with mainstream belief‐desire psychology. Worse still, they argue that attempting to defend the thesis gets one caught in vicious circularities. The (...) aim of this paper is to show that, if we are careful in how we understand the key idea of being sensitive to practical considerations, we can defend total pragmatic encroachment and avoid the circularities. In fact, depending on how it is understood, we can even square mainstream belief‐desire psychology with total pragmatic encroachment as well. (shrink)

Jim Stone argues that one cannot combine three-dimensionalism with counterpart theory. This paper argues to the contrary.

Certain well-known intuitions suggest that, contrary to traditional thinking in epistemology, knowledge judgements are shifty—i.e., that judgements about whether somebody knows something can shift in stringency with context. Some take these intuitions to show that knowledge judgements are shifty. Jennifer Nagel and Mikkel Gerken have argued, however, that closer attention to the psychological processes which underlie knowledge judgements shows how traditional non-shifty thinking can be preserved. They each defend moderate classical invariantism—the view that the epistemic standard for knowing is always (...) moderate—by drawing on recent work in cognitive psychology. This paper argues that neither attempt succeeds. (shrink)

Advocates of occasional identity have two ways of interpreting putative cases of fission and fusion. One way—we call it the Creative view—takes fission to involve an object really dividing (or being replicated), thereby creating objects which would not otherwise have existed. The more ontologically parsimonious way takes fission to involve merely the ‘separation’ of objects that were identical before: strictly speaking, no object actually divides or is replicated, no new objects are created. In this paper we recommend the Creative approach (...) as the best way of dealing with certain problem cases involving teletransportation. Our considerations yield novel takes on psychological-continuity theories of personal identity and survival, and on the puzzle of Theseus' ship. (shrink)

Roache has raised a new objection to cohabitation theories of personal fission. According to these theories, in cases of personal fission the pre-fission body is cohabited by (at least) two persons. She claims such cohabitants cannot be concerned for their survival in the way ordinary non-cohabitants can. I will offer criticism of Roache’s argument and conclude she doesn’t establish this claim.

I show that frequentism, as an explanation of probability in classical statistical mechanics, can be extended in a natural way to a decoherent quantum history space, the analogue of a classical phase space. The result is a form of finite frequentism, in which Gibbs’ concept of an infinite ensemble of gases is replaced by the quantum state expressed as a superposition of a finite number of decohering microstates. It is a form of finite and actual frequentism (as opposed to hypothetical (...) frequentism) insofar as all the microstates exist, in keeping with the decoherence-based Everett interpretation, and some versions of pilot-wave theory. (shrink)

This bestselling dictionary is written by one of the leading philosophers of our time, and it is widely recognized as the best dictionary of its kind. Comprehensive and authoritative, it covers every aspect of philosophy from Aristotle to Zen. With clear and concise definitions, it provides lively and accessible coverage of not only Western philosophical traditions, but also themes from Chinese, Indian, Islamic, and Jewish philosophy. New entries on philosophy of economics, social theory, neuroscience, philosophy of the mind, and moral (...) conceptions, bring this authoritative third edition up to date. It is the ideal introduction to philosophy for anyone with an interest in the subject, and it is an indispensable work of reference for students and teachers. (shrink)

Provides a comprehensive introduction to the major philosophical theories attempting to explain the workings of language.

These essays examine how some perennial problems in philosophy and religion are significant for understanding contemporary life. Issues discussed include: capitalism; public philosophy; man-made mass death; psychoanalysis; feminism; fundamentalism; and the desire to be happy.

Which political principles should govern global politics? In his new book, Simon Caney engages with the work of philosophers, political theorists, and international relations scholars in order to examine some of the most pressing global issues of our time. Are there universal civil, political, and economic human rights? Should there be a system of supra- state institutions? Can humanitarian intervention be justified?

This volume collects some influential essays in which Simon Blackburn, one of our leading philosophers, explores one of the most profound and fertile of philosophical problems: the way in which our judgments relate to the world. This debate has centered on realism, or the view that what we say is validated by the way things stand in the world, and a variety of oppositions to it. Prominent among the latter are expressive and projective theories, but also a relaxed pluralism (...) that discourages the view that there are substantial issues at stake. The figure of the "quasi-realist" dramatizes the difficulty of conducting these debates. Typically philosophers thinking of themselves as realists will believe that they alone can give a proper or literal account of some of our attachments--to truth, to facts, to the independent world, to knowledge and certainty. The quasi-realist challenge, developed by Blackburn in this volume, is that we can have those attachments without any metaphysic that deserves to be called realism, so that the metaphysical picture that goes with our practices is quite idle. The cases treated here include the theories of value and knowledge, modality, probability, causation, intentionality and rule-following, and explanation. A substantial new introduction has been added, drawing together some of the central themes. The essays articulate a fresh alternative to a primitive realist/anti-realist opposition, and their cumulative effect is to yield a new appreciation of the delicacy of the debate in these central areas. (shrink)

Simon Blackburn puts forward a compelling original philosophy of human motivation and morality. He maintains that we cannot get clear about ethics until we get clear about human nature. So these are the sorts of questions he addresses: Why do we behave as we do? Can we improve? Is our ethics at war with our passions, or is it an upshot of those passions? Blackburn seeks the answers in an exploration of guilt, shame, disgust, and other moral emotions; he (...) draws also on game theory and cognitive science in his account of the structures of human motivation. Many philosophers have wanted a naturalistic ethics a theory that integrates our understanding of human morality with the rest of our understanding of the world we live in. What is special about Blackburn's naturalistic ethics is that it does not debunk the ethical by reducing it to the non-ethical. At the same time he banishes the spectres of scepticism and relativism that have haunted recent moral philosophy. Ruling Passions sets ethics in the context of human nature: it offers a solution to the puzzle of how ethics can maintain its authority even though it is rooted in the very emotions and motivations that it exists to control. (shrink)

In these interviews from 1982 and 1985, I ask Beauvoir about her philosophical differences with Jean-Paul Sartre on the issues of voluntarism vs social conditioning and embodiment, individualism vs reciprocity, and ontology vs ethics. We also discuss her influence on Sartre's work, the problems with the current English translation of The Second Sex, her analyses of motherhood and feminist concepts of woman-identity, and her own experience of sexism.

Our engagement with time is a ubiquitous feature of our lives. We are aware of time on many scales, from the briefest flicker of change to the way our lives unfold over many years. But to what extent does this encounter reveal the true nature of temporal reality? To the extent that temporal reality is as it seems, how do we come to be aware of it? And to the extent that temporal reality is not as it seems, why does (...) it seem that way? These are the central questions addressed by Simon Prosser in Experiencing Time. He defends the B-theory of time, according to which the apparently dynamic quality of change, the special status of the present, and even the passage of time are all illusions. Prosser goes on to explore solutions to certain puzzles raised by experiences of temporal features such as changes, rates, and durations, and in doing so sheds light on broader issues in the philosophy of mind. (shrink)

Examination of naturally occurring cases in which a person reports that a word is on the tip of his or her tongue has led several theorists to propose that an important role is played by blocking words whose intrusions hinder access to the correct targets. As yet, however, the blocking mechanism appears to have received little direct investigation experimentally. It was studied here by adapting the classic method of Brown and McNeill in which a person is presented with a definition (...) of a rare word and uses it to attempt to generate that target word. The adaptation that was made was to append a potential blocking word to the presentation of each definition. The potential blocking words were either phonologically related to the target or not, either semantically related to the target or not, and either rare or not. Only the first of these factors exerted a significant effect—more cases of tip of the tongue were experienced when the potential blocking word was phonologically related to the target than when it was not. This result suggests that the recall of a word on the basis of its meaning may proceed via an intermediate stage characterised by partial retrieval of its phonology. (shrink)

The relationship of part to whole is one of the most fundamental there is; this is the first and only full-length study of this concept. This book shows that mereology, the formal theory of part and whole, is essential to ontology. Peter Simons surveys and criticizes previous theories, especially the standard extensional view, and proposes a more adequate account which encompasses both temporal and modal considerations in detail. 'Parts could easily be the standard book on mereology for the next twenty (...) or thirty years.' Timothy Williamson, Grazer Philosophische Studien. (shrink)

Although it is argued that social justice is a core concern for the discipline, nursing has not generally played a leadership role in the responses to many of the greatest social problems of our time. These include the accelerated rate of climate change, pandemic threats, systemic racism, growing health and social inequities, and the regulation of new technologies to ensure an equitable future ‘for all.’ In nursing codes of ethics, administration, education, policies, and practice, social justice is often claimed to (...) be a core value, yet it is rarely contextualized by philosophical or theoretical underpinnings. It appears that nurses’ commitment to social justice may stem more from a penchant for ‘doing good’ than an attempt to explore, understand, and enact what is meant by social justice from an ontological, epistemological, and methodological perspective. We contend that the dominance of a human science perspective in nursing contributes to a narrow definition of health and relegates many issues central to social justice to the margins of nurses’ care. In this article, we explore how the focus on ‘the human’ in the human science perspective may not only be limiting the capacity of nurses to develop strategies to adequately address social injustice, but in some instances, direct nurses to contribute to their very reproduction. We suggest that a critical interrogation of this human‐centric hegemony can identify avenues of rupture and introduce posthumanism as an additional philosophical perspective for consideration to help bridge the human‐social divide. (shrink)