Australasian Journal of Philosophy

ISSNs: 0004-8402, 1471-6828

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  1. Inquiry and Metaphysical Rationalism.Fatema Amijee - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):809-823.
    ABSTRACT According to an important version of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, every fact has a metaphysical explanation, where a metaphysical explanation of some fact tells us what makes it the case that the fact obtains. I argue that, so long as we have not yet discovered that any fact is brute, we ought to be committed to this version of the principle—henceforth ‘the PSR’—because it is indispensable to a species of inquiry in which we ought to engage. I argue, (...)
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  2. Plato’s Sun-Like Good: Dialectic in the Republic: Broadie, Sarah, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021, pp. ix + 240, AUD $141.95 (hardback). [REVIEW]Rick Benitez - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):1019-1022.
    In the final book of her exceptional career, Sara Broadie claims to provide a ‘revolutionary’ interpretation of Plato’s Analogy of the Sun (Republic VI). Broadie’s approach to interpreting the anal...
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  3.  8
    When is Equality Basic?Ian Carter & Olof Page - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):983-997.
    ABSTRACT In this paper we steer a course between two views of the value of equality that are usually understood as diametrically opposed to one another: on the one hand, the view that equality has intrinsic value; on the other, the view that equality is a normatively redundant notion. We proceed by analysing the different ways in which the equal possession of certain relevant properties justifies distributive equality. We then present an account of ‘basic equality’ that serves to single out (...)
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  4.  49
    Self-Control without a Self.Monima Chadha & Shaun Nichols - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):936-953.
    ABSTRACT Self-control is essential to the Buddhist soteriological project, but it is not immediately clear how we can make sense of it in light of the doctrine of no-self. Exercising control over our actions, thoughts, volitions, and emotions seems to presuppose a conception of self and agency that is not available to the Buddhist. Thus, there seems to be a fundamental mismatch in the practical instructions for exercising control in the Buddhist texts and the doctrine of no-self. In this paper, (...)
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  5.  13
    Skill and Mastery: Philosophical Stories from the Zhuangzi: Lai, Karyn and Wai Wai Chiu (eds.), Rowman & Littlefield International, 2019, pp. v+289, £28.00 (paperback). [REVIEW]Julianne Chung - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):1022-1025.
    Skill and Mastery: Philosophical Stories from the Zhuangzi is part of Rowman & Littlefield International’s CEACOP (Center for East Asian and Comparative Philosophy) East Asian Comparative Ethics, P...
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  6. Challenging the Pursuit of Novelty.Emmalon Davis - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):773-792.
    Novelty—the value of saying something new—appears to be a good-making feature of a philosophical contribution. Beyond this, however, novelty functions as a metric of success. This paper challenges the presumption and expectation that a successful philosophical contribution will be a novel one. As I show, the pursuit of novelty is neither as desirable nor as feasible as it might initially seem.
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  7.  20
    On E.E. Constance Jones’s Account of Categorical Propositions and Her Defence of Frege.Karen Green - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):863-875.
    E.E.C. Jones’s early logical writings have recently been rescued from obscurity and it has been claimed that, in her works dating from the 1890s, she anticipated Frege’s distinction between sense and reference. This claim is challenged on the ground that it is based on a common but inadequate reading of Frege, which runs together his concept/object and sense/reference distinctions. It is admitted that a case can be made for Jones having anticipated something very like Frege’s analysis of categorical propositions, and (...)
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  8.  7
    Rationality in Mathematical Proofs.Yacin Hamami & Rebecca Morris - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):793-808.
    ABSTRACT Mathematical proofs are not sequences of arbitrary deductive steps—each deductive step is, to some extent, rational. This paper aims to identify and characterize the particular form of rationality at play in mathematical proofs. The approach adopted consists in viewing mathematical proofs as reports of proof activities—that is, sequences of deductive inferences—and in characterizing the rationality of the former in terms of that of the latter. It is argued that proof activities are governed by specific norms of rational planning agency, (...)
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  9. Pundits and Possibilities: Philosophers Are Not Modal Experts.Caroline Hendy & Daniel Kilov - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):824-843.
    ABSTRACT Wilfrid Sellars [1962: 1] described philosophy as an attempt to ‘understand how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term’. But it is distinctive of philosophy that many of us are interested not only in how the world is but in ways that it could be. That is, philosophy is concerned with facts about modality. Some of the most important arguments in philosophy hinge on modal premises, and philosophers (...)
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  10. What Justifies Our Bias Toward the Future?Todd Karhu - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):876-889.
    A person is biased toward the future when she prefers, other things being equal, bad events to be in her past rather than her future or good ones to be in her future rather than her past. In this paper, I explain why both critics and defenders of future bias have failed to consider the best version of the view. I distinguish external time from personal time, and show that future bias is best construed in terms of the latter. This (...)
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  11. Conventionalism about Persons and the Nonidentity Problem.Michael Tze-Sung Longenecker - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):954-967.
    ABSTRACT I motivate ‘Origin Conventionalism’—the view that which facts about one’s origins are essential to one’s existence depends partly on our person-directed attitudes. One important upshot is that the view offers a novel and attractive solution to the Nonidentity Problem. That problem typically assumes that the sperm-egg pair from which a person originates is essential to that person’s existence; in which case, for many future persons that come into existence under adverse conditions, had those conditions not been realized, the individuals (...)
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  12.  21
    The Pleistocene Social Contract: Culture and Cooperation in Human Evolution. [REVIEW]John Matthewson - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):1027-1027.
  13.  30
    Cost and Psychological Difficulty: Two Aspects of Demandingness.Brian McElwee - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):920-935.
    ABSTRACT The demandingness of a moral prescription is generally understood exclusively in terms of the welfare costs involved in complying with that prescription. I argue that psychological difficulty is a second aspect of demandingness, whose relevance cannot be reduced to that of welfare costs. Appeal to psychological difficulty explains intuitive verdicts about the permissibility of favouring oneself over others, favouring loved ones over strangers, and favouring one’s short-term good over one’s long-term good. There are also significant implications for the morality (...)
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  14. Some Question-Begging Objections to Rule Consequentialism.Caleb Perl - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):904-919.
    ABSTRACT This paper defends views like rule consequentialism by distinguishing between two sorts of ideal world objections. It aims to show that one of those sorts of objections is question-begging. Its success would open up a path forward for such views.
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  15. Engineering Human Beauty.Matteo Ravasio - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):998-1011.
    ABSTRACT Individual differences in bodily beauty result in significant differences in life outcomes. Some such differences seem unwarranted. On this basis, various authors have argued that there is a kind of discrimination—lookism—that affects those who are aesthetically disadvantaged. Several strategies have been proposed to address lookism. One aim of this paper is to draw a distinction between two sorts of anti-lookist strategies. Redistributive approaches propose to alter the current distribution of beauty, either by broadening beauty standards, or by giving individuals (...)
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  16. Kant on Reason as the Capacity for Comprehension.Karl Schafer - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):844-862.
    This essay develops an interpretation of Kant’s conception of the faculty of reason as the capacity for what he calls "comprehension" (Begreifen). In doing so, it first discusses Kant's characterizations of reason in relation to what he describes as the two highest grades of cognition—insight and comprehension. Then it discusses how the resulting conception of reason relates to more familiar characterizations as the faculty for inference and the faculty of principles. In doing so, it focuses on how the idea of (...)
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  17. Self-Fulfilling Beliefs: A Defence.Paul Silva - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):1012-1018.
    ABSTRACT Self-fulfilling beliefs are, in at least some cases, a kind of belief that is rational to form and hold in the absence of evidence. The rationality of such beliefs have significant implications for a range of debates in epistemology. Most startlingly, it undermines the idea that having sufficient evidence for the truth of is necessary for it to be rational to believe that. The rationality of self-fulfilling beliefs is here defended against the idea that their rationality is incompatible with (...)
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  18.  10
    Feeling Like It: A Theory of Inclination and Will. [REVIEW]Sergio Tenenbaum - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):1026-1026.
    Tamar Schapiro’s terrific book gives a central role to inclination in our understanding of agency. Contemporary philosophers often presuppose a monistic theory of motivation; under the heading of ‘...
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  19. A Hybrid Account of Harm.Charlotte Franziska Unruh - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (4):890-903.
    ABSTRACT When does a state of affairs constitute a harm to someone? Comparative accounts say that being worse off constitutes harm. The temporal version of the comparative account is seldom taken seriously, due to apparently fatal counterexamples. I defend the temporal version against these counterexamples, and show that it is in fact more plausible than the prominent counterfactual version of the account. Non-comparative accounts say that being badly off constitutes harm. However, neither the temporal comparative account nor the non-comparative account (...)
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  20.  22
    Love and Objective Reality in Spinoza’s Account of the Mind’s Power over the Affects.Lilli Alanen - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):517-533.
    This paper explores Spinoza’s therapy of passions and method of salvation through knowledge and love of God. His optimism about this method is perplexing: it is not even clear how his God, who is unlike any traditional notion of divinity, can be loved. Sorting out Spinoza’s view involves distinguishing an ethics of bondage from another of freedom, and two corresponding notions of love of God. The paper argues that the highest kind of love—‘pure intellectual love of God’—should not be understood (...)
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  21.  38
    Action, Presence, and the Specious Present.Elliot Carter - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):575-591.
    Perceptual experience is present-directed in the sense that what we perceptually experience seems to be temporally present, while what we remember or imagine does not. One way of explaining this contrast is to claim that perceptual experience uniquely involves awareness of the property of presence (either conceived as an observer-independent property of the present time or as a relation of simultaneity between an event and one’s experience of it). I argue against this explanation and in favour of one on which (...)
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  22. True Blame.Randolph Clarke & Piers Rawling - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):736-749.
    1. We sometimes angrily confront, pointedly ostracize, castigate, or denounce those whom we think have committed moral offences. Conduct of this kind may be called blaming behaviour. When genuine,...
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  23.  25
    Thick and Perceptual Moral Beauty.Ryan P. Doran - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):704-721.
    Which traits are beautiful? And is their beauty perceptual? It is argued that moral virtues are partly beautiful to the extent that they tend to give rise to a certain emotion—ecstasy—and that compassion tends to be more beautiful than fair-mindedness because it tends to give rise to this emotion to a greater extent. It is then argued, on the basis that emotions are best thought of as a special, evaluative, kind of perception, that this argument suggests that moral virtues are (...)
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  24.  73
    Moral Testimony and Collective Moral Governance.Iskra Fileva - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):722-735.
    1. If you tell me that it’s raining outside, I would, presumably, be justified in acquiring the belief that it is raining on the basis of your say-so.1 But if you tell me that some war is unjust or...
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  25. Is Consciousness Vague?Geoffrey Hall - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):670-684.
    1. Is consciousness vague? This paper will argue that it is. But, first, we need to get clear on the meaning of the question.I will take vagueness to consist in the possibility of borderline cases....
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  26.  47
    What is (Neo-)Pragmatists’ Function?Sebastian Köhler - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):653-669.
    Functions play an important role in neo-pragmatism. This paper advances neo-pragmatism’s prospects by investigating how functions are to be understood on this account. It argues that prominent ways of understanding functions do not suit neo-pragmatists’ meta-semantic commitments or their preferred methodology. It then presents an account that fits both, based on Laura and François Schroeter’s theory of rationalizing self-interpretation. On this account, a term’s function is what it allows us to do that makes our tradition with the term rational.
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  27. Coordination, Content, and Conflation.Kyle Landrum - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):638-652.
    Coordination is the presumption that distinct representations have the same referential content. Philosophers have discussed ways in which the presence of coordination might bear on the metasemantic determination of content. One test case for exploring the relationship between coordination and content is the phenomenon of conflation — the situation in which representations are about distinct things but are nevertheless coordinated. In this paper, I use observations about conflation to develop an anaphoric metasemantics for some representations in which coordination plays an (...)
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  28. The Neutrality of Life.Andrew Y. Lee - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):685-703.
    Some philosophers think that life is worth living not merely because of the goods and the bads within it, but also because life itself is good. I explain how this idea can be formalized by associating each version of such of a view with a function from length of life to the value generated by life itself. Then I argue that every version of the view that life itself is good faces some version of the following dilemma: either (1) good (...)
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  29.  52
    Against the Humean Argument for Extended Simples.Tien-Chun Lo & Hsuan-Chih Lin - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):551-563.
    Is it possible that there are extended simples—material objects extended in space or spacetime that have no proper parts? The most commonly cited argument for this possibility is based on a version of the Humean principle: namely (and with some qualifications), any pattern of instantiation of a fundamental relation is possible. In this paper, we make the Humean argument fully explicit, and criticise it from three aspects—the Disjunction problem, the Pluralist problem, and the Accidentality problem. First, the original argument only (...)
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  30.  8
    Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in NatureWaldow, Anik, Experience Embodied: Early Modern Accounts of the Human Place in Nature, New York: Oxford University Press, 2020, pp. xiv + 294, US$90 (hardback). [REVIEW]Robert B. Louden - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):765-767.
    At present, one more book on modern philosophy that opens with a chapter on Descartes, closes with one on Kant, and includes discussions of usual suspects such as Locke and Hume (among others) in-b...
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  31.  98
    Is prime matter energy?David S. Oderberg - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):534-550.
    This paper tests the following hypothesis: that the prime matter of classical Aristotelian-Scholastic metaphysics is numerically identical to energy. Is P=E? After outlining the classical Aristotelian concept of prime matter, I provide the master argument for it based on the phenomenon of substantial change. I then outline what we know about energy as a scientific concept, including its role and application in some key fields. Next, I consider the arguments in favour of prime matter being identical to energy, followed by (...)
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  32. Skills as Knowledge.Carlotta Pavese & Beddor Bob - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):609-624.
    1. What is the relation between skilful action and knowledge? According to most philosophers, the two have little in common: practical intelligence and theoretical intelligence are largely separate...
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  33.  84
    Towards a Synthesis of Two Research Programmes: Inference to the Best Explanation and Models of Scientific Explanation.Yunus Prasetya - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):750-764.
    There are two important philosophical research programmes on explanation in the twentieth century—the search for an account or model of scientific explanation, and the defence of inference to the best explanation as a rational form of inference. These two research programmes have largely developed independently from one another. This paper argues that bringing the two research programmes in contact promises to yield fruitful discussion. I consider and reject two arguments for keeping the two research programmes separate. I outline several issues (...)
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  34.  30
    Philosophical Expertise Put to the Test.Samuel Schindler & Pierre Saint-Germier - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):592-608.
    The so-called expertise defence against sceptical challenges from experimental philosophy has recently come under attack: there are several studies claiming to have found direct evidence that philosophers’ judgments in thought experiments are susceptible to erroneous effects. In this paper, we distinguish between the customary ‘immune experts’ version of the expertise defence and an ‘informed experts’ version. On the informed expertise defence, we argue, philosophers’ judgments in thought experiments could be preferable to those by the folk even if it were true (...)
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  35.  36
    The Aleph and Other Alleged Mereological Curiosities.Jeroen Smid - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):564-574.
    Standard principles of mereology, such as the transitivity and asymmetry of proper parthood, have been questioned, using various multi-location scenarios. The most famous of these is Borges’s Aleph, although the literature is rife with other examples that allegedly show that some mereological principle is at odds with some form of multi-location. However, the scenarios only support this conclusion given various bridge principles that link location to parthood. I argue that the bridge principles that guarantee the desired conclusion are controversial partly (...)
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  36.  68
    Uncoordinated Norms of Belief.Oliver Traldi - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (3):625-637.
    If it is ethically wrong to hold some beliefs, there may be a conflict between the demands of morality and the demands of rationality. A recent theory holds that no such conflict exists: any morally wrong belief is also irrational to hold, made irrational through a phenomenon of radical moral encroachment. In this paper, I argue that radical moral encroachment fails to coordinate ethical and epistemic norms, given plausible epistemological principles and various substantive accounts of which beliefs are morally wrong, (...)
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  37.  35
    Slurs, Synonymy, and Taboo.Y. Sandy Berkovski - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):423-439.
    The ‘prohibitionist’ idea that slurs have the same linguistic properties as their neutral counterparts hasn’t received much support in the literature. Here I offer a modified version of prohibitionism, according to which the taboo on using slurs is part of their conventional meaning. I conclude with explanations of the behaviour of slurs in embedded constructions.
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  38.  15
    Not Excusing Rape: Silencing, Rationality, and Blame.Anna Brinkerhoff - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):390-404.
    Anti-pornography feminists have famously argued that pornography silences women: specifically, pornography causes women to be illocutionarily disabled in some real-life sexual contexts so that they are unable to refuse sex by saying ‘no’. Call this view Silencing. Some philosophers object to Silencing because it seems to entail that, in some cases, a rapist’s blameworthiness is significantly diminished. If the woman cannot refuse sex by saying ‘no’, and this allows the man’s belief, that she consents, to be rational, then the man’s (...)
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  39. Interpolating Decisions.Jonathan Cohen & Elliott Sober - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):327-339.
    Decision theory requires agents to assign probabilities to states of the world and utilities to the possible outcomes of different actions. When agents commit to having the probabilities and/or utilities in a decision problem defined by objective features of the world, they may find themselves unable to decide which actions maximize expected utility. Decision theory has long recognized that work-around strategies are available in special cases; this is where dominance reasoning, minimax, and maximin play a role. Here we describe a (...)
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  40.  9
    Powerful Deceivers and Public Reason Liberalism: An Argument for Externalization.Sean Donahue - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):405-422.
    Public reason liberals claim that legitimate rules must be justifiable to diverse perspectives. This Public Justification Principle threatens that failing to justify rules to reprehensible agents makes those rules illegitimate. Although public reason liberals have replies to this objection, they cannot avoid the challenge of powerful deceivers. Powerful deceivers trick people who are purportedly owed public justification into considering otherwise good rules to be unjustified. Avoiding this challenge requires discounting some failures of justification, according to what caused people’s beliefs. I (...)
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  41.  28
    The Epistemology of Groups.Benjamin Elzinga - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):515-515.
    Jennifer Lackey’s manuscript covers a wide range of issues related to the epistemology of groups in a concise, unified, and persuasive manner. She provides novel accounts of group belief, justifica...
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  42. Inquiring Minds Want to Improve.Arianna Falbo - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2).
    Much of the recent work on epistemology of inquiry defends two related theses. First, inquiry into a question rationally prohibits believing an answer to that question. Second, knowledge is the aim of inquiry. I develop a series of cases which indicate that inquiry is not as narrow as these views suggest. These cases can be accommodated if we take a broader approach and understand inquiry as aiming at epistemic improvement, described more generally. This approach captures a wider range of inquiring (...)
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  43.  5
    Aristotle on Melissus on Infinity.Refik Güremen - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):455-469.
    This paper claims that the argument that Aristotle seems to ascribe to Melissus in Physics III.6 about infinity is different from Melissus’ original argument. On scrutiny, it turns out that the Aristotelian version of the argument takes Melissus to suppose that being is unlimited because it is not in contact with anything else. I claim that this is not Melissus’ notion of unlimitedness for being, and that the Aristotelian version hinges on a reversal of Melissus’ own reasoning.
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  44.  38
    Rational Norms for Degreed Intention (and the Discrepancy between Theoretical and Practical Reason).Jay Jian - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):360-374.
    Given the success of the formal approach, within contemporary epistemology, to understanding degreed belief, some philosophers have recently considered its extension to the challenge of understanding intention. According to them, (1) intentions can also admit of degrees, as beliefs do, and (2) these degreed states are all governed by the norms of the probability calculus, such that the rational norms for belief and for intention exhibit certain structural similarity. This paper, however, raises some worries about (2). It considers two schemes (...)
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  45.  63
    The Statistical Riddle of Induction.Eric Johannesson - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):313-326.
    With his new riddle of induction, Goodman raised a problem for enumerative induction which many have taken to show that only some ‘natural’ properties can be used for making inductive inferences. Arguably, however, (i) enumerative induction is not a method that scientists use for making inductive inferences in the first place. Moreover, it seems at first sight that (ii) Goodman’s problem does not affect the method that scientists actually use for making such inferences—namely, classical statistics. Taken together, this would indicate (...)
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  46. The Structure of Phenomenal Justification.Uriah Kriegel - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):282-297.
    An increasing number of epistemologists defend the notion that some perceptual experiences can immediately justify some beliefs and do so in virtue of (some of) their phenomenal properties. But this view, which we may call phenomenal dogmatism, is also the target of various objections. Here I want to consider an objection that may be put as follows: what is so special about perceptual phenomenology that only it can immediately justify beliefs, while other kinds of phenomenology—including quite similar ones—remain ‘epistemically inert’? (...)
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  47.  11
    Aristotle on Reasoning and Rational Animals.Ian C. McCready-Flora - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):470-485.
    This paper articulates and defends a novel view of the strict distinction that Aristotle makes between human and non-human mental life. We examine two crucially relevant but overlooked arguments that turn on the human capacity for reasoning and inference (syl/logismos) to reconstruct his view of what makes some cognitive processes rational and how they differ from non-rational counterparts. A creature is rational just in case its occurrent cognitive states exhibit a sequential coherence wherein prior cognitive activity constrains subsequent activity for (...)
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  48.  98
    What is the folk concept of life?Kevin Reuter & Claus Beisbart - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):486-507.
    This paper details the content and structure of the folk concept of life, and discusses its relevance for scientific research on life. In four empirical studies, we investigate which features of life are considered salient, universal, central, and necessary. Functionings, such as nutrition and reproduction, but not material composition, turn out to be salient features commonly associated with living beings (Study 1). By contrast, being made of cells is considered a universal feature of living species (Study 2), a central aspect (...)
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  49.  34
    Depression, Ataraxia, and the Pig.Léa Salje - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):251-266.
    What would happen if we succeeded in ‘turning down’ our emotional reactions? In this paper I compare two conditions that play out the answer to this question in very different ways—the lived experience of flattened affect characteristic of depression, and the idealised emotional restraint of the tranquil Epicurean ataraxic. I use this comparison to develop a new proposed source of value for the presence of emotion in our ordinary lives: it feels good to feel like oneself, and there are facts (...)
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  50.  15
    Mary Shepherd’s Essays on the Perception of an External Universe.Amy M. Schmitter - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):516-516.
    A very welcome addition to the Oxford New Histories of Philosophy, this new edition of Shepherd’s 1827 book comprises the lengthy ‘Essay on the Academical or Sceptical Philosophy’ and fourteen shor...
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  51.  19
    The Undivided Self: Aristotle and the ‘Mind-Body’ Problem.Christopher Shields - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):508-511.
    The quotation marks around ‘Mind-Body’ in the phrase ‘Mind-Body Problem’ in the title of this book already encourage its readers to reflect on the question of what precisely that problem is meant t...
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  52.  19
    Plato’s Epistemology: Being and Seeming.Rupert L. Sparling - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):511-514.
    A two-worlds view of Plato’s epistemology holds that the objects of the epistemic powers knowledge and belief cannot overlap. Whereas, an overlap view claims that they can. The two-worlds view has...
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  53. Admiration, Appreciation, and Aesthetic Worth.Daniel Whiting - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):375-389.
    What is aesthetic appreciation? In this paper, I approach this question in an indirection fashion. First, I introduce the Kantian notion of moral worthy action and an influential analysis of it. Next, I generalise that analysis from the moral to the aesthetic domain, and from actions to affects. Aesthetic appreciation, I suggest, consists in an aesthetically worthy affective response. After unpacking the proposal, I show that it has non-trivial implications while cohering with a number of existing insights concerning the nature (...)
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  54. Infinite Aggregation and Risk.Hayden Wilkinson - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (2):340-359.
    For aggregative theories of moral value, it is a challenge to rank worlds that each contain infinitely many valuable events. And, although there are several existing proposals for doing so, few provide a cardinal measure of each world's value. This raises the even greater challenge of ranking lotteries over such worlds—without a cardinal value for each world, we cannot apply expected value theory. How then can we compare such lotteries? To date, we have just one method for doing so (proposed (...)
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  55.  8
    Getting Our Act Together: A Theory of Collective Moral Obligations: Schwenkenbecher, Anne, New York: Routledge, 2021, pp. xiii + 174, US$160 (hb). [REVIEW]Maike Albertzart - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):240-243.
    Anne Schwenkenbecher’s Getting Our Act Together offers an in-depth and timely account of how our ability to act jointly can create so-called joint moral duties. Getting Our Act Together not only co...
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  56.  27
    Locke on Persons and Personal Identity.Margaret Atherton - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):247-247.
    Ruth Boeker’s Locke on Persons and Personal Identity is a tightly argued and illuminating account, containing much to ponder. The presence of both terms, ‘persons’ and ‘personal identity’, in the t...
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  57.  44
    Epistemic Justification: Probability, Normalcy, and the Functional Theory.Marvin Backes - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):65-81.
    This paper puts forward a novel pluralist theory of epistemic justification that brings together two competing views in the literature—probabilistic and non-probabilistic accounts of justification. The first part of the paper motivates the new theory by arguing that neither probabilistic nor non-probabilistic accounts alone are wholly satisfactory. The second part puts forward what I call the Functional Theory of Justification. The key merit of the new theory is that it combines the most attractive features of both probabilistic and non-probabilistic accounts (...)
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  58. Being Me Being You: Adam Smith & Empathy. [REVIEW]Nir Ben-Moshe - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):243-246.
    Samuel Fleischacker’s Being Me Being You: Adam Smith & Empathy offers a new interpretation of Adam Smith’s conception of empathy—or ‘sympathy’, as Smith referred to the phenomenon in The Theory of...
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  59.  21
    Fifty Shades of Affective Colouring of Perception.Frederique de Vignemont - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):1-15.
    Recent evidence in cognitive neuroscience indicates that the visual system is influenced by the outcome of an early appraisal mechanism that automatically evaluates what is seen as being harmful or beneficial for the organism. This indicates that there could be valence in perception. But what could it mean for one to see something positively or negatively? Although most theories of emotions accept that valence involves being related to values, the nature of this relation remains highly debated. Some explain valence in (...)
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  60. Maybe Some Other Time.Martin Glazier - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):197-212.
    I develop a puzzle, the resolution of which, I argue, requires an unfamiliar distinction between two forms or senses of metaphysical modality, each bearing a different relationship to time. In one sense of ‘metaphysically possible’, it is metaphysically possible for it to be a time other than the time it is now; in another sense, this is not metaphysically possible.
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  61.  71
    Humean Idealism.Daniel Kodaj - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):34-50.
    I outline a version of idealism that borrows from Humean Supervenience. The resulting theory is immune to what is often considered to be the most powerful anti-idealist argument, the gist of which is that the idealist can’t supply truthmakers (or an adequate supervenience base) for commonly accepted truths about the physical world. That charge has no purchase on Humean idealism.
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  62. Closing the Case on Self-Fulfilling Beliefs.Chad Marxen - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):1-14.
    Two principles in epistemology are apparent examples of the close connection between rationality and truth. First, adding a disjunct to what it is rational to believe yields a proposition that’s also rational to believe. Second, what’s likely if believed is rational to believe. While these principles are accepted by many, it turns out that they clash. In light of this clash, we must relinquish the second principle. Reflecting on its rationale, though, reveals that there are two distinct ways to understand (...)
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  63. Tolerating Sense Variation.Eliot Michaelson & Mark Textor - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):182-196.
    Frege famously claimed that variations in the sense of a proper name can sometimes be ‘tolerated’. In this paper, we offer a novel explanation of this puzzling claim. Frege, we argue, follows Trendelenburg in holding that we think in language—sometimes individually and sometimes together. Variations in sense can be tolerated in just those cases where we are using language to coordinate our actions but are not engaged in thinking together about an issue.
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  64.  19
    Graham Charles Nerlich (23 November 1929 – 31 March 2022).Chris Mortensen & Antony Eagle - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):249-250.
    Graham Nerlich studied philosophy and English literature at the University of Adelaide, gaining a BA (with joint Honours) in 1954 and an MA (1955). These were halcyon days for philosophy in Adelaid...
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  65.  25
    The Weight of the Past.George Sher - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):152-164.
    ABSTRACT The question that this paper seeks to answer is that of whether the resistance to change that characterizes the conservative temperament has any rational basis. More precisely, my question is whether we have good grounds for accepting any version of the principle that if something exists then we need a reason to change it but don’t need a reason to keep it. The paper defends a version of this principle whose scope is restricted to familiar traditions and customs on (...)
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  66.  78
    Being Rational Enough: Maximizing, Satisficing, and Degrees of Rationality.Robert Weston Siscoe - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):111-127.
    ABSTRACT Against the maximizing conception of practical rationality, Michael Slote has argued that rationality does not always require choosing what is most rational. Instead, it can sometimes be rational to do something that is less-than-fully rational. In this paper, I will argue that maximizers have a ready response to Slote’s position. Roy Sorensen has argued that ‘rational’ is an absolute term, suggesting that it is not possible to be rational without being completely rational. Sorensen’s view is confirmed by the fact (...)
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  67. Edenic Idealism.Robert Smithson - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):16-33.
    ABSTRACT According to edenic idealism, our ordinary object terms refer to items in the manifest world—the world of primitive objects and properties presented in experience. I motivate edenic idealism as a response to scenarios where it is difficult to match the objects in experience with corresponding items in the external world. I argue that edenic idealism has important semantic advantages over realism: it is the most intuitive view of what we are actually talking about when we use terms for objects.
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  68.  13
    Evaluative and Metalinguistic Dispute.Andrés Soria-Ruiz - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):165-181.
    ABSTRACT Recently, the hypothesis that purely evaluative disputes are metalinguistic negotiations has gained traction. I resist a strong version of that hypothesis, and argue that some of those disputes are not metalinguistic negotiations. To defend that claim, I argue that metalinguistic negotiations have three linguistic properties that some purely evaluative disputes lack. First, in a metalinguistic negotiation it is felicitous to embed the dispute-initial statement under the subjective attitude verb consider; second, a speaker can reply to that initial statement by (...)
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  69. Can It Be Irrational to Knowingly Choose the Best?Jack Spencer - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):128-139.
    Seeking a decision theory that can handle both the Newcomb problems that challenge evidential decision theory and the unstable problems that challenge causal decision theory, some philosophers recently have turned to ‘graded ratifiability’. However, the graded ratifiability approach to decision theory is, despite its virtues, unsatisfactory; for it conflicts with the platitude that it is always rationally permissible for an agent to knowingly choose their best option.
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  70. Average Utilitarianism Implies Solipsistic Egoism.Christian J. Tarsney - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):140-151.
    ABSTRACT Average utilitarianism and several related axiologies, when paired with the standard expectational theory of decision-making under risk and with reasonable empirical credences, can find their practical prescriptions overwhelmingly determined by the minuscule probability that the agent assigns to solipsism—that is, to the hypothesis that there is only one welfare subject in the world, namely, herself. This either (i) constitutes a reductio of these axiologies, (ii) suggests that they require bespoke decision theories, or (iii) furnishes an unexpected argument for ethical (...)
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  71.  39
    The Shape of Agency: Control, Action, Skill, Knowledge.Markos Valaris - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):248-248.
    Considered from a specific perspective, the world is full actions and agents: a star explodes, grass grows, a spider spins its web, a cat stalks a bird, Fred butters a piece of toast, Mary plays a...
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  72.  16
    Deflating the Success-Truth Connection.Chase Wrenn - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 101 (1):96-110.
    ABSTRACT According to a prominent objection, deflationist theories of truth can’t account for the explanatory connection between true belief and successful action [Putnam 1978]. Canonical responses to the objection show how to reformulate truth-involving explanations of particular successful actions, so as to omit any mention of truth [Horwich 1998]. According to recent critics, though, the canonical strategy misses the point. The deflated paraphrases lack the generality or explanatory robustness of the original explanatory appeals to truth [Kitcher 2002; Lynch 2009; Gamester (...)
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  73.  27
    Metaphysical Emergence, Jessica Wilson. [REVIEW]Elanor Taylor - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 1 (3):767-771.
    Many scientists and philosophers claim that some phenomena are emergent, including consciousness, free will, entanglement, ordinary objects, and spacetime. But beyond the rough idea that emergent f...
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  74. When to Psychologize.A. K. Flowerree - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy (4):968-982.
    The central focus of this paper is to motivate and explore the question, when is it permissible to endorse a psychologizing explanation of a sincere interlocutor? I am interested in the moral question of when (if ever) we may permissibly dismiss the sincere reasons given to us by others, and instead endorse an alternative explanation of their beliefs and actions. I argue that there is a significant risk of wronging the other person, and so we should only psychologize when we (...)
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  75. A Case Against Simple-Mindedness: Śrīgupta on Mental Mereology.Allison Aitken - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    There’s a common line of reasoning which supposes that the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is grounded in a mind-like simple subject. To the contrary, Mādhyamika Buddhist philosophers like Śrīgupta (seventh–eighth century) argue that any kind of mental simple is incoherent and thus metaphysically impossible. Lacking any unifying principle, the phenomenal unity of conscious experience is instead an unfounded illusion. In this paper, I present an analysis of Śrīgupta’s "neither-one-nor-many argument" against mental simples and show how his line of reasoning (...)
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  76. Becoming a Statue.Justin Mooney - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    ABSTRACT One simple but relatively neglected solution to the notorious coincidence puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay claims that the property of being a statue is a phase sortal property that the piece of clay instantiates temporarily. I defend this view against some standard objections, by reinforcing it with a novel counterpart-theoretic account of identity under a sortal. This proposal does not require colocation, four-dimensionalism, eliminativism, deflationism, or unorthodox theses about classical identity.
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  77. On Scepticism About Ought Simpliciter.James L. D. Brown - 2023 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy.
    Scepticism about ought simpliciter is the view that there is no such thing as what one ought simpliciter to do. Instead, practical deliberation is governed by a plurality of normative standpoints, each authoritative from their own perspective but none authoritative simpliciter. This paper aims to resist such scepticism. After setting out the challenge in general terms, I argue that scepticism can be resisted by rejecting a key assumption in the sceptic’s argument. This is the assumption that standpoint-relative ought judgments bring (...)
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