Pacific Philosophical Quarterly

ISSNs: 0279-0750, 1468-0114

19 found

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  1.  7
    Vagueness, Conditionals and Context Sensitivity.Tom Beevers - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (3):354-369.
    I argue that practically all vague language is context sensitive in a covert and unfamiliar way. I first outline a novel puzzle concerning the interaction of conditionals and vagueness. I then argue that the best way of resolving the puzzle is by positing context‐sensitive penumbral connections between sundry parts of language. I argue that these penumbral connections shift through a distinct form of Lewisian accommodation. The upshot is that meaning is a far shiftier thing than has typically been thought.
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  2. Indirect Defenses of Speciesism Make No Sense.François Jaquet - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (3):308-327.
    Animal ethicists often distinguish between direct and indirect defenses of speciesism, where the former appeal to species membership and the latter invoke other features that are simply associated with it. The main extant charge against indirect defenses rests on the empirical claim that any feature other than membership in our species is either absent in some humans or present in some nonhumans. This paper challenges indirect defenses with a new argument, which presupposes no such empirical claim. Instead, the argument from (...)
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  3.  18
    True Love Is Reciprocal: Thomas Aquinas on the Love of Friendship.James Kintz - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (3):328-353.
    One of the most important topics that Thomas Aquinas discusses in his extensive corpus is the love of friendship, which is a unique form of love aimed at persons. Yet Aquinas's teachings on this are perplexing, for he claims that this love always produces union between lover and beloved, and that it is always a mutual love. This implies that one's love depends on reciprocation from the beloved, which seems implausible given the possibility of phenomena such as unrequited love. A (...)
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  4. The Egalitarian Objection to Coercion.Adam Lovett - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (3):392-417.
    I develop an egalitarian account of what's objectionable about coercion. The account is rooted in the idea that certain relationships, like those of master to slave or lord to peasant, are relationships of subordination or domination. These relationships are morally objectionable. Such relationships are in part constituted by asymmetries of power. A master subordinates a slave because the master has more power over the slave than vice versa. Coercion is objectionable, I argue, because it creates such asymmetries of power and (...)
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  5.  42
    Impossible Ethics: Do Population Ethical Impossibility Results Support Moral Skepticism and/or Anti‐Realism?Victor Moberger - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (3):370-391.
    In this paper, I discuss two different metaethical challenges based on population ethical impossibility results. According to the anti‐realist challenge, the results pose a serious threat to the existence of objective moral facts. According to the skeptical challenge, the results pose a serious threat to the reliability of our moral intuitions. My aim is to systematically explore and evaluate these challenges. In addition to clarifying the issues, I argue that population ethical impossibility results do not in fact support any anti‐realist (...)
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  6.  67
    Impossible Ethics: Do Population Ethical Impossibility Results Support Moral Skepticism and/or Anti-Realism?Victor Moberger - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (3):370-391.
    In this paper, I discuss two different metaethical challenges based on population ethical impossibility results. According to the anti-realist challenge, the results pose a serious threat to the existence of objective moral facts. According to the skeptical challenge, the results pose a serious threat to the reliability of our moral intuitions. My aim is to systematically explore and evaluate these challenges. In addition to clarifying the issues, I argue that population ethical impossibility results do not in fact support any anti-realist (...)
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  7.  38
    Deciding Under a Description.Matthew Heeney - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (2):191-209.
    I issue a challenge for the view that deciding‐to‐A is rendered intentional by an intention or other pro‐attitude towards deciding. Either such an attitude cannot rationalize my deciding specifically to A for a reason I take to support doing A, or, fixing for this, cannot accommodate deciding without entertaining alternatives. If successful, the argument motivates the search for an account that does not source the intentionality of deciding in a rationalizing pro‐attitude.
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  8. Kierkegaard on the Relationship Between Practical and Epistemic Reasons for Belief.Z. Quanbeck - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (2):233-266.
    On the dominant contemporary accounts of how practical considerations affect what we ought to believe, practical considerations either encroach on epistemic rationality by affecting whether a belief is epistemically justified, or constitute distinctively practical reasons for belief which can only affect what we ought to believe by conflicting with epistemic rationality. This paper argues that Søren Kierkegaard offers a promising alternative view on which practical considerations can affect what we ought to believe without either encroaching on or (necessarily) conflicting with (...)
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  9.  49
    Social Change, Solidarity, and Mass Agency.Kevin Richardson - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (2):210-232.
    Critics of social injustice argue that the agent of transformative social change will (or should) be a mass agent; namely, an agent that is large, complex, and geographically dispersed. Traditional theories of collective agency emphasize the presence of shared intentions and common knowledge, but mass agents are too large for such cohesion. To make sense of mass agency, I suggest a new approach. On the solidarity theory of mass agency, a mass agent is composed of (a) organizers who intend to (...)
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  10.  30
    Socrates' Final Argument in Apology.Mark Robert Taylor - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (2):291-305.
    Socrates provides an argument at the end of the Apology that he believes gives hope that death is a blessing. This argument, grounded on the claim that death is one of two things, has been the subject of much derision and some recent defense. In this essay, I build on the work of other sympathetic commentators to show that Socrates' argument, when taken in context, not only makes good sense, but unifies Socrates' speech into a cohesive exhortation toward virtue.
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  11. A Regularity Theory of Causation.Holger Andreas & Mario Günther - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1):2-32.
    In this paper, we propose a regularity theory of causation. The theory aims to be reductive and to align with our pre‐theoretic understanding of the causal relation. We show that our theory can account for a wide range of causal scenarios, including isomorphic scenarios, omissions, and scenarios which suggest that causation is not transitive.
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  12. Counterfactual Decision Theory Is Causal Decision Theory.J. Dmitri Gallow - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1):115-156.
    The role of causation and counterfactuals in causal decision theory is vexed and disputed. Recently, Brian Hedden (2023) argues that we should abandon causal decision theory in favour of an alternative: counterfactual decision theory. I argue that, pace Hedden, counterfactual decision theory is not a competitor to, but rather a version of, causal decision theory – the most popular version by far. I provide textual evidence that the founding fathers of causal decision theory (Stalnaker, Gibbard, Harper, Lewis, Skyrms, Sobel, and (...)
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  13. Does Pornography Presuppose Rape Myths?Richard Kimberly Heck - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1):50-74.
    Rae Langton and Caroline West argue that pornography silences women by presupposing misogynistic attitudes, such as that women enjoy being raped. More precisely, they claim that a somewhat infamous pictorial, ‘Dirty Pool’, makes such presuppositions, and that it is typical in this respect. I argue for four claims. (1) There are empirical reasons to doubt that women are silenced in the way that Langton and West claim they are. (2) There is no evidence that very much pornography makes the sorts (...)
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  14.  30
    The Responses That Matter.Sebastian Köhler - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1):33-49.
    We are all familiar with judgements about the persistence of people. Furthermore, we tend to structure certain attitudes and practices around such judgements because we think that personal identity matters for the relevant practical concerns. Response‐dependence views try to accommodate that personal identity matters by letting relevant attitudes and practices determine the personal identity relation for a particular person. This paper argues that genuine response‐dependence views are not well positioned to accommodate the connection between personal identity and what matters. Rather, (...)
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  15. The Matter of Coincidence.Justin Mooney - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1):98-114.
    The phasalist solution to the puzzle of the statue and the piece of clay claims that being a statue is a phase sortal property of the piece of clay, just like being a child is a phase sortal property of a human being. Some philosophers reject this solution because it cannot account for cases where the statue seems to gain and lose parts that the piece of clay does not. I rebut this objection by arguing, contrary to the prevailing view, (...)
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  16.  57
    The Utilitarian's Guide to Dreams.Adam Piovarchy - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 105 (1):75-97.
    Unpleasant dreams occur much more frequently than many people realise. If one is a hedonistic utilitarian – or, at least, one thinks that dreams have positive or negative moral value in virtue of their experiential quality – then one has considerable reason to try to make such dreams more positive. Given it is possible to improve the quality of our dreams, we ought to be promoting and implementing currently available interventions that improve our dream experiences, and conducting research to find (...)
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  17.  9
    ‘Ordered and Placed in a Certain Form’: Kant on the Spatiality of Sensation.Tim Jankowiak - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (3):418-446.
    Kant claims repeatedly that experience involves sensations being ‘ordered and placed’ in space. This paper considers what this surprising claim could possibly mean. After presenting the relevant textual evidence and rejecting two candidate interpretations of it, I defend a qualia or ‘mental paint’ interpretation, according to which experience involves a direct, conscious ‘acquaintance’ with sensations arrayed in a ‘phenomenal space.’ This interpretation allows us to take literally many of Kant's claims about sensation: that it is the matter of both intuition (...)
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  18.  87
    Epistemic conflicts and the form of epistemic rules.Aleks Knoks - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (2):158-190.
    While such epistemic rules as 'If you perceive that X, you ought to believe that X' and 'If you have outstanding testimony that X, you ought to believe that X' seem to be getting at important truths, it is easy to think of cases in which they come into conflict. To avoid classifying such cases as dilemmas, one can hold either that epistemic rules have built-in unless-clauses listing the circumstances under which they don't apply, or, alternatively, that epistemic rules are (...)
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  19. Defending the Doctrine of the Mean Against Counterexamples: A General Strategy.Nicholas Colgrove - 2024 - Pacific Philosophical Quarterly (Online First):1-24.
    Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean states that each moral virtue stands opposed to two types of vice: one of excess and one of deficiency, respectively. Critics claim that some virtues—like honesty, fair-mindedness, and patience—are counterexamples to Aristotle’s doctrine. Here, I develop a generalizable strategy to defend the doctrine of the mean against such counterexamples. I argue that not only is the doctrine of the mean defensible, but taking it seriously also allows us to gain substantial insight into particular virtues. Failure (...)
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