Philosophers' Imprint

ISSN: 1533-628X

24 found

View year:

  1.  70
    Emotional Experience and the Senses.Lorenza D'Angelo - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (20).
    This paper investigates the nature of emotional experience in relation to the senses, and it defends the thesis that emotional experience is partly non-sensory. In §1 I introduce my reader to the debate. I reconstruct a position I call ‘restrictivism’ and motivate it as part of a reductive approach to mind’s place in nature. Drawing on intuitive but insightful remarks on the nature of sensation from Plato, I map out the conditions under which the restrictivist thesis is both substantive and (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  2. Aristotle on Intelligent Perception.Marc Gasser-Wingate - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (17):1-22.
    Aristotle presents perception as a potentially intelligent form of cognition—a form of cognition that allows us to respond in discerning, knowing ways to a range of different situations, and develop certain theoretical insights relevant to some inquiry. But it’s not clear how we should understand the interaction between our rational and perceptual powers in these cases, or how widespread we should take their interaction to be. In this paper I argue against interpretations on which human perception would be an inherently (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  3. Outrage and the Bounds of Empathy.Sukaina Hirji - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (16).
    Often, when we are angry, we are angry at someone who has hurt us, and our anger is a protest against our perceived mistreatment. In these cases, its function is to hold the abuser accountable for their offense. The anger involves a demand for some sort of change or response: that the hurt be acknowledged, that the relationship be repaired, that the offending party reform in some way. In this paper, I develop and defend an account of a different form (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  4. Taking the Straight Path. P.F. Strawson's Later Work on Freedom and Responsibility.Benjamin De Mesel - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (12):1-17.
    I highlight three features of P.F. Strawson’s later, neglected work on freedom and responsibility. First, in response to a criticism by Rajendra Prasad, Strawson explicitly rejects an argument put forward in ‘Freedom and Resentment’ against the relevance of determinism to moral responsibility. Second, his remarkable acceptance of Prasad’s criticism motivates him to take the ‘straight path’, that is, to be straightforward about the relation between determinism, freedom, the ability to do otherwise and the conditions of responsibility. He claims that the (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  5. In Defence of Hybrid Contingentism.Lukas Skiba - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (4):1-30.
    Hybrid contingentism combines first-order contingentism, the view that it is contingent what individuals there are, with higher-order necessitism, the view that it is non-contingent what properties and propositions there are (where these are conceived as entities in the range of appropriate higher-order quantifiers). This combination of views avoids the most delicate problems afflicting alternative contingentist positions while preserving the central contingentist claim that ordinary, concrete entities exist contingently. Despite these attractive features, hybrid contingentism is usually faced with rejection. The main (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   3 citations  
  6. Gravity and Grace.Gordon Belot - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (1).
    This paper revisits the bearing of underdetermination arguments on scientific realism. First it argues that underdetermination considerations provide good reason to doubt that science is objective in the strong sense that anyone following the its methods will be led closer and closer to the truth about any given question within the purview of those methods, as more relevant data are considered. Then it argues that scientific realism is difficult to maintain in the absence of this sort of objectivity.
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  7.  17
    Stupefying.Michael Deigan - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (1).
    Assertions are often accepted without being understood, a phenomenon I call stupefying. I argue that stupefying can be a means for conversational manipulation that works through at-issue content, in contrast with the not-at-issue and back-door speech act routes identified by others. This shows that we should reject a widely assumed connection between attention and at-issue content. In exploring why stupefying happens, it also emerges that stupefying has important cooperative uses, in addition to its manipulative ones, and so should not be (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  8. Thinking, Guessing, and Believing.Ben Holguin - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (1):1-34.
    This paper defends the view, put roughly, that to think that p is to guess that p is the answer to the question at hand, and that to think that p rationally is for one’s guess to that question to be in a certain sense non-arbitrary. Some theses that will be argued for along the way include: that thinking is question-sensitive and, correspondingly, that ‘thinks’ is context-sensitive; that it can be rational to think that p while having arbitrarily low credence (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  9.  24
    The Fragmentation of Felt Time.Carla Merino-Rajme - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (1).
    Why does time seem to fly by when we are absorbed? The case of listening to music is of particular interest, given that listening to music itself requires experiencing time. In this paper, I argue that neither the prevailing psychological model nor some initially appealing alternative explanations can account for the experience of time flying by in cases where, like listening to music, the activity we are absorbed in itself requires experiencing time. I then put forward a novel view on (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10.  34
    Kant on Decomposing Synthesis and the Intuition of Infinite Space.Tobias Rosefeldt - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22 (1).
    In the Transcendental Aesthetic of the Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant famously claims that we have an a priori intuition of space as an ‘infinite given magnitude’. Later on, in the Transcendental Analytic, he seems to add that the intuition of space presupposes a synthetic activity of the transcendental imagination. Several authors have recently pointed out that these two claims taken together give rise to two problems. First, it is unclear how the transcendental imagination of a finite mind could (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   2 citations  
  11. Desire.Kyle Blumberg & John Hawthorne - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    In this paper, we present two puzzles involving desire reports concerning series of events. What does a person want to happen in the first event – is it the event with the highest expected return, or the event that is the initial part of the best series? We show that existing approaches fail to resolve the puzzles around this question and develop a novel account of our own. Our semantics is built around three ideas. First, we propose that desire ascriptions (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  12.  23
    Darwin's Causal Argument Against Creationism.Hayley Clatterbuck - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    In the Origin, Darwin forwards two incompatible lines of attack on special creationism. First, he argues that imperfect or functionless traits are evidence against design. Second, he argues that since special creationism can be made compatible with any observation, it is unscientific and explanatorily vacuous. In later works, Darwin shifts to an argument that he finds much more persuasive and which would undermine theistic evolutionism as well. He argues that variation is random with respect to selection and that this demonstrates (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  13. The Problem of Intuitive Presence.Miguel Egler - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    The historically-influential perceptual analogy states that intuitions and perceptual experiences are alike in many important respects. Phenomenalists defend a particular reading of this analogy according to which intuitions and perceptual experiences share a common phenomenal character. The phenomenalist thesis has proven highly influential in recent years. However, insufficient attention has been given to the challenges that the phenomenalist thesis raises for theories of intuitions. In this paper, I first develop one such challenge. I argue that if we take seriously the (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  14.  13
    The Logic of Misandrogyny.Jeff M. Engelhardt - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    This paper develops an account of misandrogyny that is modeled on Kate Manne's account of misogyny. On Manne's view, misogyny is a system of mechanisms that together police and enforce the gendered hierarchy of a patriarchal order. On the account developed here, misandrogyny is a system of mechanisms that together police and enforce the gender binary of a patriarchal order. The gender binary is constituted by norms that preclude the existence of persons who aren't consistently 'read' either as a man (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  15.  35
    Does Compositionality Entail Complexity?John Adorno Keller - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    Propositions are (generally taken to be) the semantic values of declarative sentences in context. There is a long history of thinking that an important reason for taking propositions to be structured stems from the fact that the semantic values of such sentences are (typically) compositionally determined. In this paper, I argue that compositionality does not entail, nor provide good evidence for, the claim that propositions are structured. I go on to argue that there is no additional feature of declarative sentences—for (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  16. The Musicality of Speech.James H. P. Lewis - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    It is common for people to be sensitive to aesthetic qualities in one another’s speech. We allow the loveliness or unloveliness of a person’s voice to make impressions on us. What is more, it is also common to allow those aesthetic impressions to affect how we are inclined to feel about the speaker. We form attitudes of liking, trusting, disliking or distrusting partly in virtue of the aesthetic qualities of a person’s speech. In this paper I ask whether such attitudes (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  17. Assertion is weak.Matthew Mandelkern & Kevin Dorst - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    Recent work has argued that belief is weak: the level of rational credence required for belief is relatively low. That literature has contrasted belief with assertion, arguing that the latter requires an epistemic state much stronger than (weak) belief---perhaps knowledge or even certainty. We argue that this is wrong: assertion is just as weak as belief. We first present a variety of new arguments for this, and then show that the standard arguments for stronger norms are not convincing. Finally, we (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   7 citations  
  18. Essentialist Non-Reductivism.Taylor-Grey Edward Miller - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    According to many contemporary metaphysicians, we ought to theorize in terms of grounding because of its promise to explicate the idea of reality having a layered structure. However, a tension emerges when one combines the layered structure view with the view that higher-level facts are not reducible to lower-level facts. This tension emerges from two problems. The first problem arises from the fact that grounding explanations entail true universal generalizations. In order to satisfy this constraint, we will face serious pressure (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  19.  9
    Idealizations and ideal policing.Jake Monaghan - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    Political philosophy often focuses on “major institutions” that make up the “basic structure” of society. These include political, economic, and social institutions. In this paper I argue first that policing plays a substantial role in generating the kinds of inequalities and problems that are concerns of social or structural justice, and therefore that police agencies qualify as a major institution. When we abandon full compliance or similar idealizations, it is clear that policing is not a concern secondary to, e.g., the (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  20. Remembering objects.James Openshaw - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22:1–20.
    Conscious recollection, of the kind characterised by sensory mental imagery, is often thought to involve ‘episodically’ recalling experienced events in one’s personal past. One might wonder whether this overlooks distinctive ways in which we sometimes recall ordinary, persisting objects. Of course, one can recall an object by remembering an event in which one encountered it. But are there acts of recall which are distinctively objectual in that they are not about objects in this mediated way (i.e., by way of being (...)
    Direct download (7 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  21.  15
    Old Bad Attitudes.Robert Pasnau - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    The systematic study of male misogyny began with Christine de Pizan at the start of the fifteenth century. Although her work has generally been neglected within the history of philosophy, her ideas illuminate many questions of pressing current philosophical concern, including the nature of epistemic injustice, the prospects for an individualistic methodology in social theory, and the epistemology of disagreement.
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  22. Two paradoxes of bounded rationality.David Thorstad - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    My aim in this paper is to develop a unified solution to two paradoxes of bounded rationality. The first is the regress problem that incorporating cognitive bounds into models of rational decisionmaking generates a regress of higher-order decision problems. The second is the problem of rational irrationality: it sometimes seems rational for bounded agents to act irrationally on the basis of rational deliberation. I review two strategies which have been brought to bear on these problems: the way of weakening which (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   1 citation  
  23.  20
    Embedded Epistemic Instrumentalism: An Account of Epistemic Normativity.James Bernard Willoughby - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 22.
    We are bombarded with epistemic norms. Respect your evidence. Don’t believe in contradictions. Don’t arbitrarily change beliefs. But how do such norms get their normative force? Why should we respect our evidence, for example? In this paper I offer a familiar type of answer, epistemic instrumentalism. Epistemic instrumentalism holds that epistemic norms get their normative force by being useful. You should respect your evidence because it will help you achieve some valuable ends. This answer, while familiar, is not very popular. (...)
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  24. Trouble on the Horizon for Presentism.Sam Baron & Baptiste Le Bihan - 2022 - Philosophers' Imprint 1.
    Surface presentism is the combination of a general relativistic physics with a presentist metaphysics. In this paper, we provide an argument against this combination based on black holes. The problem focuses on the notion of an event horizon. We argue that the present locations of event horizons are ontologically dependent on future black hole regions, and that this dependence is incompatible with presentism. We consider five responses to the problem available to the surface presentist, and argue that none succeed. Surface (...)
    Direct download (5 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
 Previous issues
  
Next issues