Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

ISSNs: 0066-7374, 1467-9264

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  1.  25
    IX—Unmistaken: Imaginative Perception and Illusion.Adrian J. T. Alsmith - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (3):205-228.
    Sometimes what we perceive appears other than it is. The term ‘illusion’ is often used to capture the broad variety of cases in which this occurs. But some of these cases are better described as cases of imaginative perception—cases in which what we perceive appears as we imagine it to be. I argue that imaginative perception is to be sharply contrasted with illusions variously conceived as cases of misleading appearance and cases of perceptual error. By removing the blanket term ‘illusion’ (...)
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  2.  24
    Hard Choices and Ultimate Ends.Annalisa Costella - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (3):371-382.
    I propose a novel view on hard choices. It broadens the concept to include not only ‘classic’ hard choices but also transformative and aspirational choices. I argue that a choice is hard when an individual does not have an all-things-considered reason to choose one option over another and the objects of choice are ultimate ends. Construing hard choices in this way supports and explains the widely held assumption that, when faced with hard choices, it is impermissible to choose arbitrarily. More (...)
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  3.  92
    Love’s Curiosity.Daniela Dover - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (3):323-348.
    Love naturally gives rise to cravings for epistemic security. At the same time, since human beings are responsive to our interpretations of them, our desire that they be knowable risks becoming oppressively self-fulfilling. I argue that ‘erotic curiosity’—understood not as a desire for stable knowledge but rather as a desire to engage in an indefinitely prolonged inquisitive activity—is central to a certain kind of love.
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  4.  36
    XIII—Reclaiming the Idea of ‘the Human’.Michele M. Moody-Adams - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (3):277-298.
    Progressive social movements correctly presume that justice demands treating people with humane regard: combining respect for human agency with concern for human vulnerability to suffering. Promoting humane regard is a critical means of acknowledging the moral claims of humanity. Some critics reject the underlying concept of a universal humanity, in virtue of which human beings form a distinct community of reciprocal moral obligation. Critics charge that the concept presumes indefensible dualisms (of mind and body, and humanity and nature); that it (...)
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  5. Rationalizing Inquiry and Historical Understanding.Lilian O’Brien - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (3):349-370.
    In ‘The Epistemic Goals of the Humanities’, Stephen Grimm (2024) argues for epistemic continuities between the humanities, on one hand, and the social and natural sciences, on the other. This paper focuses on discontinuities. Drawing inspiration from Svetlana Alexievich’s literary non-fiction, I argue that if a reader is to gain a specific kind of understanding of the actions of the agents who appear in such work, they must engage in a rational evaluation of those agents’ reasons and actions. This epistemic (...)
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  6.  16
    X—Synthetic Philosophy: A Restatement1.Eric Schliesser - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (3):229-252.
    The guiding thread of the paper is the diagnosis that the advanced division of cognitive labour (that is, intellectual specialization) engenders a set of perennial, political and epistemic challenges (Millgram 2015) that, simultaneously, also generate opportunities for philosophy. In this paper, I re-characterize the nature of synthetic philosophy as a means to advance and institutionalize philosophy. In §i, I treat Plato’s Republic as offering two models to represent philosophy’s relationship to the other sciences within the advanced division of labour. I (...)
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  7.  43
    XIV—Existence ‘in’ the Mind.Umrao Sethi - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (3):299-322.
    We often speak of an entity existing only in the mind, but what exactly do we mean when we speak this way? In this paper, I look at different accounts of what it is for something to exist in the mind. I argue that none of these accounts do justice to a specific set of cases involving sensory phenomena like after-images, phosphenes and hallucinations. When a subject experiences a green after-image, we may say that the greenness that the subject sees (...)
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  8.  16
    XII—The Ethical Problem of Evil.Daniel Watts - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (3):253-276.
    I introduce a distinct challenge to religious belief: the Ethical Argument from evil. By this argument, paradigmatic forms of religious practice constitutively involve failures of ethical acknowledgement with respect to the reality of evil. I show how standard discussions of the problem of evil, as a purely logical or epistemic issue, abstract away from its fundamentally ethical dimensions. Drawing on an analogy with Moore’s paradox, I argue that the Ethical Argument presents a genuine theoretical problem, not merely a practical or (...)
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  9.  27
    On the Function of Advanced Modalizing.Cansu Yüksel - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (3):383-393.
    The Lewisian account of modality based on counterpart theory suffers from the problems of advanced modalizing, where claims about spatiotemporally disunified entities are modalized. In this paper, I first discuss a strategy to bypass the problem, one which treats cases of advanced modalizing as cases of equivocation lying outside the scope of the translation. I then argue that the strategy does not satisfactorily generalize to the case of advanced modal claims involving abstract entities. This failure not only reveals the limitations (...)
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  10.  43
    Unity Without Truth? Contra Trueman’s Immodest Identity Theory.Julian Dodd - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (2):197-204.
    Robert Trueman (2022) sets out and defends an ‘immodest’ identity theory of truth: that is, an identity theory in which the facts with which true propositions are identical are things whose totality is the world: i.e. obtaining states of affairs. This brief reply argues that Truman’s theory falls foul of a perennial objection to such immodest identity theories: namely, that it cannot explain how a candidate proposition’s putative elements can be unified into a proposition proper without this proposition being true.
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  11. The Relevance of Belief Outsourcing to Whether Arguments Can Change Minds.Scott Hill - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (2):191-196.
    There is a wealth of evidence which indicates that arguments are not very efficient tools for changing minds. Against this scepticism, Dutilh Novaes (2023) presents evidence that, given the right social context, arguments sometimes play a significant role in belief revision. However, drawing on Levy (2021), I argue that the evidence Dutilh Novaes cites is compatible with the view that it is not arguments that change individual minds but instead belief outsourcing that occurs alongside the consideration of arguments.
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  12.  54
    VIII—Situational Dependence and Blame’s Arrow.Jessica Isserow - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (2):167-190.
    A looming deadline. A difficult situation at home. A heated phone conversation that redirects our attention. Certain features of our circumstances can be (at least partially) excusing; sometimes, agents who act wrongly in the face of circumstantial pressures are not (that) blameworthy for having done so. But we’re rather bad at detecting these factors that excuse others from blame. When put together, these two observations yield an under-appreciated problem: we fall short of procedural norms of blame in fairly systematic ways.
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  13.  34
    VII—The Straight-edge of Virtue: Aristotle on the Rational Significance of Beauty-in-Action.Gabriel Richardson Lear - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (2):139-165.
    Aristotle claims that the virtuous person acts for the sake of to kalon. To understand this idea, I examine the analogy he draws between craft and virtue. I argue that the kalon is a formal feature of well-ordered wholeness and that the virtuous person takes intellectual pleasure in perceiving (or remembering or imagining) the kalon-in-action, akin to pleasure in observing artworks or works of nature. However, the virtuous person’s pleasure in kalon action is primarily a pleasure of practical reason. In (...)
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  14.  54
    VI—Four Grades of Modal Naturalism.Alastair Wilson - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (2):115-137.
    How, if at all, can scientific progress improve our view of the modal facts? According to rationalist approaches to modal epistemology, science has no substantive role: a priori reflection reveals the structure of modal space, and a posteriori science merely locates us within that modal space, by identifying the actual properties and structures instantiated at our world. According to modal naturalist approaches, science provides evidence about the structure of the underlying modal space. In this paper I distinguish four versions of (...)
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  15. Emotionless Animals? Constructionist Theories of Emotion Beyond the Human Case.Jonathan Birch - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (1):71-94.
    Could emotions be a uniquely human phenomenon? One prominent theory in emotion science, Lisa Feldman Barrett’s Theory of Constructed Emotion (tce), suggests they might be. The source of the sceptical challenge is that tce links emotions to abstract concepts tracking socio-normative expectations, and other animals are unlikely to have such concepts. Barrett’s own response to the sceptical challenge is to relativize emotion to the perspective of an interpreter, but this is unpromising. A more promising response may be to amend the (...)
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  16.  72
    III—Doing Our ‘Best’? Utilitarianism, Rationality and the Altruist’s Dilemma.Max Khan Hayward - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (1):49-70.
    Utilitarians think that what matters in ethics is making the world a better place. In that case, it might seem that we each rationally ought to do our best—perform the actions, out of those open to each of us, with the best expected outcomes. In other words, we should follow act-utilitarian reasons. But often the result of many altruistic agents following such individualistic reasons is worse than the result of them following collectivist ‘team-reasons’. So utilitarians should reject act utilitarianism, and (...)
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  17.  79
    V—Wise Trust.Karen Jones - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (1):95-113.
    Justified trust is rationally permitted trust; wise trust is excellent trust. Excellent (dis)trust is always justified (dis)trust, but the reverse is not true. You can be justified in distrusting someone and yet it be wise for you to trust. Contrary to folk saying, wisdom does not favour distrust ahead of trust. This paper explores what it takes to be wise in entering, maintaining, modifying and exiting trust relations. Wisdom is socially scaffolded, including by distributed networks of distrust that make local (...)
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  18.  20
    II—Ownership, Property and Belonging: Some Lessons to Learn from Thinkers of Antiquity about Economics and Success.Catherine Rowett - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (1):29-48.
    I explore some enlightening alternative economic theories in Plato’s Republic which help to cast doubt on standard models of rationality in economics. Starting from Socrates’ suggestion that things work best if everyone says ‘mine’ about the same things, I discuss a kind of ‘belonging’ which merits more attention in political and economic theory. This kind of belonging is not about owning property, but it can (better) explain the desire to do things for others and for the collective good. But did (...)
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  19.  54
    When Epistemic Models Misfire: Lessons for Everyday Rationality.Scott Sturgeon - 2024 - Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 124 (1):1-28.
    Three natural assumptions about rationality lead to conflict when they are formalized in natural ways. The paper examines how the assumptions are built into formal frameworks and why they lead to conflict. Several lessons are learned for the type of rationality ordinary people manifest in everyday life.
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