This paper takes up the problem of correlationism from a phenomenological perspective. Speculative realists, such as Quentin Meillassoux and Graham Harman, seek to establish new forms of Continental realism largely because, in their view, phenomenology cannot adequately account for the real. To counter these claims, I will use what I call a “critical phenomenological approach”, which critically delimits the real from the intentional relation, and thus makes possible a phenomenological theory of the real. This approach to realism establishes not only (...) that the real is independent from the intentional relation but also that the intentional relation itself is contingent with regard to the real. Furthermore, it also shows that the human being is exposed to the real in an originary way that calls into question the adequacy of Meillassoux’s and Harman’s forms of realism. (shrink)

It has generally been recognized that while Bruno Latour’s and Martin Heidegger’s respective philosophies of technology converge on key points there is also a significant difference of attitudes towards the themes discussed. To better appreciate the similarities and differences, I suggest that we seek to understand both Latour and Heidegger as philosophers of the event, who seek to rescue the novel emergence of beings from the sedimentation of reductive, explanatory frameworks. I take up this line of thought and compare Latour’s (...) and Heidegger’s theories of things and the types of experiences they presume. Latour’s metaphysics of the actant ensures that no actant’s activity is ever reduced to being the passive effect of another. Yet while the actant can be ‘applied’ to any entity, from a Heideggerian standpoint this strength is precisely its weakness. Latour’s metaphysics provides a horizon of thought that blocks an original experience of things that Heidegger’s thought points towards. By stepping back from the horizonal experience Latour’s metaphysical blueprint for entities imposes, one can enter into an original opening that stems neither from humans nor nonhumans, but an ineradicable mystery at the origin of being. This mystery is nothing more than the inability to give ultimate reasons for the presence of beings. While Latour’s actant as _Ding_ is simply an actant with innumerable relations, Heidegger’s _das Ding_ is the concrete experience of the dissolution of metaphysical reasons, first and last causes. Precisely because Heidegger’s _das Ding_ emerges from a prior mystery that suspends any overarching causal or purposive schema, things can more freely presence from themselves. (shrink)

This volume is about the many ways we perceive. Contributors explore the nature of the individual senses, how and what they tell us about the world, and how they interrelate. They consider how the senses extract perceptual content from receptoral information. They consider what kinds of objects we perceive and whether multiple senses ever perceive a single event. They consider how many senses we have, what makes one sense distinct from another, and whether and why distinguishing senses may be useful. (...) They consider the extent to which the senses act in concert, rather than as discrete modalities, and whether this influence is epistemically pernicious, neutral, or beneficial. They explore both the familiar five sense modalities and other candidate sense modalities, including a sense for flavour, inner senses (e.g., a sense for pain), and various senses that may result from using sensory substitution devices. Contributors often represent competing views, and the methods they deploy sometimes differ from one essay to the next—with some drawing upon the sciences and engineering and others relying upon conceptual analysis. All contributors agree, nonetheless, that traditional theorizing about the senses is hampered by a neglect of the senses other than vision, and by the misconception that vision is a passive receptacle for an image thrown by a lens. And many contributors believe that it is unduly restrictive to think of perception as a collation of contents provided by individual sense modalities; they think that to understand perception properly, we need to build into our accounts the idea that the senses work together. The ambition of the volume is to begin to develop better paradigms for understanding the senses, and thereby to move toward a better understanding of perception. (shrink)

We discuss Boltzmann’s probabilistic explanation of the second law of thermodynamics providing a comprehensive presentation of what is called today the typicality account. Countering its misconception as an alternative explanation, we examine the relation between Boltzmann’s H-theorem and the general typicality argument demonstrating the conceptual continuity between the two. We then discuss the philosophical dimensions of the concept of typicality and its relevance for scientific reasoning in general, in particular for understanding the reduction of macroscopic laws to microscopic laws. Finally, (...) we reply to various common criticisms of the typicality account. (shrink)

This paper surveys historical and recent philosophical discussions of the relations between imagination and creativity. In the first two sections, it covers two insufficiently studied analyses of the creative imagination, that of Kant and Sartre, respectively. The next section discusses imagination and its role in scientific discovery, with particular emphasis on the writings of Michael Polanyi, and on thought experiments and experimental design. The final section offers a brief discussion of some very recent work done on conceptual relations between imagination (...) and creativity. (shrink)

This chapter argues that we are irremediably ignorant about the identities of the fundamental properties that figure in the actual realization of the true final theory. Of the three published responses to Lewis’s work, each argues that even if Lewis’s metaphysical assumption, the thesis known as “quidditism,” is accepted, we need not accept his epistemic conclusion, the thesis of Humility. The aim of this chapter is to defend Lewis against these critics. Ann Whittle attempts to refute Humility by an appeal (...) to a more lenient account of identification. Following is a defense of Lewis carried by showing that his taxing account of identification is a perfectly good account of at least one perfectly legitimate sense of identification. (shrink)

Perception is typically distinguished from cognition. For example, seeing is importantly different from believing. And while what one sees clearly influences what one thinks, it is debatable whether what one believes and otherwise thinks can influence, in some direct and non-trivial way, what one sees. The latter possible relation is the cognitive penetration of perception. Cognitive penetration, if it occurs, has implications for philosophy of science, epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science. This paper offers an analysis of the phenomenon, (...) its theoretical consequences, and a variety of experimental results and possible interpretations of them. The paper concludes by proposing some constraints for analyses and definitions of cognitive penetrability. (shrink)

Andrew Bacon, John Hawthorne, and Gabriel Uzquiano have recently argued that free logics—logics that reject or restrict Universal Instantiation—are ultimately not promising approaches to resolving a family of intensional paradoxes due to Arthur Prior. These logics encompass ramified and contextualist approaches to paradoxes, and broadly speaking, there are two kinds of criticism they face. First, they fail to address every version of the Priorean paradoxes. Second, the theoretical considerations behind the logics make absolutely general statements about all propositions, properties of (...) propositions, etc., but because this sort of intensional quantification is always restricted in the logics, they cannot even express those considerations. I present a novel sort of free logic, which rejects the standard Universal Instantiation but validates a restricted form of the rule, and which addresses both kinds of criticism by allowing some propositions to be unrestricted in their quantification. (shrink)

Structuralism and quidditism are competing views of the metaphysics of property individuation: structuralists claim that properties are individuated by their nomological roles; quidditists claim that they are individuated by something else. This paper (1) refutes what many see as the best reason to accept structuralism over quidditism and (2) offers a methodological argument in favor of a quidditism. The standard charge against quidditism is that it commits us to something ontologically otiose: intrinsic aspects of properties, so-called ‘quiddities’. Here I grant (...) that quiddities are ontologically otiose, but deny that quidditism requires them. According to a view I call ‘austere quidditism’, properties are individuated by bare numerical identity. I argue that, as far as ontological parsimony is concerned, austere quidditism and structuralism are on a par. But is austere quidditism a coherent alternative to structuralism? To see that it is, we must get clear on what exactly we mean by ‘property individuation’. What we discover is that structuralism is a counterpart theory for properties, and that austere quidditism is simply the rejection of counterpart theory. I conclude with a methodological argument to the effect that counterpart theory for properties ought to be rejected. This paper begins by situating the debate between structuralists and quidditists within the context of a debate over the epistemic limits of fundamental science. At the center of this debate is David Lewis’s posthumously published ‘Ramseyan Humility’ (2008). In the appendix I explain the precise role of austere quidditism in Lewis’s argument. (shrink)

This chapter concerns the cognitive penetration of the visual experience of colour. Alleged cases of cognitively penetrated colour perception are of special import since they concern an uncontroversial type of visual experience. All theorists of perception agree that colour properties figure properly in the content or presentation of visual perception, even though not all parties agree that pine trees or causes or other "high-level" properties can figure properly in visual content or presentation. So an alleged case of this kind does (...) not require controversial commitments regarding the admissible contents of visual perception. The chapter clarifies this theoretical importance , identifying alleged empirical cases of cognitively penetrated colour perception, and then analyzing the implications of such cases for an epistemology of perception. (shrink)

This paper revisits Moses Mendelssohn’s political theology through his early aesthetic writings, and in conjunction with his later writing on politics and religion, unearths a model of religious toleration that can respond to many contemporary critiques of tolerance, especially those which draw from Jacobi and Schmitt’s decisionist political theology.

“When citizens can associate only in certain cases, they regard association as a rare and singular process, and they hardly think of it. When you allow them to associate freely in everything, they end up seeing in association the universal and, so to speak, unique means that men can use to attain the various ends that they propose. Each new need immediately awakens the idea of association. The art of association then becomes, as I said above, the mother science; everyone (...) studies it and applies it”When Alexis De Tocqueville visited the United States from France in the 1830s, he noted that many voluntary associations existed among citizens throughout the American landscape, something that did not exist in the... (shrink)

The current investigation examines the incidence of clients telling their psychotherapists of committing violent crimes for which they have not been prosecuted. Thirteen percent of the psychologists surveyed indicated that on at least one occasion a client self-disclosed to them during a psychotherapy session that he/she had murdered someone, not including the killing of another person in the line of duty in the military or as a public peace officer. One third of the psychologists had clients self-disclose an unprosecuted incident (...) of a sexual assault, and more than two thirds had clients self-disclose an unprosecuted incident of a physical assault during a psychotherapy session. Data are reported on psychotherapists' views of the impact of such disclosures on the psychotherapy relationship, adequacy of being informed regarding legal obligations after hearing such reports of violence, and adequacy of graduate preparation to deal with these clinical situations. (shrink)

This paper considers an orectic penetration hypothesis which says that desires and desire-like states may influence perceptual experience in a non-externally mediated way. This hypothesis is clarified with a definition, which serves further to distinguish the interesting target phenomenon from trivial and non-genuine instances of desire-influenced perception. Orectic penetration is an interesting possible case of the cognitive penetrability of perceptual experience. The orectic penetration hypothesis is thus incompatible with the more common thesis that perception is cognitively impenetrable. It is of (...) importance to issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science, epistemology, and general philosophy of science. The plausibility of orectic perception can be motivated by some classic experimental studies, and some new experimental research inspired by those same studies. The general suggestion is that orectic penetration thus defined, and evidenced by the relevant studies, cannot be deflected by the standard strategies of the cognitive impenetrability theorist. (shrink)

Jonathan Ichikawa (2012) argues that the standard counterexamples to the knowledge norm of practical reasoning are no such thing. More precisely, he argues that those alleged counterexamples rest on claims about which actions are appropriate rather than on claims about which propositions can be appropriately treated as reasons for action. Since the knowledge norm of practical reasoning concerns the latter and not the former, Ichikawa contends that proponents of the alleged counterexamples must offer a theory that bridges the gap between (...) the two types of claims. I argue, first, that the standard counterexamples do not rest on claims about which actions are appropriate, second, that even if they did, we would not need a theory to bridge the gap between the two types of claims, and, third, that even if we did need such a theory, a plausible theory is on offer. (shrink)

ABSTRACTIn this article I briefly respond to what I view as the most contentious parts of Guus Duindam's defence of transcendental idealism and critique of Bhaskar’s transcendental realism. First, I argue that Duindam does not address the main problem with the transcendental idealist account of causal laws and therefore does not successfully defend it against Bhaskar’s transcendental analysis of experimental activity. Second, I argue that Duindam’s interpretation of transcendental idealism is vulnerable to the problem of the thing in itself, which (...) further weakens his attempt to recommend transcendental idealism to critical realists. (shrink)

When we engage in practical deliberation, we sometimes engage in careful probabilistic reasoning. At other times, we simply make flat out assumptions about how the world is or will be. A question thus arises: when, if ever, is it rationally permissible to engage in the latter, less sophisticated kind of practical deliberation? Recently, a number of authors have argued that the answer concerns whether one knows that p. Others have argued that the answer concerns whether one is justified in believing (...) that one knows that p. Against both of these, this paper argues that the answer concerns whether p is ‘practically certain’—that is, whether the actual epistemic probability that p differs from epistemic certainty that p only in ways that are irrelevant to the decision one currently faces. (shrink)

Using the example of classical electrodynamics, I argue that the concept of fields as mediators of particle interactions is fundamentally flawed and reflects a misguided attempt to retrieve Newtonian concepts in relativistic theories. This leads to various physical and metaphysical problems that are discussed in detail. In particular, I emphasize that physics has not found a satisfying solution to the self-interaction problem in the context of the classical field theory. To demonstrate the superiority of a pure particle ontology, I defend (...) the direct interaction theory of Wheeler and Feynman against recent criticism and argue that it provides the most cogent formulation of classical electrodynamics. (shrink)

Certain philosophers maintain that there is a ‘constitutive threshold for belief’: to believe that p just is to have a degree of confidence that p above a certain threshold. On the basis of this view, these philosophers defend what is known as ‘the Lockean Thesis ’, according to which it is rational to believe that p just in case it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p above the constitutive threshold for belief. While not directly speaking to (...) the controversy over the Lockean Thesis, this paper defends the general idea behind it—namely, the thesis that there is some threshold such that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence great than that threshold. This paper identifies the threshold in question—not with the alleged constitutive threshold for belief—but with what I call ‘the practical threshold for rational belief’. Roughly, the thesis defended here is that it is rational to believe that p if and only if it is rational to have a degree of confidence that p that rationalizes engaging in certain types of practical reasoning. (shrink)

In , Frank Ramsey separates paradoxes into two groups, now taken to be the logical and the semantical. But he also revises the logical system developed in Whitehead and Russellthe intensional paradoxess interest in these problems seriously, then the intensional paradoxes deserve more widespread attention than they have historically received.

A fiction may prescribe imagining that a pig can talk or tell the future. A fiction may prescribe imagining that torturing innocent persons is a good thing. We generally comply with imaginative prescriptions like the former, but not always with prescriptions like the latter: we imagine non-evaluative fictions without difficulty but sometimes resist imagining value-rich fictions. Thus arises the puzzle of imaginative resistance. Most analyses of the phenomenon focus on the content of the relevant imaginings. The present analysis focuses instead (...) on the character of certain kinds of imaginings, arguing that we resist in such cases given the rich evaluative character of the imaginings prescribed, and the agent-dependent constraints on imagining in such ways. (shrink)

Dustin McWherter defends the possibility of critical ontology by pitting Roy Bhaskar's attempt to rehabilitate ontology in the philosophy of science against Kant's attempt to replace traditional ontology with an account of cognitive experience.

The article addresses the debate about the empirical status of particles versus wave functions in Bohmian quantum mechanics. It thereby clarifies questions and misconceptions about the role of the...

This paper offers a critical survey and analysis of empirical studies on creativity, with emphasis on how imagination plays a role in the creative process. It takes as a foil the romantic view that, given features like novelty, incubation, and insight, we should be skeptical about the prospects for naturalistic explanation of creativity. It rebuts this skepticism by first distinguishing stages or operations in the creative process. It then works through various behavioral and neural studies, and corresponding philosophical theorizing, that (...) concern the preparation, generation, insight, and evaluation stages of creative processes. The result is not a complete explanation of creativity, but it identifies an explanatory path towards such an explanation, including the features of creativity that motivate that skepticism. (shrink)

Many traditional theories of creativity put heavy emphasis on an incubation stage in creative cognitive processes. The basic phenomenon is a familiar one: we are working on a task or problem, we leave it aside for some period of time, and when we return attention to the task we have some new insight that services completion of the task. This feature, combined with other ostensibly mysterious features of creativity, has discouraged naturalists from theorizing creativity. This avoidance is misguided: we can (...) maintain unconscious incubated cognition as (sometimes) part of the creative process and we can explain it in scientifically responsible ways. This paper, focusing on the effects of attention on the functional networking of the brain, attempts just such an explanation. It also serves to assuage the naturalist's scepticism about other features of creative cognition. The broad upshot, one would hope, is that philosophers of mind and cognitive scientists return some attention to the long neglected topic of creativity. (shrink)

Jörg Hansen, John Horty, and Xavier Parent and Leendert van der Torre have all recently described some sort of nonmonotonic logic to model reasons and their interactions. Horty’s framework is broader in scope than the other two, encompassing both reasoning about the relative strengths of reasons and reasoning about which reasons to consider in the first place. Hansen discusses a plethora of approaches and examples, including Horty’s, arguing that his preferred system best captures our intuitions. And Parent and van der (...) Torre present a family of systems of input/output logic, which are in some ways the most flexible. In this paper, I aim to combine these features. Without attempting to answer the question of which intuitions are the best to capture, I first argue that there are good reasons to explore systems that behave more like Hansen’s than Horty’s. I then show that Parent and van der Torre’s framework of input/output logic can exactly duplicate Hansen’s system but is flexible enough to produce other results as well. Finally, I extend their framework to include the additional kinds of reasoning Horty discusses, showing that the resulting theory can handle a wider range of cases than Horty’s. (shrink)

The paper discusses recent proposals by Carroll and Chen, as well as Barbour, Koslowski, and Mercati to explain the arrow of time without a Past Hypothesis, i.e. the assumption of a special initial state of the universe. After discussing the role of the Past Hypothesis and the controversy about its status, we explain why Carroll's model - which establishes an arrow of time as typical - can ground sensible predictions and retrodictions without assuming something akin to a Past Hypothesis. We (...) then propose a definition of a Boltzmann entropy for a classical N-particle system with gravity, suggesting that a Newtonian gravitating universe might provide a relevant example of Carroll's entropy model. This invites comparison with the work of Barbour, Koslowski, and Mercati that identifies typical arrows of time in a relational formulation of classical gravity on shape space. We clarify the difference between this gravitational arrow in terms of shape complexity and the entropic arrow in absolute spacetime, and work out the key advantages of the relationalist theory. We end by pointing out why the entropy concept relies on absolute scales and is thus not relational. (shrink)

There are good, even if inconclusive, reasons to think that cognitive penetration of perception occurs: that cognitive states like belief causally affect, in a relatively direct way, the contents of perceptual experience. The supposed importance of – indeed as it is suggested here, what is definitive of – this possible phenomenon is that it would result in important epistemic and scientific consequences. One interesting and intuitive consequence entirely unremarked in the extant literature concerns the perception of art. Intuition has it (...) that knowledge about art changes how one aesthetically evaluates artworks. A profound explanation of this intuitive fact is that perceptual experiences vary with artistic expertise. Cognitive penetration provides an explanatory mechanism for this latter effect. What one knows or otherwise thinks about art may affect, in one of two ways sketched below, how one perceives art. Differences in aesthetic evaluation may follow, either because high-level aesthetic properties can be perceptually represented or because they causally depend on low-level perceptible properties. All of this lends credence to the hypothesis that the expert better judges art because she better perceives art. And she better perceives art because she better knows art. (shrink)

This paper offers a novel conversational implicature account of the pragmatic sensitivity of knowledge attributions. Developing an account I first suggested elsewhere and independently proposed by Lutz, this paper explores the idea that the relevant implicatures are generated by a constitutive relationship between believing a proposition and a disposition to treat that proposition as true in practical deliberation. I argue that while this view has a certain advantage over standard implicature accounts of pragmatic sensitivity, it comes with a significant concession (...) to proponents of pragmatic encroachment. On the account offered here, knowledge attributions have locally-pragmatically-sensitive implicatures because they have non-locally-pragmatically-sensitive entailments. The view thus represents a unique and powerful hybrid of these two approaches to the pragmatic sensitivity of knowledge attributions. (shrink)

We identify a class of paradoxes that is neither set-theoretical nor semantical, but that seems to depend on intensionality. In particular, these paradoxes arise out of plausible properties of propositional attitudes and their objects. We try to explain why logicians have neglected these paradoxes, and to show that, like the Russell Paradox and the direct discourse Liar Paradox, these intensional paradoxes are recalcitrant and challenge logical analysis. Indeed, when we take these paradoxes seriously, we may need to rethink the commonly (...) accepted methods for dealing with the logical paradoxes. (shrink)

The belief bias in reasoning occurs when individuals are more willing to accept conclusions that are consistent with their beliefs than conclusions that are inconsistent. The present study...

In today’s world, technology seems to touch every aspect of our lives. Our processes for so many things have become automated and digitalized. The use of networked computational devices by both end users and corporations has become, in a word, ubiquitous. In many ways, the era of rapid technological growth we find ourselves in currently can be traced back to the work of the pioneering computer scientist, Mark Weiser. It is widely accepted among technologists today that his original vision of (...) “ubiquitous computing” played a large part in setting these events into motion in the first place. Yet the emergence of our technologies and the ways we use them has turned out to be something radically different from what Weiser had in mind. -/- As John Tinnell carefully explains in The Philosopher of Palo Alto, Weiser had in fact hoped for a future that would place computation all around us. Devices would perform specialized tasks regularly to enhance and improve our quality of life. The goal, however, according to Weiser’s view, was for these technologies to function always on the periphery of human perception. They were never meant to place any unreasonable demand on our attention. Operating in this manner, the devices designed to support human affairs could do so, and at the same time leave space for us to connect with the world and each other in essentially human ways. (shrink)

In this book, Dustin Peone analyzes the role of shame and fame in the contemporary world, showing that these ideas have lost their roots in social virtue. He then criticizes the technological mentality, demonstrating its responsibility for changing the human condition.

[File is the introduction to the monograph] -/- Abstract to monograph -/- How and whether thinking affects perceiving is a deeply important question. Of course it is of scientific interest: to understand the human mind is to understand how we best distinguish its processes, how those processes interact, and what this implies for how and what we may know about the world. And so in the philosopher’s terms, this book is one on both mental architecture and the epistemology of perception. (...) But there is a more human interest. How we make contact with the world, and with one another, is of the most basic of importance. We can make both sensory contact and cognitive contact with the world. The first is traditionally supposed to be determined by the biological nature of our sensory systems, while the second is at least partly determined by us, what we have learned, our experiences, and so on. The most basic claim of the book is that this is mistaken and importantly so. Our sensory contact with the world can also change and in a way that is importantly affected by the cognitive contact that we have, or have had, with the world. Thinking does not just affect perceiving, thinking improves perceiving. If this is true, it changes not only how we should theorize the mind, it changes how we should understand, as individuals, our place in and contact with the world. (shrink)

Computer programs are generating artworks of astonishing novelty and aesthetic value. By the standard definition of creativity, these programs would count as being creative. But if you still hesitate to call a program creative, that's for good reason, we argue. It's because real creativity requires AGENTS who are responsible for what they make, and it's not at all clear that these programs are agents. -/- (The title was imposed by the editor. It was supposed to be called, "ARE COMPUTERS CREATIVE?").

Debates about female genital mutilation/cutting have polarized opinion between those who see it as an abuse of women’s health and human rights, to be ‘eradicated’, and those who may or may not oppose the practice, but see a double standard on the part of western campaigners who fail to challenge other unnecessary surgical interventions — such as male circumcision or cosmetic surgery — in their own communities and cultures. This article interrogates these debates about FGM/c in the context of measures (...) to reduce it in the UK over recent decades. It does not suggest that FGM/c is a legitimate practice, seeing it, rather, as an abuse of women’s and children’s rights that should be combated using a combination of measures. However, it argues that reduction strategies are undermined by inconsistencies in the law and the failure to back up the law with research and education. (shrink)

Dustin Peone argues that memory is the foundation of philosophical thought. This may seem strange to the contemporary reader, but it is something that philosophers themselves have known since before Socrates. Peone advocates a doctrine of "memory as philosophy" that ties philosophical recollection back to the wisdom of the Muses, daughters of Memory, who sing of "what was, is, and shall be." Part One draws on the work of philosophers from Cicero to Vico to Bergson to articulate the meaning (...) and significance of memory. Peone understands memory not merely in its psychological sense, but as the key to metaphysical and moral thinking. Part Two takes up the philosophical history of memory. Peone gives an overview of its role as both a speculative and technical instrument from ancient Greece through Renaissance Europe. Then with the rise of modernity and the critical philosophy of Descartes, the memory tradition falls into disrepute. Why did this happen? Was it accidental? Is a philosophical system grounded in memory possible after Descartes? In the final chapters, Montaigne and Hegel are analyzed as practitioners of "memory as philosophy" in the modern world. (shrink)

The ‘impairment argument’ against abortion developed by Perry Hendricks aims to derive the wrongness of abortion from the wrongness of causing foetal alcohol syndrome. Hendricks endorses an ‘impairment principle’, which states that, if it is wrong to inflict an impairment of a certain degree on an organism, then, ceteris paribus, it is also wrong to inflict a more severe impairment on that organism. Causing FAS is wrong in virtue of the impairment it inflicts. But abortion inflicts an even more severe (...) impairment, and so, ceteris paribus, is also wrong. Notably, Hendricks thinks that this argument does not require the claim that the foetus is a person. Here, I respond to Hendricks by arguing that the ceteris paribus clause of the impairment principle is not met in ordinary cases of pregnancy. Carrying an unwanted pregnancy to term is much more burdensome than is refraining from excessive drinking for nine months. This provides a pro tanto justification for obtaining an abortion that does not apply to causing FAS. If the foetus is not a person, it seems fairly clear to me that this justification is strong enough to render abortion permissible. Hendricks is therefore incorrect in claiming that the impairment argument can go without claims concerning foetal personhood. If the foetus is a person, then whether burdensomeness justifies abortion depends on certain questions relating to Thomson’s famous violinist argument. I will not attempt to answer those. But anyone who is otherwise sympathetic to Thomson’s argument should not be moved by the impairment argument. (shrink)

We offer a brief characterization of creativity, followed by a review of some of the reasons people have been skeptical about the possibility of explaining creativity. We then survey some of the recent work on creativity that is naturalistic in the sense that it presumes creativity is natural (as opposed to magical, occult, or supernatural) and is therefore amenable to scientific inquiry. This work is divided into two categories. The broader category is empirical philosophy, which draws on empirical research while (...) addressing questions that have traditionally been regarded as philosophical. The second category is experimental philosophy, a special branch of empirical philosophy in which experiments are designed (by philosophers) with the explicit purpose of addressing philosophical questions. All of this highlights the relative theoretical neglect of creativity, while at the same time suggesting ample opportunity for experimentally minded philosophers to break new ground. (shrink)

It is well known that Socrates was executed by the city of Athens for not believing in the gods and for corrupting the youth. Despite this, it is not widely known what he really thought, or taught the youth to think, about philosophy, the gods, and political affairs. Of the few authors we rely on for firsthand knowledge of Socrates—Aristophanes, Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle—only Xenophon, the least read of the four, lays out the whole Socratic education in systematic order. In (...) Xenophon's Socratic Education, through a careful reading of Book IV of Xenophon's Memorabilia, Dustin Sebell shows how Socrates ascended, with his students in tow, from opinions about morality or politics and religion to knowledge of such things. Besides revealing what it was that Socrates really thought—about everything from self-knowledge to happiness, natural theology to natural law, and rhetoric to dialectic—Sebell demonstrates how Socrates taught promising youths, like Xenophon or Plato, only indirectly: by jokingly teaching unpromising youths in their presence. Sebell ultimately shows how Socrates, the founder of moral and political philosophy, sought and found an answer to the all-important question: should we take our bearings in life from human reason, or revealed religion? (shrink)