In this enlightening book, Sam Harris argues that free will is an illusion but that this truth should not undermine morality or diminish the importance of social and political freedom; indeed, this truth can and should change the way we think about some of the most important questions in life.

We develop a new version of the causal theory of spacetime. Whereas traditional versions of the theory seek to identify spatiotemporal relations with causal relations, the version we develop takes causal relations to be the grounds for spatiotemporal relations. Causation is thus distinct from, and more basic than, spacetime. We argue that this non-identity theory, suitably developed, avoids the challenges facing the traditional identity theory.

Historical and philosophical background -- Del Medigo on the material intellect -- Del Medigo on the agent intellect -- Del Medigo on conceptualisation -- Hic homo intelligit?

Friedrich Engels: Ludwig Feuerbach und der Ausgang der klassischen deutschen Philosophie Edition Holzinger. Taschenbuch Berliner Ausgabe, 2013 Vollständiger, durchgesehener Neusatz mit einer Biographie des Autors bearbeitet und eingerichtet von Michael Holzinger Textgrundlage ist die Ausgabe: Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels: Werke. Herausgegeben vom Institut für Marxismus-Leninismus beim ZK der SED, 43 Bände, Band 21, Berlin: Dietz-Verlag, 1962. Herausgeber der Reihe: Michael Holzinger Reihengestaltung: Viktor Harvion Umschlaggestaltung unter Verwendung des Bildes: Friedrich Engels, Fotographie von 1888 von William Elliott Debenham (1839-1924) Gesetzt aus (...) Minion Pro, 10 pt. (shrink)

Formal models of appearance and reality have proved fruitful for investigating structural properties of perceptual knowledge. This paper applies the same approach to epistemic justification. Our central goal is to give a simple account of The Preface, in which justified belief fails to agglomerate. Following recent work by a number of authors, we understand knowledge in terms of normality. An agent knows p iff p is true throughout all relevant normal worlds. To model The Preface, we appeal to the normality (...) of error. Sometimes, it is more normal for reality and appearance to diverge than to match. We show that this simple idea has dramatic consequences for the theory of knowledge and justification. Among other things, we argue that a proper treatment of The Preface requires a departure from the internalist idea that epistemic justification supervenes on the appearances and the widespread idea that one knows most when free from error. (shrink)

Bestselling author Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith-that a moral system cannot be based on science.

Suppositional theories of conditionals take apparent similarities between supposition and conditionals as a starting point, appealing to features of the former to provide an account of the latter. This paper develops a novel form of suppositional theory, one which characterizes the relationship at the level of semantics rather than at the level of speech acts. In the course of doing so, it considers a range of novel data which shed additional light on how conditionals and supposition interact.

Judges in multiple US states, such as New York, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, California, and Florida, receive a prediction of defendants’ recidivism risk, generated by the COMPAS algorithm. If judges act on these predictions, they implicitly delegate normative decisions to proprietary software, even beyond the previously documented race and age biases. Using the ProPublica dataset, we demonstrate that COMPAS predictions favor jailing over release. COMPAS is biased against defendants. We show that this bias can largely be removed. Our proposed correction increases overall (...) accuracy, and attenuates anti-black and anti-young bias. However, it also slightly increases the risk that defendants are released who commit a new crime before tried. We argue that this normative decision should not be buried in the code. The tradeoff between the interests of innocent defendants and of future victims should not only be made transparent. The algorithm should be changed such that the legislator and the courts do make this choice. (shrink)

Sam Harris dismantles the most common justification for religious faith--that a moral system cannot be based on science.

Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Volume 104, Issue 1, Page 19-49, January 2022.

Sam Gillespie's The Mathematics of Novelty presents a new account of Alain Badiou and Gilles Deleuze, identifying conceptual impasses in their philosophical ...

In non‐literal uses of language, the content an utterance communicates differs from its literal truth conditions. Loose talk is one example of non‐literal language use (amongst many others). For example, what a loose utterance of (1) communicates differs from what it literally expresses: (1) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock. Loose talk is interesting (or so I will argue). It has certain distinctive features which raise important questions about the connection between literal and non‐literal language use. This paper aims to (i.) (...) introduce a range of novel data demonstrating certain overlooked features of loose talk, and (ii.) develop a new theory of the phenomenon which accounts for these data. In particular, this theory is motivated by the need to explain minimal pairs such as (2)-(3): (2) Lena arrived at 9 o'clock, but she did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly. (3) ?? Lena did not arrive at 9 o'clock exactly, but she arrived at 9 o'clock. (2) and (3) agree in their truth conditions. Yet they differ in felicity. As such, they constitute a problem for any account which hopes to predict the acceptability of the loose use of a sentence from its truth conditions and the context of utterance alone. Instead, it will be argued, to explain loose talk phenomena we must posit an additional layer of meaning outstripping truth conditions. This layer of meaning is shown to exhibit a range of properties, all of which point to its being semantically encoded. Thus, if correct, the theory provides a new example of how semantic meaning must extend beyond literal, truth‐conditional content. (shrink)

According to the KK-principle, knowledge iterates freely. It has been argued, notably in Greco, that accounts of knowledge which involve essential appeal to normality are particularly conducive to defence of the KK-principle. The present article evaluates the prospects for employing normality in this role. First, it is argued that the defence of the KK-principle depends upon an implausible assumption about the logical principles governing iterated normality claims. Once this assumption is dropped, counter-instances to the principle can be expected to arise. (...) Second, it is argued that even if the assumption is maintained, there are other logical properties of normality which can be expected to lead to failures of KK. Such failures are noteworthy, since they do not depend on either a margins-for-error principle or safety condition of the kinds Williamson appeals to in motivating rejection KK. “Introduction: KK and Being in a Position to Know” Section formulates two versions of the KK-Principle; “Inexact Knowledge and Margins for Error” Section presents a version of Williamson’s margins-for-error argument against it; “Knowledge and Normality” and “Iterated Normality” Sections discuss the defence of the KK-Principle due to Greco and show that it is dependent upon the implausible assumption that the logic of normality ascriptions is at least as strong as K4; finally, “Knowledge in Abnormal Conditions” and “Higher-Order Ignorance Inside the Margins” Sections argue that a weakened version of Greco’s constraint on knowledge is plausible and demonstrate that this weakened constraint will, given uncontentious assumptions, systematically generate counter-instances to the KK-principle of a novel kind. (shrink)

Hume notoriously pursues a constructive science of human nature in the Treatise while raising serious skeptical doubts about that project and leaving them apparently unanswered. On the perspectivalist reading, Hume endorses multiple incommensurable epistemic perspectives in the Treatise. This reading faces two significant objections: that it renders Hume’s epistemology inconsistent (or at least highly incoherent) and that it is ad hoc. In this paper, I propose a perspectivalist account of epistemic justification in the Treatise that addresses, to a significant degree, (...) these concerns. Hume has available to him an account – what I will call epistemic dispositionalism – that is internally consistent, allows for epistemic continuity between perspectives, and is thoroughly grounded in his naturalism. (shrink)

Inquiry aims at knowledge. Your inquiry into a question succeeds just in case you come to know the answer. However, combined with a common picture on which misleading evidence can lead knowledge to be lost, this view threatens to recommend a novel form of dogmatism. At least in some cases, individuals who know the answer to a question appear required to avoid evidence bearing on it. In this paper, we’ll aim to do two things. First, we’ll present an argument for (...) this novel form of dogmatism and show that it presents a substantive challenge. Second, we’ll consider a way those who take knowledge to be the aim of inquiry can mount a response. In the course of doing so, we’ll try to get clearer on the normative connections between inquiry, knowledge and evidence gathering. (shrink)

This thesis examines necessary truth and defends a normative, or linguistic, account of it. Roughly, it holds that necessary truths state or follow from conceptual norms (i.e., norms that determine patterns of correct concept use). While the thesis touches upon logical and mathematical truth, its primary focus are those necessary truths typically expressed using natural language. The thesis has three parts. In Part I, I criticise metaphysical accounts of necessity and present and defend a normative account of it. At no (...) point do I give a history of normative accounts, but clearly their roots are to be found in the first half of the twentieth century – in the works of Wittgenstein and Carnap, for example. In Part II, I consider whether language can sustain the normative account. Some argue that the account requires language to be regimented in a way that it is not. I show that while it requires a distinction in kind between empirical and conceptual principles, it nevertheless makes room for indeterminacy regarding whether a given statement is an empirical claim or follows from conceptual norms. Finally, in Part III, I consider the relationship between the world and our conceptual scheme. I argue that denying our concepts answer to the world does not mean that they cannot be justified. The normative account does not say that we have no reasons for categorising things in a certain way, but rather that natural facts, in combination with our interests, are fit to provide them. The purpose of the thesis is to show that normative accounts of necessity can be much more robust than they are often given credit for and needn’t have the malign implications often associated with them. (shrink)

Der Prozess der Formung beginnt in der Auseinandersetzung mit dem Chaos, einer immer wieder aktualisierten Anspielung auf die Schöpfung. Wenn den Dingen ihre Form entzogen wird, so scheint die Gegenhandlung im Spiel zu sein. Im vorliegenden Band wird hingegen versucht, Formwerdung und Formentzug als Vorgänge zu verstehen, die gleichermaßen am Zuge sind, sobald Kunstwerke ihre Wirkmächtigkeit entfalten.

This volume brings together essays by seminal figures and rising stars in the fields of animal ethics and moral theory to analyze and evaluate the moral status of non-human animals, with a special focus on the question of whether or not animals have moral rights. Though wide-ranging in many ways, these fourteen original essays and one reprinted essay direct significant attention to both the main arguments for animal rights and the biggest challenges to animal rights. This volume explores the question (...) of whether or not animals have moral rights through a number of different lenses, including classical deontology, libertarianism, commonsense morality, virtue ethics, and utilitarianism. The volume also addresses what are undoubtedly the most serious challenges to the strong animal rights position, which maintains that animals have moral rights equal in strength to the rights of humans, including challenges posed by rights nihilism, the ‘kind’ argument against animal rights, the problem of predation, and the comparative value of lives. In addition, the volume explores the practical import of animal rights both from a social policy standpoint and from the standpoint of personal ethical decisions concerning what to eat and whether or not to hunt animals. Unlike other volumes on animal rights, which focus primarily on the legal rights of animals, and unlike other anthologies on animal ethics, which tend to cover a wide variety of topics but only devote a few articles to each topic, the volume under consideration is focused exclusively on the question of whether or not animals have moral rights and the practical import of such rights. (shrink)

This article explores the concept of ethical invention in both Jean-Paul Sartre’s and Michel Foucault’s later lectures and interviews, showing that a courageous disposition to invent or transform plays a key role in both thinkers’ visions of ethics. Three of Sartre’s post-Critique of Dialectical Reason lectures on ethics are examined: Morality and History, The Rome Lecture, and A Plea for Intellectuals. It is shown that ethical invention for Sartre requires the use of our freedom to transcend our current circumstances, a (...) willingness to break away from harmful ideologies, and directing our free praxis towards the goal of universal humanism. Examining several of Foucault’s interviews alongside his lecture series The Government of Self and Others and The Courage of Truth, it is shown that ethical invention for Foucault requires a rejection of necessities or inevitabilities in our current landscape, a willingness to reshape our current beliefs, and a philosophical way of life that results in an alteration of the relationship to self and others. For both thinkers, ethical invention should be preceded by a critical reflection on ourselves in our historical moment. Both argue that ethical invention requires a rejection of the inherent value of our world and realization that the conditions of possibility for being subjects are malleable. Last, it is shown that both philosophers specifically call philosophers or intellectuals to invent. (shrink)

The experiences described in the VIP transcripts are incredibly varied and yet frequently explicitly labelled by participants as "voices." How can we make sense of this? If we reflect carefully on uses of the word "voice", we see that it can express at least two entirely different concepts, which pick out categorically different phenomena. One concept picks out a speech sound (e.g. "This synthesizer has a "voice" setting"). Another concept picks out a specific agent (e.g. "I hear two voices: one (...) is a ten year-old boy…"). This chapter explores how these two concepts are related to one another in the context of voice-hearing. (shrink)

Explores how the emotional experience of gratitude has been enlisted in neoliberal governance through the language of debt. In The Art of Gratitude, Jeremy David Engels sketches a genealogy of gratitude from the ancient Greeks to the contemporary self-help movement. One of the most striking things about gratitude, Engels finds, is how consistently it is described using the language of indebtedness. A chief purpose of this, he contends, is to make us more comfortable living lives in debt, with the nefarious (...) effect of pacifying the citizenry so we are less likely to speak out about social and economic injustice. To counteract this, he proposes an alternative art of gratitude-as-thanksgiving that is inspired by Indian philosophy, particularly the yoga philosophy of the Bhagavad Gita and Patanjali’s Yoga-Sutras. He argues that this art of gratitude can challenge neoliberalism by reorienting our politics away from resentment, anger, and guilt and toward a democratic ethic of thanksgiving and the common good. Jeremy David Engels is the Sherwin Early Career Professor in the Rock Ethics Institute and Associate Professor of Communication Arts and Sciences at Penn State University. He is the author of The Politics of Resentment: A Genealogy and Enemyship: Democracy and Counter-Revolution in the Early Republic. (shrink)

In this paper, I will present and advocate a view about what we are doing when we attribute delusion, namely, say that someone is delusional. It is an “expressivist” view, roughly analogous to expressivism in meta-ethics. Just as meta-ethical expressivism accounts for certain key features of moral discourse, so does this expressivism account for certain key features of delusion attribution. And just as meta-ethical expressivism undermines factualism about moral properties, so does this expressivism, if correct, show that certain attempts to (...) objectively define delusion are misguided. I proceed as follows. I start by examining different attempts at defining delusion, separating broadly psychiatric attempts from epistemic ones. I then present a change of approach, according to which we question whether the term “delusion” is in the business of (merely) describing reality. I then support this proposal, first, by borrowing standard lines of argument from meta-ethics (including ontological reluctance, intrinsic motivation, and deep disagreement) but also, by inference to the best explanation of some the features we see when we try to theorise about delusion (namely that it is hard to define, and that our delusion attributions are elicited by a plurality of norms). (shrink)

Inquiry aims at knowledge. Your inquiry into a question succeeds just in case you come to know the answer. However, combined with a common picture on which misleading evidence can lead knowledge to be lost, this view threatens to recommend a novel form of dogmatism. At least in some cases, individuals who know the answer to a question appear required to avoid evidence bearing on it. In this paper, we’ll aim to do two things. First, we’ll present an argument for (...) this novel form of dogmatism and show that it presents a substantive challenge. Second, we’ll consider a way those who take knowledge to be the aim of inquiry can mount a response. In the course of doing so, we’ll try to get clearer on the normative connections between inquiry, knowledge and evidence gathering. (shrink)

This paper uses detailed art criticism to ground a distinctive take on debates about the interaction of moral and aesthetic value. Immoralists claim that moral flaws can make artworks aesthetically better than they would otherwise be. I argue that whether or not immoralism is true, immoralists have not provided compelling characterizations of strategies that might constitute this kind of “immoral artistry.” The main exception is found in the work of A. W. Eaton. I critique Eaton’s perspective by way of sustained (...) interpretive-philosophical discussion of The Wire and especially The Sopranos. The discussion has implications for value interaction debates, conceptualizations of the “rough hero” genre, theories of appropriate response to fictions, and more applied debates about the moral criticism of film and television. (shrink)

Jerry Fodor wrote the following assessment of Danto’s importance in 1993: “Danto has done something I’ve been very much wanting to do: namely, reconsider some hard problems in aesthetics in the light of the past 20 years or so of philosophical work on intentionality and representation” (Fodor 1993, p. 41). Fodor is absolutely right: some of Danto’s work could be thought of as the application of some influential ideas about perception that Fodor also shared. The problem is that these ideas (...) have turned out to be false. Both Danto and Fodor are modularist: they both think that perception is an encapsulated process that is in no way influenced by any kind of non-perceptual processing (see, e.g., Fodor 1983, Pylyshyn 1984). Many of Danto’s famous and influential arguments rely very directly on this modularist assumption. There is now, however, a wealth of evidence against modularism of the strong kind held to by Danto and Fodor. We now know that perceptual experience is not determined entirely by the retinal input: our visual processing is influenced at various point in a top-down manner. What we know and what kinds of visual stimuli we have encountered previously deeply influence how the retinal input is processed. The empirical literature on this is vast and conclusive (for an overview, see Teufel and Nanay 2017 but see also the references in the last section of this paper). What does this mean for Danto’s views on art and perception? While one of Danto’s premises may turn out to be false, the history and examples he gave are valuable and bear repeating. Even more importantly, Danto’s aesthetics can in part be separated out from his modularism, leading us to draw slightly different but arguably even more interesting conclusions from famous thought experiments such as the Gallery of Indiscernibles. (shrink)

This paper develops an account of pluralities based on the following simple claim: some things are nothing over and above the individual things they comprise. For some, this may seem like a mysterious statement, perhaps even meaningless; for others, like a truism, trivial and inferentially inert. I show that neither reaction is correct: the claim is both tractable and has important consequences for a number of debates in philosophy.

Global Health involves, among many things the intensified travelling of people, resources, technologies, knowledge, standards, and ideas. This book describes what happens when innovations are transferred to new settings: What work is needed to make them work, but also how they change the setting into which they are introduced.

In an interesting experimental study, Bonini et al. (1999) present partial support for truth-gap theories of vagueness. We say this despite their claim to find theoretical and empirical reasons to dismiss gap theories and despite the fact that they favor an alternative, epistemic account, which they call ‘vagueness as ignorance’. We present yet more experimental evidence that supports gap theories, and argue for a semantic/pragmatic alternative that unifies the gappy supervaluationary approach together with its glutty relative, the subvaluationary approach.

Most conceptual models of the organization of the cardiovascular system begin with the premise that the nervous system regulates the metabolic and nonmetabolic reflex adjustments of the circulation. These models assume that all the neurally mediated responses of the circulation are reactive, i.e., reflexes elicited by adequate stimuli. This target article suggests that the responses of the circulation are conditional in three senses. First, as Sherrington argued, reflexes are conditional in that they never operate in a vacuum but in a (...) context together with other reflexes. Guided by functional utility, they interact rather than add. Second, as Pavlov argued, stimuli acquire meanings as a result of experience. This notion of stimulus effect plus the Sherringtonian notion of conditionality suggest that association is one of the ways stimuli eliciting cardiovascular reflexes acquire their meanings and thus their relative strengths. Finally, as Skinner and others have argued, operants are responses that act upon the environment to obtain consequences – that is, stimuli. As operants, cardiovascular responses fulfill a major biological need, functioning proactively. The cardiovascular response is an integral component of the animal's behavior regardless of whether it is an elicited reflex or the eliciting stimulus acquired its properties as a result of the genetic inheritance of the animal or through experience, or the cardiovascular response is emitted in anticipation of an environmental consequence. The main theses of this essay are: (1) behavior is an integrated set of responses and the circulation is one of the response systems comprising behavior; (2) behavior is, in part, determined by its functional significance within a context; (3) the contextual factors operative at the time of the behavior have a major role in determining which of the set of possible responses will determine the final act, that is, which behavior will be the effective response and which other behaviors will be concomitants. (shrink)

There is a large literature exploring how accuracy constrains rational degrees of belief. This paper turns to the unexplored question of how accuracy constrains knowledge. We begin by introducing a simple hypothesis: increases in the accuracy of an agent’s evidence never lead to decreases in what the agent knows. We explore various precise formulations of this principle, consider arguments in its favour, and explain how it interacts with different conceptions of evidence and accuracy. As we show, the principle has some (...) noteworthy consequences for the wider theory of knowledge. First, it implies that an agent cannot be justified in believing a set of mutually inconsistent claims. Second, it implies the existence of a kind of epistemic blindspot: it is not possible to know that one’s evidence is misleading. (shrink)

In Time, Existential Presence and the Cinematic Image, Sam B. Girgus relates Laura Mulvey's theory of 'delayed cinema' to ideas on time and the relationship to the other in the writings of Jean-Luc Nancy, Emmanuel Levinas and Julia Kristeva, among others. The sustained tension in film between, in Mulvey's phrase, 'stillness and the moving image' enacts a drama of existential emergence. The stillness of the framed image in relation to the moving image opens 'free' cinematic time and space for a (...) fresh engagement with crucial ethical and cultural issues. With close readings of films such as The Bicycle Thieves, Two Days, One Night, The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada, The Revenant and The Age of Innocence, this book proposes a fresh approach to reading film in the context of emerging existential presence and the ethical imperative. (shrink)

Some critics argue that the types of psychiatric diagnosis found in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders and International Classification of Disease are superfluous and should be abandoned. These are known as categorical polythetic psychiatric diagnoses. To receive a categorical polythetic psychiatric diagnosis an individual need only exhibit some, rather than all, of the symptoms on the diagnostic criteria. Consequently, categorical polythetic psychiatric diagnoses only associate an individual with a range of symptoms rather than specify which symptoms they (...) have. Drawing on Giere’s account of scientific models, I portray categorical polythetic psychiatric diagnoses as abstract models that guide the building of less abstract models. These models can specify which symptoms a particular individual has. Additionally, categorical polythetic psychiatric diagnoses can guide investigation of symptoms towards difficult to spot symptoms, guide investigation towards changing symptoms, and guide investigation towards how symptoms manifest. These important roles mean categorical polythetic psychiatric diagnoses should not be abandoned. (shrink)