This chapter contains sections titled: Definitional Structure Probabilistic Structure Theory Structure Concepts Without Structure Rethinking Conceptual structure.

This is the first complete, one-volume English translation of the ancient Chinese text Xunzi, one of the most extensive, sophisticated, and elegant works in the tradition of Confucian thought. Through essays, poetry, dialogues, and anecdotes, the Xunzi articulates a Confucian perspective on ethics, politics, warfare, language, psychology, human nature, ritual, and music, among other topics. Aimed at general readers and students of Chinese thought, Eric Hutton's translation makes the full text of this important work more accessible in English than (...) ever before. Named for its purported author, the Xunzi has long been neglected compared to works such as the Analects of Confucius and the Mencius. Yet interest in the Xunzi has grown in recent decades, and the text presents a much more systematic vision of the Confucian ideal than the fragmented sayings of Confucius and Mencius. In one famous, explicit contrast to them, the Xunzi argues that human nature is bad. However, it also allows that people can become good through rituals and institutions established by earlier sages. Indeed, the main purpose of the Xunzi is to urge people to become as good as possible, both for their own sakes and for the sake of peace and order in the world. In this edition, key terms are consistently translated to aid understanding and line numbers are provided for easy reference. Other features include a concise introduction, a timeline of early Chinese history, a list of important names and terms, cross-references, brief explanatory notes, a bibliography, and an index. (shrink)

What is the source of aesthetic knowledge? Empirical knowledge, it is generally held, bottoms out in perception. Such knowledge can be transmitted to others through testimony, preserved by memory, and amplified via inference. But perception is where the rubber hits the road. What about aesthetic knowledge? Does it too bottom out in perception? Most say “yes”. But this is wrong. When it comes to aesthetic knowledge, it is appreciation, not perception, where the rubber hits the road. The ultimate source of (...) aesthetic knowledge is feeling. In this essay, we articulate and defend the very idea of affective knowledge and reveal aesthetic knowledge to be a species of the genus. We then show how the view resolves a thorny problem that has bedeviled aesthetic epistemologists: how to reconcile the seemingly direct character of aesthetic knowledge with the possibility of acquiring such knowledge from criticism. One learns from criticism, we argue, when it guides one’s engagement with an object so that one can appreciate it in virtue of those of its features that render it worthy of appreciation. (shrink)

A Bayesian mind is, at its core, a rational mind. Bayesianism is thus well-suited to predict and explain mental processes that best exemplify our ability to be rational. However, evidence from belief acquisition and change appears to show that we do not acquire and update information in a Bayesian way. Instead, the principles of belief acquisition and updating seem grounded in maintaining a psychological immune system rather than in approximating a Bayesian processor.

Conscious states—state that there is something it is like to be in—seem both rich or full of detail and ineffable or hard to fully describe or recall. The problem of ineffability, in particular, is a longstanding issue in philosophy that partly motivates the explanatory gap: the belief that consciousness cannot be reduced to underlying physical processes. Here, we provide an information theoretic dynamical systems perspective on the richness and ineffability of consciousness. In our framework, the richness of conscious experience corresponds (...) to the amount of information in a conscious state and ineffability corresponds to the amount of information lost at different stages of processing. We describe how attractor dynamics in working memory would induce impoverished recollections of our original experiences, how the discrete symbolic nature of language is insufficient for describing the rich and high-dimensional structure of experiences, and how similarity in the cognitive function of two individuals relates to improved communicability of their experiences to each other. While our model may not settle all questions relating to the explanatory gap, it makes progress toward a fully physicalist explanation of the richness and ineffability of conscious experience—two important aspects that seem to be part of what makes qualitative character so puzzling. (shrink)

Journal of Political Philosophy, Volume 29, Issue 4, Page 539-563, December 2021.

Analyticity, or the 'analytic/synthetic' distinction is one of the most important and controversial problems in contemporary philosophy. It is also essential to understanding many developments in logic, philosophy of language, epistemology and metaphysics. In this outstanding introduction to analyticity Cory Juhl and Eric Loomis cover the following key topics: The origins of analyticity in the philosophy of Hume and Kant Carnap's arguments concerning analyticity in the early twentieth century Quine's famous objections to analyticity in his classic 'Two Dogmas of (...) Empiricism' essay The relationship between analyticity and central issues in metaphysics, such as ontology The relationship between analyticity and epistemology Analyticity in the context of the current debates in philosophy, including mathematics and ontology Throughout the book the authors show how many philosophical controversies hinge on the problem of analyticity. Additional features include chapter summaries, annotated further reading and a glossary of technical terms making the book ideal to those coming to the problem for the first time. (shrink)

I present a novel position vis-à-vis the views in the Latin American philosophy literature regarding whether subjects more aptly use "Hispanic" or "Latinx" to refer to Hispanic- or-Latinx people. To this end, I will argue (C) the term "Afro-Latinx" is more apt than "Hispanic" or "Latinx" in a significant number of cases. This conclusion is based on three premises. The first premise (P1) is that use of "Afro-Latinx" provides subjects with understanding of how certain events depend on anti-Black racism, US (...) society's racially unjust structure and US colonial policy. The second premise (P2) is that that neither the term "Hispanic" nor the term "Latinx" provide subjects with this understanding of how certain events depend on anti-Black racism, US society's racially unjust structure and US colonial policy. The third premise (P3) is that the term "Afro-Latinx" provides subjects with more understanding of these events than the terms, "Hispanic" and "Latinx.” I present three cases which feature the experiences of Afro-Dominican people. The 1992 murder of Dominican man Kiko García by New York Police officer O’Keefe is first case. The second case is the Washington Heights Uprising that ensued Kiko García’ murder. An instance where a nightclub bouncer in the Dominican Republic denies a Dominican women entry because of her hair texture composes the third case. (shrink)

In Minker and Rajasekar (J Log Program 9(1):45–74, 1990), Minker proposed a semantics for negation-free disjunctive logic programs that offers a natural generalisation of the fixed point semantics for definite logic programs. We show that this semantics can be further generalised for disjunctive logic programs with classical negation, in a constructive modal-theoretic framework where rules are built from _claims_ and _hypotheses_, namely, formulas of the form \(\Box \varphi \) and \(\Diamond \Box \varphi \) where \(\varphi \) is a literal, respectively, (...) yielding a “base semantics” for general disjunctive logic programs. Model-theoretically, this base semantics is expressed in terms of a classical notion of logical consequence. It has a complete proof procedure based on a general form of the cut rule. Usually, alternative semantics of logic programs amount to a particular interpretation of nonclassical negation as “failure to derive.” The counterpart in our framework is to complement the original program with a set of hypotheses required to satisfy specific conditions, and apply the base semantics to the resulting set. We demonstrate the approach for the answer set semantics. The proposed framework is purely classical in mainly three ways. First, it uses classical negation as unique form of negation. Second, it advocates the computation of logical consequences rather than of particular models. Third, it makes no reference to a notion of preferred or minimal interpretation. (shrink)

Since the inception of large‐scale human genome research, there has been much caution about the risks of exacerbating a number of socially dangerous attitudes linked to human genetics. These attitudes are usually labeled with one of a family of genetic or genomic “isms” or “ations” such as “genetic essentialism,” “genetic determinism,” “genetic reductionism,” “geneticization,” “genetic stigmatization,” and “genetic discrimination.” The psychosocial processes these terms refer to are taken to exacerbate several ills that are similarly labeled, from medical racism and psychological (...) fatalism to economic exploitation and social exclusion. But as genomic information becomes more familiar in clinical and research settings as well as other life activities, do we need to continue to worry so much about this family of attitudes and their impact on existing problems?In genomics, the underlying anxiety has been that disclosure of genomic information will trigger a series of (seemingly unavoidable) negative responses that will affect individuals, their families, and their communities at large. The fundamental social challenges that hyperbolic genomic messaging, low genomic literacy, and “folk biology” help sustain remain to be addressed. If we hope to break the cycle of genomic isms and ations, we will have to get better at resisting overinterpretations of the relevance that genomics has for people’s future potentials, ancestral vulnerabilities, community memberships, and ethnic affiliations. (shrink)

Physicians place significant weight on the distinction between acts and omissions. Most believe that autonomous refusals for procedures, such as blood transfusions and resuscitation, ought to be respected, but they feel no similar obligation to accede to requests for treatment that will, in the physician’s opinion, harm the patient (e.g., assisted death). Thus, there is an asymmetry. In this paper, we challenge the strength of this distinction by arguing that the ordering of values should be the same in both cases. (...) The reason for respecting refusals is that, in such cases, autonomy outweighs well-being. We argue that the same should be true in request cases, which means that requests should not be denied only due to the treatment being too harmful in the physician’s opinion. Our strategy is to consider and reject a number of arguments for the asymmetrical view, including an appeal to the doing–allowing distinction and positive and negative rights. The duty to respect refusals is still greater than the duty to grant requests on our view, but, by arguing that the ordering of values is the same in both cases, we show that there is less of a distinction in healthcare between requests and refusals than many currently believe. (shrink)

I argue that Bartolomé de las Casas and Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda differed in their conclusions regarding the status of Indigenous persons at least partly because las Casas had significant, yet incomplete, understanding of Indigenous persons, culture and societies and Sepúlveda had mere knowledge of them. To this end, I show that the epistemic state of understanding explains why Las Casas properly concluded that Indigenous persons deserve the same moral status afforded to Europeans. And I show how las Casas’ understanding (...) of Indigenous persons, culture and societies related to what he got wrong about Indigenous persons. (shrink)

An enduring question in the philosophy of science is the question of whether a scientific theory deserves more credit for its successful predictions than it does for accommodating data that was already known when the theory was developed. In The Paradox of Predictivism, Eric Barnes argues that the successful prediction of evidence testifies to the general credibility of the predictor in a way that evidence does not when the evidence is used in the process of endorsing the theory. He (...) illustrates his argument with an important episode from nineteenth-century chemistry, Mendeleev's Periodic Law and its successful predictions of the existence of various elements. The consequences of this account of predictivism for the realist/anti-realist debate are considerable, and strengthen the status of the 'no miracle' argument for scientific realism. Barnes's important and original contribution to the debate will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy of science. (shrink)

The need for fair and just AI is often related to the possibility of understanding AI itself, in other words, of turning an opaque box into a glass box, as inspectable as possible. Transparency and explainability, however, pertain to the technical domain and to philosophy of science, thus leaving the ethics and epistemology of AI largely disconnected. To remedy this, we propose an integrated approach premised on the idea that a glass-box epistemology should explicitly consider how to incorporate values and (...) other normative considerations, such as intersectoral vulnerabilities, at critical stages of the whole process from design and implementation to use and assessment. To connect ethics and epistemology of AI, we perform a double shift of focus. First, we move from trusting the output of an AI system to trusting the process that leads to the outcome. Second, we move from expert assessment to more inclusive assessment strategies, aiming to facilitate expert and non-expert assessment. Together, these two moves yield a framework usable for experts and non-experts when they inquire into relevant epistemological and ethical aspects of AI systems. We dub our framework ‘epistemology-cum-ethics’ to signal the equal importance of both aspects. We develop it from the vantage point of the designers: how to create the conditions to internalize values into the whole process of design, implementation, use, and assessment of an AI system, in which values (epistemic and non-epistemic) are explicitly considered at each stage and inspectable by every salient actor involved at any moment. (shrink)

Standard conditionals $\varphi > \psi$, by which I roughly mean variably strict conditionals à la Stalnaker and Lewis, are trivially true for impossible antecedents. This article investigates three modifications in a doxastic setting. For the neutral conditional, all impossible-antecedent conditionals are false, for the doxastic conditional they are only true if the consequent is absolutely necessary, and for the metaphysical conditional only if the consequent is ‘model-implied’ by the antecedent. I motivate these conditionals logically, and also doxastically by properties of (...) conditional belief and belief revision. For this I show that the Lewisian hierarchy of conditional logics can be reproduced within ranking semantics, provided we slightly stretch the notion of a ranking function. Given this, acceptance of a conditional can be interpreted as a conditional belief. The epistemic and the neutral conditional deviate from Lewis’ weakest system $V$, in that ID or even CN are dropped, and new axioms appear. The logic of the metaphysical conditional is completely axiomatised by $V$ to which we add the known Kripke axioms T5 for the outer modality. Related completeness results for variations of the ranking semantics are obtained as corollaries. (shrink)

Foundational theories of mental content seek to identify the conditions under which a mental representation expresses, in the mind of a particular thinker, a particular content. Normativists endorse the following general sort of foundational theory of mental content: A mental representation r expresses concept C for agent S just in case S ought to use r in conformity with some particular pattern of use associated with C. In response to Normativist theories of content, Kathrin Glüer-Pagin and Åsa Wikforss propose a (...) dilemma, alleging that Normativism either entails a vicious regress or falls prey to a charge of idleness. In this paper, I respond to this argument. I argue that Normativism can avoid the commitments that generate the regress and does not propose the sort of explanation required to charge that its explanation has been shown to be problematically idle. The regress-generating commitment to be avoided is, roughly, that tokened, contentful mental states are the product of rule-following. The explanatory task Normativists should disavow is that of explaining how it is that beliefs and other contentful mental states are produced. I argue that Normativism, properly understood as a theory of content, does not provide this kind of psychological explanation, and therefore does not entail that such explanations are to be given in terms of rule-following. If this is correct, Normativism is not the proper target of the dilemma offered by Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss. Understanding why one might construe Normativism in the way Glüer-Pagin and Wikforss must, and how, properly understood, it avoids their dilemma, can help us to appreciate the attractiveness of a genuinely normative theory of content and the importance of paying careful attention to the sort of normativity involved in norm-based theories of content. (shrink)

An enduring question in the philosophy of science is the question of whether a scientific theory deserves more credit for its successful predictions than it does for accommodating data that was already known when the theory was developed. In The Paradox of Predictivism, Eric Barnes argues that the successful prediction of evidence testifies to the general credibility of the predictor in a way that evidence does not when the evidence is used in the process of endorsing the theory. He (...) illustrates his argument with an important episode from nineteenth-century chemistry, Mendeleev's Periodic Law and its successful predictions of the existence of various elements. The consequences of this account of predictivism for the realist/anti-realist debate are considerable, and strengthen the status of the 'no miracle' argument for scientific realism. Barnes's important and original contribution to the debate will interest a wide range of readers in philosophy of science. (shrink)

According to one interpretation of Aristotle’s famous thesis, to say that action is the conclusion of practical reasoning is to say that action is itself a judgment about what to do. A central motivation for the thesis is that it suggests a path for understanding the non-observational character of practical knowledge. If actions are judgments, then whatever explains an agent’s knowledge of the relevant judgment can explain her knowledge of the action. I call the approach to action that accepts Aristotle’s (...) thesis so understood Normativism. There are many reasons to doubt Normativism. My aim in this paper is to defend Normativism from a pair of arguments that purport to show that a normative judgment could not constitute an event in material reality and also the knowledge of such a happening. Both highlight a putative mismatch between the natures of, on the one hand, an agent’s knowledge of her normative judgment and, on the other, her knowledge of her own action. According to these objections, knowledge of action includes (a) perceptual knowledge and (b) knowledge of what one has already done. But knowledge of a normative judgment includes neither. Hence knowledge of action cannot simply be knowledge of a normative judgment. (shrink)

We argue that honesty in assertion requires non-empirical knowledge that what one asserts is what one believes. Our argument proceeds from the thought that to assert honestly, one must follow and not merely conform to the norm ‘Assert that p only if you believe that p’. Furthermore, careful consideration of cases shows that the sort of doxastic self-knowledge required for following this norm cannot be acquired on the basis of observation, inference, or any other form of detection of one’s own (...) doxastic states. It is, as we put it, transparent rather than empirical self-knowledge. (shrink)

People cannot contemplate a proposition without believing that proposition. A model of belief fixation is sketched and used to explain hitherto disparate, recalcitrant, and somewhat mysterious psychological phenomena and philosophical paradoxes. Toward this end I also contend that our intuitive understanding of the workings of introspection is mistaken. In particular, I argue that propositional attitudes are beyond the grasp of our introspective capacities. We learn about our beliefs from observing our behavior, not from introspecting our stock beliefs. -/- The model (...) of belief fixation offered in the dissertation poses a novel dilemma for theories of rationality. One might have thought that the ability to contemplate ideas while withholding assent is a necessary condition on rationality. In short, it seems that rational creatures shouldn‘t just form their beliefs based on whatever they happen to think. However, it seems that we are creatures that automatically and reflexively form our beliefs based on whatever propositions we happen to consider. Thus, either the rational requirement that states that we must have evidence for our beliefs must be jettisoned or we must accept the conclusion that we are necessarily irrational. (shrink)

A collection of quirky, entertaining, and reader-friendly short pieces on philosophical topics that range from a theory of jerks to the ethics of ethicists. Have you ever wondered about why some people are jerks? Asked whether your driverless car should kill you so that others may live? Found a robot adorable? Considered the ethics of professional ethicists? Reflected on the philosophy of hair? In this engaging, entertaining, and enlightening book, Eric Schwitzgebel turns a philosopher's eye on these and other (...) burning questions. In a series of quirky and accessible short pieces that cover a mind-boggling variety of philosophical topics, Schwitzgebel offers incisive takes on matters both small and large. A common theme might be the ragged edge of the human intellect, where moral or philosophical reflection begins to turn against itself, lost among doubts and improbable conclusions. The history of philosophy is humbling when we see how badly wrong previous thinkers have been, despite their intellectual skills and confidence. Some of the texts resist thematic categorization—thoughts on the philosophical implications of dreidels, the diminishing offensiveness of the most profane profanity, and fatherly optimism—but are no less interesting. Schwitzgebel has selected these pieces from the more than one thousand that have appeared since 2006 in various publications and on his popular blog, The Splintered Mind, revising and updating them for this book. Philosophy has never been this much fun. (shrink)

Common understandings of neuroethics, i.e., of its distinctive nature, are premised on two distinct sets of claims: (1) neuroscience can change views about the nature of ethics itself and neuroethics is dedicated to reaping such an understanding of ethics; (2) neuroscience poses challenges distinct from other areas of medicine and science and neuroethics tackles those issues. Critiques have rightfully challenged both claims, stressing how the first may lead to problematic forms of reductionism while the second relies on debatable assumptions about (...) the nature of bioethics specialization and development. Informed by philosophical pragmatism and our experience in neuroethics, we argue that these claims are ill-founded and should give way to pragmatist reconstructions. Namely, neuroscience, much like other areas of empirical research on morality, can provide useful information about the nature of morally problematic situations but it does not need to promise radical and sweeping changes to ethics based on neuroscientism. Furthermore, the rationale for the development of neuroethics as a specialized field need not to be premised on the distinctive nature of the issues it tackles or of neurotechnologies. Rather, it can espouse an understanding of neuroethics as both a scholarly and a practical endeavor dedicated to resolving a series of problematic situations raised by neurological and psychiatric conditions. (shrink)

Tracer des ponts entre la philosophie et la théologie, à travers un discours qui ne sacrifie jamais la raison sur l'autel de la foi, mais qui utilise l'éclairage de la Parole de Dieu pour stimuler la réflexion philosophique, tel est le pari de Charles-Éric de Saint Germain dans ses Écrits philosophico-théologiques sur le christianisme.

In this introduction to the life and thought of one of the most important French thinkers of the twentieth-century Eric Matthews shows how Merleau-Ponty has contributed to current debates in philosophy, such as the nature of consciousness, the relation between biology and personality, the historical understanding of human thought and society, and many others. Surveying the whole range of Merleau-Ponty's thinking, the author examines his views about the nature of phenomenology and the primacy of perception; his account of human (...) embodiment, being-in-the-world, and his understanding of human behaviour; his conception of the self and its relation to other selves; and, his views on society, politics, and the arts. A final chapter considers his later thought, published posthumously. The ideas of Merleau-Ponty are shown to be of immense importance to the development of French philosophy and the author evaluates his distinctive contributions and relates his thought to that of his predecessors, contemporaries and successors, both in France and elsewhere. This unrivalled introduction will be welcomed by philosophers and cognitive scientists as well as students taking courses in contemporary continental philosophy. (shrink)

In his _Duino Elegies,_ Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the _creaturely_—have a biopolitical aspect: (...) they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, _On Creaturely Life_ is also a significant contribution to critical theory. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMany philosophers say that the nature of personal identity has to do with narratives: the stories we tell about ourselves. While different narrativists address different questions of personal identity, some propose narrativist accounts of personal identity over time. The paper argues that such accounts have troubling consequences about the beginning and end of our lives, lead to inconsistencies, and involve backwards causation. The problems can be solved, but only by modifying the accounts in ways that deprive them of their appeal.

According to Eric Olson, the Thinking Animal Argument (TAA) is the best reason to accept animalism, the view that we are identical to animals. A novel criticism has been advanced against TAA, suggesting that it implicitly employs a dubious epistemological principle. I will argue that other epistemological principles can do the trick of saving the TAA, principles that appeal to recent issues regarding disagreement with peers and experts. I conclude with some remarks about the consequence of accepting these modified (...) principles, drawing out some general morals in defending animalism. (shrink)

In this wide-ranging and authoritative volume, leading scholars engage with the philosophy and writings of Wilhelm Dilthey, a key figure in nineteenth-century thought. Their chapters cover his innovative philosophical strategies and explore how they can be understood in relation to their historical situation, as well as presenting incisive interpretations of Dilthey's arguments, including their development, their content, and their influence on later thought. A key focus is on how Dilthey's work remains relevant to current debates around art and literature, the (...) biographical and autobiographical self, knowledge, language, science, culture, history, society, and psychology and the embodied mind. The volume will be important for researchers in hermeneutics, aesthetics, practical philosophy, and the history of German philosophy, providing a valuable introduction to Dilthey's work as well as detailed critical analysis of its ongoing significance. (shrink)

The concept of vulnerability is widely used in research ethics to signal attention to participants who require special protections in research. However, this concept is vague and under‐theorized. There is also growing concern that the dominant categorical approach to vulnerability (as exemplified by research ethics regulations and guidelines delineating vulnerable groups) is ethically problematic because of its assumptions about groups of people and is, in fact, not very guiding. An agreed‐upon strategy is to move from categorical towards analytical approaches (focused (...) on analyzing types and sources of vulnerability) to vulnerability. Beyond this agreement, however, scholars have been advancing competing accounts of vulnerability without consensus about its appropriate operationalization in research ethics. Based on previous debates, we propose that a comprehensive account of vulnerability for research ethics must include four components: definition, normative justifications, application, and implications. Concluding that no existing accounts integrate these components in a functional (i.e., practically applicable) manner, we propose an integrative and functional account of vulnerability inspired by pragmatist theory and enriched by bioethics literature. Using an example of research on deep brain stimulation for treatment‐resistant depression, we illustrate how the integrative‐functional account can guide the analysis of vulnerability in research within a pragmatist, evidence‐based approach to research ethics. While ultimately there are concerns to be addressed in existing research ethics guidelines on vulnerability, the integrative‐functional account can serve as an analytic tool to help researchers, research ethics boards, and other relevant actors fill in the gaps in the current landscape of research ethics governance. (shrink)

Can we build machines with which we can have interesting conversations? Observing the new optimism of AI regarding deep learning and new language models, we set ourselves an ambitious goal: We want to find out how far we can get in creating a digital replica of a philosopher. This project has two aims; one more technical, investigating of how the best model can be built. The other one, more philosophical, explores the limits and risks which are accompanied by the creation (...) of digital replicas. In cooperation with Daniel Dennett, we took his complete works to fine-tune a GPT-3. In this paper, we share our first results with some piloting models and discuss legal and ethical questions about creating and interacting with digital replicas. (shrink)

The paper discusses the pros and cons of inductive research methods. It is argued that, despite the profusion of good arguments against this scientific strategy, it is frequently employed, for example in psychology. A case probe taken from the realm of cognitive psychology is used as an illustration.

There are multiple formal characterizations of the natural numbers available. Despite being inter-derivable, they plausibly codify different possible applications of the naturals – doing basic arithmetic, counting, and ordering – as well as different philosophical conceptions of those numbers: structuralist, cardinal, and ordinal. Some influential philosophers of mathematics have argued for a non-egalitarian attitude according to which one of those characterizations is ‘more basic’ or ‘more fundamental’ than the others. This paper addresses two related issues. First, we review some of (...) these non-egalitarian arguments, lay out a laundry list of different, legitimate, notions of relative priority, and suggest that these arguments plausibly employ different such notions. Secondly, we argue that given a metaphysical-cum-epistemological gloss suggested by Frege's foundationalist epistemology, the ordinals are plausibly more basic than the cardinals. This is just one orientation to relative priority one could take, however. Ultimately, we subscribe to an egalitarian attitude towards these formal characterizations: they are, in some sense, equally ‘legitimate’. (shrink)

In Charles Mills’ essay, “White Ignorance,” and his trail-blazing monograph, The Racial Contract, he developed a view of how Whiteness or anti-Black-Indigenous-and-Latinx racism causes individuals to hold false beliefs or lack beliefs about racial injustice in particular and the world in general. I will defend a novel exegetical claim that Mills’ view is part of a more general view regarding how racial injustice can affect a subject’s epistemic standing such as whether they are justified in a belief and whether their (...) degree of confidence in the belief is rational given their evidence. Then, in light of this novel exegetical claim, I show how this interpretation of Mills’ view that racial injustice causes ignorance relates to how epistemically justified philosophers and social scientists are in the views that dominate their respective scholarly literature. (shrink)

In _Civilization and Its Discontents_, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. “Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it,” he proposed, “as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment.” After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, and Stalinism, Leviticus 19:18 seems even (...) less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In _The Neighbor_, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt’s political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In “Miracles Happen,” Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek’s “Neighbors and Other Monsters” reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, _The Neighbor_ has proven to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. This new edition contains a new preface by the authors. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Spring Fishing Song, Prehistoric Paros JOHN ERIC HAMEL Come, tuna, iridescent whorl, Spin color through our rain-locked sea. Come, scatter winter’s smoke and spitting hail, The brazier’s headache, days of coiling clay, The endless shuttle. Let the restless needle be. Come, return the sea to life. The days of winter card our limbs to rope. Restore the muscle with your flesh, unfurl The cold’s crushing boredom into the (...) sun. We’ve burnished long enough our winter soul. The heat begins to double back. The stars That mark the Oar re-stroke at last the salt. All turns. By island and straight you loop and belt, In time with star and turning tide. Shake sail, Bring oar and rope. The barley weaves new fleece. Come, bless our boats, wake us from the hours Of dropping lines over bleached gunnel, The nights of damp and cold breathing sea. Raw mackerel for days to eat, until A line is bumped like a lover’s finger touch, And fins cut water fast as breakers flash. The circled sea within our fleet erupts With flailing fins as sharp as swords. We gaff the bleeding gills into our boats. arion 28.3 winter 2021 44 spring fishing song, prehistoric paros Come, strong fish with gemstone scale, Blow on the coals of our blood, renew our strength. The deep obsidian light of winter clouds Begins to pour molten copper thick as oil All down the sea. We’re born for sails and shrouds, We’re born in waters of a mother’s wave, And return our marble souls into the grave. 2017... (shrink)

Machine learning operates at the intersection of statistics and computer science. This raises the question as to its underlying methodology. While much emphasis has been put on the close link between the process of learning from data and induction, the falsificationist component of machine learning has received minor attention. In this paper, we argue that the idea of falsification is central to the methodology of machine learning. It is commonly thought that machine learning algorithms infer general prediction rules from past (...) observations. This is akin to a statistical procedure by which estimates are obtained from a sample of data. But machine learning algorithms can also be described as choosing one prediction rule from an entire class of functions. In particular, the algorithm that determines the weights of an artificial neural network operates by empirical risk minimization and rejects prediction rules that lack empirical adequacy. It also exhibits a behavior of implicit regularization that pushes hypothesis choice toward simpler prediction rules. We argue that taking both aspects together gives rise to a falsificationist account of artificial neural networks. (shrink)

In Sisyphus's Boulder, Eric Dietrich and Valerie Hardcastle argue that we will never get such a theory because consciousness has an essential property that..

Though Kant is best known for his strictly philosophical works in the 1780s, many of his early publications in particular were devoted to what we would call 'natural science'. Kant's Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens made a significant advance in cosmology, and he was also instrumental in establishing the newly emerging discipline of physical geography, lecturing on it for almost his entire career. In this volume Eric Watkins brings together new English translations of Kant's first publication, (...) Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces, the entirety of Physical Geography, a series of shorter essays, along with many of Kant's most important publications in natural science. The volume is rich in material for the student and the scholar, with extensive linguistic and explanatory notes, editorial introductions and a glossary of key terms. (shrink)

Theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future. Not long ago, a melancholic left and a manic neoliberalism seemed to arrive at an awkward consensus: the foreclosure of futurity. Whereas the former mourned the failure of its utopian project, the latter celebrated the triumph of a global marketplace. The radical hope of realizing a singularly different, more equitable future displaced by a belief that the future had already come to pass, limiting post-historical society to (...) an uneventful life of endless accumulation. Today, amidst an abundance of neofuturisms, posthumanisms, futurologies, speculative philosophies and accelerationist scenarios, there is as well an expanding awareness of a looming planetary catastrophe driven by the extractionist logic of capitalism. Despite this return to the future, the temporal horizon of our present moment is perhaps more aptly characterized by the “shrinking future” of just-in-time production, risk management, high-frequency trading, and the futures market. In Futurity Report, theorists, historians, and artists address the precarious futurity of the notion of the future itself. Contributors McKenzie Wark, China Miéville, Kerstin Stakemeier, Diedrich Diederichsen, Natascha Sadr Haghighian, Marina Vishmidt, Johannes Paul Raether, Felicity D. Scott, Silvia Maglioni, Graeme Thomson, Doreen Mende, Pedro Neves Marques, Achille Mbembe, Kodwo Eshun, Haytham El-Wardany, T. J. Demos, Ana Teixeira Pinto. (shrink)

This volume examines the nature of interpretation, strategies within interpretation, and negotiations about the adequacy of an interpretation, with special attention paid to possible roles interpretation plays in the academic study of religions. Each chapter of this book refines a conceptual element that combines with others into a theory of interpretation useful for the classroom and in scholarship on hermeneutics.

I want to know whether Chan masters and students depicted in classical Chan transmission literature can be interpreted as asking open (or what I will call “genuine”) questions. My task is significant because asking genuine questions appears to be a decisive factor in ascertaining whether these figures represent models for dialogue—the kind of dialogue championed in democratic society and valued by promoters of interreligious exchange. My study also contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of early Chan not only by detailing (...) contrasts between contemporary interests and classical Chan, but more importantly by paying greater attention to the role language and rhetoric play in classical Chan. What roles do questions play in Chan encounter dialogues, and are any of the questions genuine? Is there anything about the conventions of the genre that keeps readers from interpreting some questions in this way? To address these topics, I will proceed as follows. First, on a global level and for critical-historical context, I survey Chan transmission literature of the Song dynasty in which encounter dialogues appear, and their role in developments of Chan/Zen traditions. Second, I zoom in on structural elements of encounter dialogues in particular as a genre. Third, aligning with the trajectory of performative analyses of Chan literature called for by Sharf and Faure, I turn to develop and criticize a performative model of questions from resources in recent analytic and continental philosophy of language and I apply that model to some questions in encounter dialogue literature. (shrink)

Some worry that offering too much money to participate in medical research can seduce people into participating against their better judgment. These overly attractive offers that impair judgment are often referred to as ‘undue inducements’. The current approach to prevent undue inducement is to limit the size of such offers. The hope is that smaller offers will not be attractive enough to impair judgment. Even if this is true, I argue that we should reject this solution. In Section 1, I (...) go over the problem of undue inducement, and our current approach to preventing it, in more detail. In Section 2, I argue that, like money, therapeutic benefits of medical research may also unduly induce. In Section 3, I argue that the current approach to preventing undue inducement is absurd in the case of therapeutic inducements. In Section 4, I argue that our current approach is analogously problematic in the case of monetary inducements. (shrink)