"The Manipulation Argument has recently taken center stage in the free-will debate, yet little else can be said of this newcomer that is uncontroversial. At present, even the most fundamental elements of the Manipulation Argument--its structure, conclusion, and target audience--are a matter of dispute. As such, we cannot begin, as we ideally would, with a simple and relatively uncontroversial overview of the argument. Instead, clarifying the debate over the basic structure and general conclusion of the Manipulation Argument will be our (...) goal." -/- UPDATE: I now refer to an isolated objection to the counterexample step as a hardline reply, an isolated attack on the generalization step a softline reply, and an isolated response to the explanation step as an "al dente" reply. Al dente replies have been given in Mele's 2005 critique of the Four-Case Argument and my 2015 (2012) critique of Mele's Zygote Argument. I also now refer to a manipulation argument which has a generalization step that concludes to impossibilism and an explanation step which proposes an explanation for the impossibility of free will as a "Master Manipulation Argument" (examples of master manipulation arguments include Mickelson 2015 and 2019). (shrink)

David Bridges; Education, Women and Human Nature, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 11, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 136–143, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.

John Wilson; Rationality and Moral Education, Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 11, Issue 1, 30 May 2006, Pages 98–112, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-.

Is the procreation asymmetry intuitively supported? According to a recent article in this journal, an experimental study suggests the opposite. Dean Spears (2020) claims that nearly three-quarters of participants report that there is a reason to create a person just because that person’s life would be happy. In reply, I argue that various confounding factors render the study internally invalid. More generally, I show how one might come to adopt the procreation asymmetry for the wrong reasons by misinterpreting one’s (...) intuitions. (shrink)

A set of replies to critics of my 2021 book 'The Fiery Test of Critique: A Reading of Kant's Dialectic' (OUP). -/- The criticisms are based on talks given at an Author-meets-critics symposium at Princeton University on April 22nd, 2023. The critics are: Beatrice Longuenesse, Patricia Kitcher, Allen Wood, Des Hogan, and Anja Jauernig.

Reply to commentators on the paper 'Realistic monism: why physicalism entails panpsychism'.

Szabó follows Heim in viewing familiarity, rather than uniqueness, as the essence of the definite article, but attempts to derive both familiarity and uniqueness implications pragmatically, assigning a single semantic interpretation to both the definite and indefinite articles. I argue that if there is no semantic distinction between the articles, then there is no way to derive these differences between them pragmatically.

ABSTRACTAndrew Bacon, Matti Eklund, and Patrick Greenough have individually proposed objections to the project in my book, Replacing Truth. Briefly, the book outlines a conceptual engineering project – our defective concept of truth is replaced for certain purposes with a team of concepts that can do some of the jobs we thought truth could do. Here, I respond to their objections and develop the views expressed in Replacing Truth in various ways.

Healey (2019a) makes four comments on my (Park, 2019a) objections to van Fraassen’s positions. The four comments concern the issues of whether ‘disbelief’ is appropriate or inappropriate to characterize van Fraassen’s position, what the relationship between a theory and models is for van Fraassen, whether he believes or not that a theory is empirically adequate, and whether destructive empiricism is tenable or not. I reply to those comments in this paper.

This paper responds to the contributions by Alexander Bird, Nathan Wildman, David Yates, Jennifer McKitrick, Giacomo Giannini & Matthew Tugby, and Jennifer Wang. I react to their comments on my 2015 book Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality, and in doing so expands on some of the arguments and ideas of the book.

"The Uneasy Heirs of Acquaintance" is my first-round contribution to a 4-way exchange with Bill Brewer, Anil Gupta, and John McDowell. In the first round, each of us writes a commentary on the other three, and in the second round we reply to each other's first-round contributions. This is my second-round contribution.

In these replies, I shall respond to criticisms offered by Kaczor and Rodger to my article titled “Ectogestation and the Problem of Abortion.” In the process, I shall also try to bring into focus why the possibility of ectogestation will radically alter the shape of the abortion debate.

강병호는 자신의 논문에서 호네트의 인정도덕 구상이 드러나는 모든 글을 체계적으로 검토하여, 칸트의 의무론적 요소를 발굴하고, 칸트의 존중개념을 통해 이를 의무론적으로 재구조화하겠다고 한다. 그리고 강병호는 이를 국내에서도 국외에서도 드문 시도라고 자평하면서, 호네트를 비롯한 국내 연구자들에게 대한 신랄한 비판을 가한다. 본 논문에서는 강병호의 주장과 비판이 과연 정당한지를 검토하기 위해, 첫째, 강병호의 비판 대상이 되는 호네트의 인정도덕 구상이 어떤 것인지 소개할 것이다. 그리고 이에 이어서 둘째, 호네트가 칸트의 의무론적 요소를 경시했고, 도덕에 대한 기능주의적 파악과 규범적 정당화를 범주적으로 혼동했다는 강병호의 비판이 과연 정당한지를 살펴볼 (...) 것이다. 그리고 끝으로 강병호가 칸트의 존중 개념을 통해 인정이론을 재구조화한다는 것이 과연 무엇을 의미하는지를 검토하면서 그 타당성을 따져 볼 것이다. (shrink)

Reply to criticsThe replies in this symposium are some of the most insightful contributions to contemporary metaphilosophy I have read. I wish I had seen them before I wrote Philosophy without Intuitions . It would have made it a better book. I also wish I had space to explore all the important issues raised, but unfortunately, the focus here will have to be on points of disagreement. The replies build on each other—I draw on material from the earlier replies (...) in the later ones. It is possible to read each reply in isolation, but they are best read in sequence.Socratic knowledge and its role in philosophy: Reply to WeathersonWeatherson presents one of the most interesting accounts of the role of intuitions in philosophy that I have encountered. For Weatherson, the role is limited, fragile, and elusive .One of the most interesting ideas in the paper is that “the important intuitions are the ones you bar .. (shrink)

Persons and Bodies develops and defends an account of persons and of the relation between human persons and their bodies. Human persons are constituted by bodies, without being identical to the bodies that constitute them—just as, I argue, statues are constituted by pieces of bronze, say, without being identical to the pieces of bronze that constitute them. The relation of constitution, therefore, is not peculiar to persons and their bodies, but is pervasive in the natural world.

A reply to Fine’s critique of Aboutness. Fine contrasts two notions of truthmaker, and more generally two notions of “state.” One is algebraic; states are sui generis entities grasped primarily through the conditions they satisfy. The other uses set theory; states are sets of worlds, or, perhaps, collections of such sets. I try to defend the second notion and question some seeming advantages of the first.

Here I reply to criticisms by Jeroen de Ridder and S. Kate Devitt to my "Collective (Telic) Virtue Epistemology".

The author of Categories We Live By replies to critics Linda Martín Alcoff, Judith Butler, and Abraham Sesshu Roth.

Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu respond to my paper “Valuing Disability, Causing Disability” by arguing that my assessment of objections to the mere-difference view of disability is unconvincing and fails to explain their conviction that it is impermissible to cause disability. In reply, I argue that their response misconstrues, somewhat radically, both what I say in my paper and the commitments of the mere-difference view more generally. It also fails to adequately appreciate the unique epistemic factors present in philosophical (...) discussions of disability. (shrink)