We propose category theory, the mathematical theory of structure, as a vehicle for defining ontologies in an unambiguous language with analytical and constructive features. Specifically, we apply categorical logic and model theory, based upon viewing an ontology as a sub-category of a category of theories expressed in a formal logic. In addition to providing mathematical rigor, this approach has several advantages. It allows the incremental analysis of ontologies by basing them in an interconnected hierarchy of theories, with an operation on (...) the hierarchy that expresses the formation of complex theories from simple theories that express first principles. Another operation forms abstractions expressing the shared concepts in an array of theories. The use of categorical model theory makes possible the incremental analysis of possible worlds, or instances, for the theories, and the mapping of instances of a theory to instances of its more abstract parts. We describe the theoretical approach by applying it to the semantics of neural networks. (shrink)

This thesis examines how association football evolved in Liverpool in the period before the Great War, and how the sport impacted on the lives of Liverpudlians during this period. Specific consideration is given in the first two chapters to the introduction of football to Liverpool and its progressive commercialisation. The third chapter examines the backgrounds of the city's professional footballers and their relationship with supporters and clubs. The role in Liverpool of amateur, semi-professional, and schoolboy football is considered in the (...) fourth chapter. Identities form a common theme of the final chapters, which examine the local culture of football supporters and newspapers' relationship with the game. The study uses a wide range of primary and secondary sources, including some previously unconsidered evidence. It is argued that previous interpretations of the sport's introduction are misleading and that football actually originated as a Muscular Christian initiative by Cambridge educated clergy at the end of the 1870s. Despite this comparatively late introduction, political and business interests influenced football, and in Liverpool the sport underwent an intense process of commercialisation. Profit seems to have been a priority for the original Everton FC and its positive commercial prognosis led to the club's selection as a founder member of the Football League. The scale of importation of professional footballers by Everton and Liverpool football clubs was to the detriment of local talent, although the city's amateur game was thriving by the 1900s. Though football was immensely popular in Liverpool, the city's unusual social and economic demography meant that a significant proportion of its population were unable to attend professional matches, or to make a significant contribution to the amateur game. From the 1900s, attendances in Liverpool grew more slowly as major football clubs in other cities attracted more spectators. (shrink)

The chair of the ethics committee of a major medical center agonized over how he, as a physician, and his organization should deal with Initiative 119, which, if passed, would legalize physician involvement in active, voluntary euthanasia in Washington State. In the end, he said, he could not vote for aid-in-dying because, “However much I want to reduce suffering, I myself just couldn’t do it to one of my patients.” He spoke of a personal distaste for the potential act, of (...) a profound desire not to have to do it. It was not an ethical argument, but an honest and compelling expression of feelings.Why can’t this sincere man do it, even for patients who request such aid? In a 1991 poll, taken in Washington State prior to the vote on Initiative 119, 49 percent of the physicians surveyed supported the initiative, but 75 percent did not want to participate in aid-in-dying. (shrink)

The chair of the ethics committee of a major medical center agonized over how he, as a physician, and his organization should deal with Initiative 119, which, if passed, would legalize physician involvement in active, voluntary euthanasia in Washington State. In the end, he said, he could not vote for aid-in-dying because, “However much I want to reduce suffering, I myself just couldn’t do it to one of my patients.” He spoke of a personal distaste for the potential act, of (...) a profound desire not to have to do it. It was not an ethical argument, but an honest and compelling expression of feelings.Why can’t this sincere man do it, even for patients who request such aid? In a 1991 poll, taken in Washington State prior to the vote on Initiative 119, 49 percent of the physicians surveyed supported the initiative, but 75 percent did not want to participate in aid-in-dying. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Ethical Issues in Drug Testing, Approval and Pricing: The Clot‐Dissolving Drugs. By Baruch Brody.

The standard formulation of Newcomb's problem compares evidential and causal conceptions of expected utility, with those maximizing evidential expected utility tending to end up far richer. Thus, in a world in which agents face Newcomb problems, the evidential decision theorist might ask the causal decision theorist: "if you're so smart, why ain’cha rich?” Ultimately, however, the expected riches of evidential decision theorists in Newcomb problems do not vindicate their theory, because their success does not generalize. Consider a theory that allows (...) the agents who employ it to end up rich in worlds containing Newcomb problems and continues to outperform in other cases. This type of theory, which I call a “success-first” decision theory, is motivated by the desire to draw a tighter connection between rationality and success, rather than to support any particular account of expected utility. The primary aim of this paper is to provide a comprehensive justification of success-first decision theories as accounts of rational decision. I locate this justification in an experimental approach to decision theory supported by the aims of methodological naturalism. (shrink)

Book reviewed in this article: Ethical Issues in Drug Testing, Approval and Pricing: The Clot‐Dissolving Drugs. By Baruch Brody.

A school of thought traceable to the political writings of Bodin and Hobbes believes that "order" is the cardinal principle which takes precedence over "justice" - which is reduced to conformity. The main concern of this book is to analyse this tradition through study of its progenitors.

Thomas Hobbes is arguably the greatest of all English philosophers. In the second half of the twentieth century, he has been the subject of sustained critical attention. Hobbes was capable of powerful argument on virtually any level, whether logical, scriptural or historical. And he has attracted attention in all these areas and more questions of historical method, language and linguistics, metaphysics, ethics, law, politics, science and religion. Hobbes has been examined from a great variety of perspectives as an ethical (...) positivist and a deontologist, as a bourgeois advocate and a supporter of the aristocracy, as an absolutist and a proponent of parliamentary government, as a "conservative" and a "modern," as an atheist and a believer. The periodical literature on Hobbes is accordingly very rich, but it is also difficult to access. The four volumes of these critical assessments assemble an important array of material which will be invaluable to all students of Hobbes. (shrink)

Steve Fuller seeks to blame Kuhn for the present state of the philosophy of science. It has become ‘Kuhniferous’, he argues, both in structure and in content. I begin by taking issue with this judgement, suggesting that Kuhn wasn’t as influential as his realist and naturalist opponents. I then proceed to argue that Fuller fails to clinch one of his central charges, that Kuhn disconnected the philosophical defence of scientific progress from any substantive ends of science. Kuhn has a story (...) to tell here that should commend itself to Fuller’s ‘instrumentalist’ instincts. That Fuller doesn’t seem to recognise it, I suggest, is down to a certain sort of blindness to epistemological issues, a failure to appreciate that claims to epistemic progress on the part of science may be more than self-serving. (shrink)

When leading spectroscopists in Europe and America were engaged, during 1897, in exploring the recently-discovered Zeeman Effect, they were overtaken by a relatively obscure phsicist working in Dublin. Thomas Preston had previously been known only for his excellent textbooks. His achievement in discovering the Anomalous Zeeman Effect was immediately recognized, but his untimely death has deprived posterity until now of a full account of his life and qualities.

The sensory constraint on conscious thought says that if a thought is phenomenally conscious, its phenomenal properties must be reducible to some sensory phenomenal character. I argue that the burgeoning psychological literature on aphantasia, an impoverishment in the ability to generate mental imagery, provides a counterexample to the sensory constraint. The best explanation of aphantasics’ introspective reports, neuroimaging, and task performance is that some aphantasics have conscious thoughts without sensory mental imagery. This argument against the sensory constraint supports the existence (...) of a non-sensory phenomenology of thought. Moreover, this argument can be extended to show that this non-sensory phenomenology determines a thought content. Finally, it can potentially diagnose the disagreement over cognitive phenomenology in the philosophy of mind, as such disagreement may turn on interpersonal variation in mental imagery. (shrink)

Beginning from Hegel's notion of ethical life (Sittlichkeit) as a mode of consciousness governed by the norms of a historical community, this essay examines the role of education in shaping contemporary communities of autonomous people. It does so by defending a version of the idea that an educator has, among her other tasks, the role of helping her students appreciate the values that are shared across her community. In the course of the examination I relate this idea to trends in (...) the European Enlightenment, and I draw on research concerning political polarization in Europe and North America today and its impact on the academy. In the process I argue that the modern university educator has the task of cultivating in her students an attitude of critical inquiry whose results are not coerced by the social conditions under which that inquiry takes place, and I offer some pedagogical proposals for the university educator facing the situation we are today. (shrink)

This book is the first comprehensive critical study of the work of Paul Feyerabend, one of the foremost twentieth-century philosophers of science. The book traces the evolution of Feyerabend's thought, beginning with his early attempt to graft insights from Wittgenstein's conception of meaning onto Popper's falsificationist philosophy. The key elements of Feyerabend's model of the acquisition of knowledge are identified and critically evaluated. Feyerabend's early work emerges as a continuation of Popper's philosophy of science, rather than as a contribution to (...) the historical approach to science with which he is usually associated. In his more notorious later work, Feyerabend claimed that there was, and should be, no such thing as the scientific method. The roots of Feyerabend's 'epistemological anarchism' are exposed and the weaknesses of his cultural relativism are brought out. Throughout the book, Preston discusses the influence of Feyerabend's thought on contemporary philosophers and traces his stimulating but divided legacy. The book will be of interest to students of philosophy, methodology, and the social sciences. (shrink)

Issues of reliability are claiming center-stage in the epistemology of machine learning. This paper unifies different branches in the literature and points to promising research directions, whilst also providing an accessible introduction to key concepts in statistics and machine learning – as far as they are concerned with reliability.

It has widely been assumed, by philosophers, that our first-person preferences regarding pleasurable and painful experiences exhibit a bias toward the future (positive and negative hedonic future-bias), and that our preferences regarding non-hedonic events (both positive and negative) exhibit no such bias (non-hedonic time-neutrality). Further, it has been assumed that our third-person preferences are always time-neutral. Some have attempted to use these (presumed) differential patterns of future-bias—different across kinds of events and perspectives—to argue for the irrationality of hedonic future-bias. This (...) paper experimentally tests these descriptive hypotheses. While as predicted we found first-person hedonic future-bias, we did not find that participants were time-neutral in all other conditions. Hence, the presumed asymmetry of hedonic/non-hedonic and first/third-person preferences cannot be used to argue for the irrationality of future-bias, since no such asymmetries exist. Instead, we develop a more fine-grained approach, according to which three factors—positive/negative valence, first/third-person, and hedonic/non-hedonic—each independently influence, but do not determine, whether an event is treated in a future-biased or time-neutral way. We discuss the upshots of these results for the debate over the rationality of future-bias. (shrink)

Big Ideas for Little Kids includes everything a teacher, a parent, or a college student needs to teach philosophy to elementary school children from picture books. Written in a clear and accessible style, the book explains why it is important to allow young children access to philosophy during primary-school education. Wartenberg also gives advice on how to construct a "learner-centered" classroom, in which children discuss philosophical issues with one another as they respond to open-ended questions by saying whether they agree (...) or disagree with what others have said. (shrink)

Philosophers working on time-biases assume that people are hedonically biased toward the future. A hedonically future-biased agent prefers pleasurable experiences to be future instead of past, and painful experiences to be past instead of future. Philosophers further predict that this bias is strong enough to apply to unequal payoffs: people often prefer less pleasurable future experiences to more pleasurable past ones, and more painful past experiences to less painful future ones. In addition, philosophers have predicted that future-bias is restricted to (...) first-person preferences, and that people’s third-person preferences are time-neutral. Philosophers disagree vigorously about the normative status of these preferences—i.e., they disagree about whether first-person future-bias is rationally permissible. Time-neutralists, for example, have appealed to the predicted asymmetry between first- and third-person preferences to argue for the rational impermissibility of future-bias. We empirically tested these predictions, and found that while people do prefer more past pain to less future pain, they do not prefer less future pleasure to more past pleasure. This was so in both first and third-person conditions. This suggests that future-bias is typically non-absolute, and is more easily outweighed in the case of positive events. We connect this result to the normative debate over future-bias. (shrink)

This paper empirically investigates whether people’s implicit decision theory is more like causal decision theory or more like a non-causal decision theory (such as evidential decision theory). We also aim to determine whether implicit causalists, without prompting and without prior education, make a distinction that is crucial to causal decision theorists: preferring something _as a news item_ and preferring it _as an object of choice_. Finally, we investigate whether differences in people’s implicit decision theory correlate with differences in their level (...) of _future bias_: the preference for positively valenced events to be located in the future and not the past, and negatively valenced events to be located in the past and not the future. We find that people are overwhelmingly non-causalists. We also find that implicit causalists _do not_ make the distinction between news items and objects of choice, and that there is little to no correlation between people’s future bias and their implicit decision theory. We end by discussing the philosophical upshots of this work. (shrink)

I provide an analysis of Hegel's interpretation of the faith exemplified in Abraham's journey to Mt. Moriah to sacrifice his son. I do so by looking at changes in Hegel's discussion of this episode in the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion that were given over the last decade of his career. In the process of tracing the contours of the development of Hegel's thinking on this issue I argue that his social philosophy, on which persons are first and foremost (...) creatures of rational self-determination, is informed by his understanding of logic and metaphysics, and I suggest some of the rationalist and romantic elements animating Hegel's thought remain viable today. (shrink)

The phenomenal view of thought holds that thinking is an experience with phenomenal character that determines what the thought is about. This paper develops and responds to the objection that the phenomenal view is chauvinistic: it withholds thoughts from creatures that in fact have them. I develop four chauvinism objections to the phenomenal view—one from introspection, one from interpersonal differences, one from thought experiments, and one from the unconscious thought paradigm in psychology—and show that the phenomenal view can resist all (...) four. (shrink)

Reflecting on the months leading up to and following the 2016 United States presidential election, in an essay published in January of 2017 I argued that the left/right dichotomy of the Democrats and the Republicans was no longer carving at a joint of American politics (Stovall, 2017). Instead, it seemed a more salient political division in the U.S. was that between what I called the urban globalists and the non-urban nationalists. This essay situates the apparent conflict between urban globalism and (...) non-urban nationalism in the context of a development in European self-understanding owed to German idealism. I will articulate this self-understanding by relating it to the period of the European Enlightenment, and in the process I will argue that a theory of collective intentions may point the way toward a more thorough understanding of the phenomena that lie behind the growing opposition between nationalist and globalist tendencies in Europe and the United States today. (shrink)

In recent years, a disagreement has erupted between two camps of philosophers about the rationality of bias toward the near and bias toward the future. According to the traditional hybrid view, near bias is rationally impermissible, while future bias is either rationally permissible or obligatory. Time neutralists, meanwhile, argue that the hybrid view is untenable. They claim that those who reject near bias should reject both biases and embrace time neutrality. To date, experimental work has focused on future-directed near bias. (...) The primary aim of this paper is to shed light on the debate by investigating past-directed near bias. If people treat the past and future differently with respect to near bias, by being future-directed but not past-directed near biased, then this supports a particular version of the hybrid view: temporal metaphysic hybridism. If people treat the past and future the same with respect to near bias, then this supports a simple version of time neutralism, which explains both future bias and near bias in terms of the functioning of a single mechanism: the anticipatory/retrospectory mechanism. Our results undermine the claim that people are future-directed, but not past-directed, near biased, and hence do not support temporal metaphysic hybridism. They also fail to support simple time-neutralism; instead, they suggest that there are multiple mechanisms that differently shape future- and past-directed preferences. (shrink)