Effective Altruism encourages affluent people to make significant donations to improve the wellbeing of the world’s poor, using quantified and observational methods to identify the most efficient charities. Critics argue that EA is inattentive to the systemic causes of poverty and underestimates the effectiveness of individual contributions to systemic change. EA claims to be open to systemic change but suggests that systemic critiques, such as the socialist critique of capitalism, are unhelpfully vague and serve primarily as hypocritical rationalizations of continued (...) affluence. I reformulate the systemic change objection, rebut the charges of vagueness and bad faith and argue that charity may not be worth doing at all from a purely altruistic perspective. In order to take systemic change seriously, EA must repudiate its narrowly empiricist approach, embrace holistic, interpretive social analysis and make inevitably controversial judgments about the complex dynamics of collective action. These kinds of evidence and judgment cannot be empirically verified but are essential to taking systemic change seriously. EA is thereby forced to sacrifice its a-political approach to altruism. I also highlight the importance of quotidian, extra-political contributions to perpetuating or changing harmful social practices. Radical efforts to resist, subvert and reconstruct harmful social practices, such as those involved in economic decision-making, could be just as effective and demanding as charity. But such efforts may be incompatible with extensive philanthropy, because they can require people to retain some level of affluence for strategic reasons but to repudiate both the acquisition of significant wealth and charity as is currently organized. The wealth and status of some critics of charity may indeed be incompatible with effectively contributing to social change, but the altruistic merits of charity are neither as obvious nor as easily demonstrated as EA believes. (shrink)

Syme, Rodney Palliative care, founded by Cicely Saunders, a devout Christian, has grown from a single London hospice to a world-wide specialty with strong government support. It is one of the most important developments in modern medicine. It aims to provide compassionate and holistic care for the terminally ill. Nevertheless opposition on religious grounds to assisted-dying or hastening of death has been a core principle of palliative care from its origin, and persists today.

Necessitists hold that, necessarily, everything is such that, necessarily, something is identical to it. Timothy Williamson has posed a number of challenges to contingentism, the negation of necessitism. One such challenge is an argument that necessitists can more wholeheartedly embrace possible worlds semantics than can contingentists. If this charge is correct, then necessitists, but not contingentists, can unproblematically exploit the technical successes of possible worlds semantics. I will argue, however, that the charge is incorrect: contingentists can embrace possible worlds (...) semantics as wholeheartedly as necessitists. Williamson offers a criterion for a class of models of quantified modal logic to be intended, and argues on its basis that contingentists must deny that there is an intended class of models. I argue that Williamson’s criterion is objectionable, supply an alternative that does not support Williamson’s argument, and adapt Williamson’s construction of an intended model structure to the needs of contingentist metaphysics. (shrink)

In this paper I explore the connection between narrative ethics and the increasing emphasis on historical consciousness as a way to cultivate moral responsibility in history education. I use Timothy Findley’s World War I novel, The Wars, as an example of how teachers might help students to see history neither simply as a collection of artefacts from the past, nor as an effort to construct an objective view about what went on in those other times and places, but rather (...) as something that makes ethical demands on us here and now. Theoretically, this paper draws on Adam Zachary Newton’s conception of narrative ethics and Roger Simon’s conception of historical consciousness, both of which rest on the Levinasian themes of irreducible difference, the face, and subjectivity as a position of ethical responsibility to and for the other. (shrink)

This biographical essay covers the life and thought of British philosopher, Timothy Sprigge, including the development of his metaphysics and ethics.

An interview with Timothy Williamson on Modality and other matters. Williams is asked three main questions: the first about the difference between philosophical and non-philosophical knowledge, the second concerns the epistemology of modality, and the third is on the emerging metaphysical picture.

‘Bioethics still has important work to do in helping to secure status equality for LGBT people’ writes Timothy F. Murphy in a recent Bioethics editorial. The focus of his piece, however, is much narrower than human rights, medical care for LGBT people, or ending the HIV/AIDS pandemic. Rather, he is primarily concerned with sexuality and gender identity, and the medical intersections thereof. It is the objective of this response to provide an alternate account of bioethics from a Queer perspective. (...) I will situate Queer bioethics within Queer studies, and offer three ‘lessons’ that bioethics can derive from this perspective. These are not definitive rules for Queer bioethics, since it is a field which fundamentally opposes categorizations, favoring pastiche over principles. These lessons are exploratory examples, which both complement and contradict LGBT bioethics. My latter two lessons – on environmental bioethics and disability – overlap with some of Murphy's concerns, as well as other conceptions of LGBT bioethics. However, the first lesson takes an antithetical stance to Murphy's primary focus by resisting all forms of heteroconformity and disavowing reproduction as consonant with Queer objectives and theory. The first lesson, which doubles as a primer in Queer theory, does heavy philosophical lifting for the remainder of the essay. This response to Timothy F. Murphy, whose work is certainly a legacy in bioethics, reveals the multiplicity of discourses in LGBT/Queer studies, many of which are advantageous – even essential – to other disciplines like bioethics. (shrink)

In his essay ‘“Conceptual Truth”’, Timothy Williamson (2006) argues that there are no truths or entailments that are constitutive of understanding the sentences involved. In this reply I provide several examples of entailment patterns that are intuitively constitutive of understanding in just the way that Williamson rejects, and I argue that Williamson’s argument does nothing to show otherwise. Williamson bolsters his conclusion by appeal to a certain theory about the nature of understanding. I argue that his theory fails to (...) consider the role that the structure of a sentence plays in determining its meaning. The cases I present suggest that this role imposes greater cognitive requirements on understanding than Williamson can acknowledge. (shrink)

Timothy Michael Fowler has argued that, as a consequence of their commitment to neutrality in regard to comprehensive doctrines, political liberals face a dilemma. In essence, the dilemma for political liberals is that either they have to give up their commitment to neutrality (which is an indispensible part of their view), or they have to allow harm to children. Fowler’s case for this dilemma depends on ascribing to political liberals a view which grants parents a great degree of freedom (...) in deciding on the education of their children. I show that ascribing this view to political liberals rests upon a misinterpretation of political liberalism. Since political liberals have access to reasons based upon the interests of children, they need not yield to parent’s wishes about the education of their children. A correct understanding of political liberalism thus shows that political liberals do not face the dilemma envisaged by Fowler. (shrink)

A new book by Timothy Morton, Being Ecological, is reviewed. Being Ecological is a project into the ethics and discourse that emerge between speculative realism and ecological politics. This book is intended to build on the object-oriented ontology that Morton has espoused in previous volumes, however with a greater emphasis on the current state and future of ecological discussions. The book's core methodology is to outline the failures of the current modes of discussion environmental and ecological concerns and provide (...) ways of entering into a more authentic philosophical discussion. The book differs from Morton's usual verbose and highly poetic form in favor of a more grounded and accessible entry into his large project. (shrink)

In a well-known paper, Timothy Williamson claimed to prove with a coin-flipping example that infinitesimal-valued probabilities cannot save the principle of Regularity, because on pain of inconsistency the event ‘all tosses land heads’ must be assigned probability 0, whether the probability function is hyperreal-valued or not. A premise of Williamson’s argument is that two infinitary events in that example must be assigned the same probability because they are isomorphic. It was argued by Howson that the claim of isomorphism fails, (...) but a more radical objection to Williamson’s argument is that it had been, in effect, refuted long before it was published. (shrink)

This is a book review of "Theism and Ultimate Explanation", by Timothy O'Connor.

The claim that a miracle is a violation of a law of nature has sometimes been used as part of an a priori argument against the possibility of miracle, on the grounds that a violation is conceptually impossible. I criticize these accounts but also suggest that alternative accounts, when phrased in terms of laws of nature, fail to provide adequate conceptual space for miracles. It is not clear what a ???violation??? of a law of nature might be, but this is (...) not relevant to the question of miracles. In practice, accounts of miracle tend to be phrased in terms of God's act not in terms of laws of nature. Finally, I suggest that the a priori argument reflects an intellectual commitment that is widely held, though wrongly built into the argument itself. (shrink)

Even to disagree, we need to understand each other. If I reject what you say without understanding you, we will only have the illusion of a disagreement. You will be asserting one thing and I will be denying another. Even to disagree, we need some agreement.

Timothy Smiley has made ground-breaking contributions to modal logic, free logic, multiple-conclusion logic, and plural logic. He has illuminated Aristotle’s syllogistic, the ideas of logical form and consequence, and the distinction between assertion and rejection, and has worked to debunk the theory of descriptions. This volume brings together new articles by an international roster of leading logicians and philosophers in order to honour Smiley’s work. Their essays will be of significant interest to those working across the logical spectrum—in philosophy (...) of language, philosophical and mathematical logic, and philosophy of mathematics. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson (2002) has offered an argument for the claim that, necessarily, he exists, that is, that he is a necessary existent.1 Though this argument has attracted a great deal of attention (e.g., Rumfitt 2003 and Wiggins 2003), I present a new argument for the same conclusion which reveals a new way of denying the soundness of Williamson’s argument, one which denies not only that it is necessary that he exists but also that there are any true necessities about (...) Williamson at all. In conclusion, given that it is contingent that Williamson exists, I nevertheless distinguish a sense in which he is, after all, a necessary existent: Williamson necessarily exists, though it is not necessary that he exists. (shrink)

One of the fundamental components of the concept of economic rationality is that preference orderings are “complete,” i.e., that all alternative actions an economic agent can take are comparable. The idea that all actions can be ranked may be called the single utility assumption. The attractiveness of this assumption is considerable. It would be hard to fathom what choice among alternatives means if the available alternatives cannot be ranked by the chooser in some way. In addition, the efficiency criterion makes (...) sense only if one can infer that an individual's choice reflects the best, in expected welfare terms, among all choices that individual could have made. The possibility that a rearrangement of resources could make someone “better off” without making others “worse off” can be understood only if the post-rearrangement world is comparable with the pre-rearrange-ment world. (shrink)

The use of vague language in law has important implications for legal theory. Legal philosophers have occasionally grappled with those implications, but they have not come to grips with the characteristic phenomenon of vagueness: the sorites paradox. I discuss the paradox, and claim that it poses problems for some legal theorists. I propose that a good account of vagueness will have three consequences for legal theory: Theories that deny that vagueness in formulations of the law leads to discretion in adjudication (...) cannot accommodate “higher-order” vagueness, A legal theory should accept that the law is partly indeterminate when it can be stated in vague language, However, the traditional formulation of the indeterminacy claim, that a vague statement is “neither true nor false” in a borderline case, is misconceived and should be abandoned. (shrink)

The book is primarily an essay on the epistemology of the sort of armchair knowledge that we can hope to achieve in philosophy. The possibility of such knowledge is not to be explained by reinterpreting philosophical questions as questions about words or concepts. Although there are philosophical questions about words and concepts, most philosophical questions are not about words or concepts: they are, just as they seem to be, about the things, many of them independent of us, to which the (...) words or concepts refer. Nor is our linguistic or conceptual competence the basis for our philosophical knowledge; such competence merely …. (shrink)

Henry Knowles Beecher, an icon of human research ethics, and Timothy Francis Leary, a guru of the counterculture, are bound together in history by the synthetic hallucinogen lysergic acid diethylamide. Beecher was a U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel who received five battle stars, was inducted into the Legion of Merit, held the first endowed chair in his discipline, wrote at least three path-breaking papers, and is honored by two prestigious ethics awards in his name. Leary was a West Point dropout (...) who was obliged to leave a research assistant professorship, was convicted of violating the Marihuana Tax Act, was sentenced to 20 years in prison and broke out with the... (shrink)

If you keep removing single grains of sand from a heap, when is it no longer a heap? From discussions of the heap paradox in classical Greece, to modern formal approaches like fuzzy logic, Timothy Williamson traces the history of the problem of vagueness. He argues that standard logic and formal semantics apply even to vague languages and defends the controversial, realist view that vagueness is a form of ignorance - there really is a grain of sand whose removal (...) turns a heap into a non-heap, but we can never know exactly which one it is. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson's new book, The Philosophy of Philosophy, has a number of central themes. The very idea that philosophy has a method which is different in kind from the sciences is one Williamson rejects. “… the common assumption of philosophical exceptionalism is false. Even the distinction between the a priori and the a posteriori turns out to obscure underlying similarities”. Although Williamson sees the book as “a defense of armchair philosophy”, he also argues that “the differences in subject matter (...) between philosophy and the other sciences are also less deep than is often supposed. In particular, few philosophical questions are conceptual questions in any distinctive sense. …”. In addition, Williamson argues that “the current philosophical mainstream has failed to articulate an adequate philosophical methodology, in part because it has fallen into the classic epistemological error of psychologizing the data. … The picture is wrong; we frequently have better epistemic access to our immediate physical environment than to our own psychology. … Our understanding of philosophical methodology must be rid of internalist preconceptions”. I am tremendously sympathetic with all of these views.In this review, I want to raise a number of questions about philosophical methodology which Williamson does not address. While Williamson is wonderfully forthright on many important issues about philosophical methodology, the view he presents is compatible with a surprisingly wide range of approaches to philosophical questions. This may be precisely what Williamson wants. At this stage in our understanding of the philosophical enterprise, it may be premature to narrow the range of methodological options more than Williamson does. There are some hints, however, that Williamson may favor some of these options more than others, and, if that is so, it would be useful to make that clear and …. (shrink)

In the January 6, 1991, issue of the Washington Post Magazine, reporter Walt Harrington wrote a profile of Bryan Stevenson. Mr. Stevenson is a 31-year-old working-class African-American from Delaware who graduated from Harvard Law School and the Kennedy School of Government. Like the typical graduate of Harvard Law School, Mr. Stevenson had the opportunity to join the worlds of six-figure corporate law or high-visibility politics. Rather than follow his colleagues, however, Mr. Stevenson works seven-day, eighty-hour weeks as director of the (...) Alabama Capital Representation Center. He appeals death sentences, handling twenty-four death-row cases himself, supervises five other lawyers who cover about thirty cases, and raises federal government and foundation funding. He does this living a Spartan existence on a salary of $24,000, refusing even the $50,000 directorship salary offered to him. (shrink)

In 1 Timothy 2:11-15 women are forbidden to teach and have authority over men in the church. The ground for this instruction is the creation account in Genesis 2 that asserts the priority of Adam over Eve in the order of creation. The second reason for the instruction is the deception of Eve according to the account of the Fall in Genesis 3. This pericope has elicited arguments between advocates of egalitarianism and complementarianism revolving over the issues of grammar, (...) the context of the Ephesian church with regard to false teachings and the comparison of this text with the other writings of Paul, for those that subscribe to the authorship of Paul. The contention of this article is that verse 15 provides a major clue as to how this text should be understood. In addition, the author's rhetoric in this text is interrogated with regard to the text's own internal literary and theological logic. In this regard, the author is found to be inconsistent in his outlook, for the grace that was poured out abundantly on him: a blasphemer, a persecutor and a violent man and on account of his ignorance and unbelief is apparently, being denied women on account of Eve's deception. (shrink)

The book is primarily an essay on the epistemology of the sort of armchair knowledge that we can hope to achieve in philosophy. The possibility of such knowledge is not to be explained by reinterpreting philosophical questions as questions about words or concepts. Although there are philosophical questions about words and concepts, most philosophical questions are not about words or concepts: they are, just as they seem to be, about the things, many of them independent of us, to which the (...) words or concepts refer. Nor is our linguistic or conceptual competence the basis for our philosophical knowledge; such competence merely …. (shrink)

Timothy Scheie’s book on the importance of the theatre in Roland Barthes’ oeuvre begins with what Scheie poses as an enigma: Barthes wrote frequently of the theatre at the beginning of his career and then ceased to do so, without comment, after 1960. Scheie argues that Barthes’ abandonment of the theatre reveals something important about the development of his thoughts and even about his life. Scheie also considers Barthes’ early theatrical criticism and later use of theatrical metaphors to be (...) an under-considered aspect of the critic’s work. Performance Degree Zero is an ambitious work not so much because of what it argues, but because of its attempt to trace the theatre’s presence (or absence) during Barthes’ .. (shrink)

Philosophers are intellectual cannibals; they feed on the supposed errors of their colleagues. No harm in that, it might be said. With a sophistical argument like that of the Queen in Alice Through the Looking Glass to support the punishment of the innocent, progress in philosophy might be thought dependent on such voracious activities. The Queen thought that in replying to the claim that punishing the innocent was wrong one could say that if the victim really was innocent then that (...) produced a better universe than one which contained both the pain of the punishment and that of the original crime. In a similar way it might be argued that if the supposed errors of a colleague really exist, then their correction is beneficial; while if the errors do not exist then at least there is underlying agreement among philosophers, though perhaps not harmony. The sophistry, however, arises from the fact that in both cases there are other, and better, alternatives. The Queen unaccountably forgets that it would be still better in the case of innocence not to punish at all; and the philosophical apologist for intellectual cannibalism forgets, unaccountably, that it might be still better to advertise agreement rather than to feed on supposed errors which do not exist. For one thing, in that latter case the spurious conflict might positively conceal the real disagreements. Something of that latter kind happens in Timothy Sprigge’s comments on my views about William James ; James and Bradley:American Truth and British Reality, Open Court, 1994 ). I cannot, however, take much credit for stimulating Sprigge to adopt positions similar to mine for two reasons. First the apparent conflicts which conceal real agreement are relatively few, although quite important; second his own considered general view of James is certainly different from mine and marks the real disagreement between us. Accordingly I take two bites at this particular cherry; first to consider my supposed errors and second to identify the real differences between us. Timothy Sprigge claims to find a number of minor errors in my account, but I concentrate on the two major cases. (shrink)

Review of Timothy Chan's (ed.) The Aim of Belief.

In their paper “Members First: The Ethics of Donating Organs and Tissues to Groups,” Timothy Murphy and Robert Veatch question the ethical underpinnings of LifeSharers, a grass-roots effort to increase the supply of organs by giving organ donors preferred access to organs.

Dans cet article, nous proposons d’examiner certains des usages qui sont faits de Descartes en sciences cognitives. Il s’agit plus précisément de s’attacher à la façon dont se trouve pensé l’héritage du cartésianisme dans la science cognitive orthodoxe, souvent conçue comme « cartésienne ». Comment en vient-on à former cette idée de science cognitive cartésienne? Nous répondons en nous appuyant sur deux analyses, celles de Timothy van Gelder et de Michael Wheeler, avec pour objectif de mettre au jour les (...) aspects de la philosophie de Descartes qui sont ici mobilisés, ainsi que les opérations intellectuelles et pratiques qui permettent à ces auteurs d’extraire le cartésianisme de son milieu originel pour le placer sur le terrain de la science cognitive contemporaine. (shrink)

Timothy Mahoney discovers and champions an ecologically benign account of Plato in opposition to my own critical analysis of the reason-centeredness, reason-nature dualism, and nature and body devaluation in the Platonic dialogues, in which multiple linked dualisms of reason and nature associated with systems of oppression provide major organizing principles for Platonic philosophy. I show first that Mahoney's criticisms of my interpretation involve some careless and mistaken readings of my own text. Second, I argue that Mahoney* s account of (...) nature is significantly different from Plato's. Mahoney's interpretation of Plato is an overly generous and idealized one which plays on the multiplicity and elasticity of the concept of nature and the notorious vagueness of the concept of participation to conflate, among other things, Plato's attitude to celestial nature with his attitude to biological nature. Mahoney's interpretation involves setting aside Plato's gender politics, playing down some of Plato's most offensive and revealing passages of earth disparagement, and ignoring the network of social meanings from which Plato's philosophy emerges. Finally, I give some reasons why Mahoney's accounts of participation and nature, even considered as a reworking of Plato, would be highly problematic as the foundation for an ecological philosophy. (shrink)

According to the Law of Non–Contradiction, no statement and its negation are jointly true. According to many critics, Christians cannot serve both the orthodox faith and the Law of Non–Contradiction: if they hold to the one they must despise the other. And according to an impressive number of these critics, Christians who cling to the traditional doctrine of the Trinity must despise the Law of Non–Contradiction. Augustine's statement of this doctrine poses the problem as poignantly as any.

Althusser called a recent essay: ‘Is it simple to be a Marxist in philosophy?’ My title, intentionally provocative, echoes that question. Following Althusser, I shall answer it in the negative and, in so doing, shall raise a series of further questions concerning the nature of and connections between politics, science and philosophy. My lecture will keep turning on these three points, just as Althusser's own work has turned on them, ever since his first book, a monograph on Montesquieu, up to (...) his most recent critical interventions on the role and organization of the French Communist Party in the 1970s. In an interview given in 1968, characteristically entitled ‘Philosophy as a revolutionary weapon’, Althusser linked the three points in an autobiographical comment: In 1948, when I was thirty, I became a teacher of philosophy and joined the French Communist Party. Philosophy was an interest; I was trying to make it my profession. Politics was a passion; I was trying to become a communist militant. (shrink)

On November 15th, one week after the results of the 2016 US presidential election were known to all, Timothy Snyder, a distinguished historian of Modern Europe, took to his Facebook page where he formulated a series of steps he urged readers to take in response to what he clearly deemed an emerging threat to the future of American democracy. Snyder's message, which captured the sense of urgency and foreboding that was palpable across large swaths of the land, instantly went (...) viral. In a preface to comments informed by deep knowledge of the totalitarian regimes that held Europe in their grip in the decades following World War I, Snyder wrote: Americans are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to... (shrink)

Jean E. Chambers and Timothy F. Murphy responded to my article “Cloning and Infertility” and extended the debate over human cloning in interesting ways. I had argued that none of the objections to cloning by somatic cell nuclear transfer are successful in the context of infertile couples who use cloning to have genetically related children, assuming the issue of safety is overcome by scientific advances.

Timothy Knepper’s book is divided into two parts, the first and more critical of which seeks to uncover the limits and weaknesses of analytic and continental philosophy of religion, while the second and more constructive section seeks to develop an alternative and more fruitful way of practising philosophy of religion, “one that is historically grounded and religiously diverse” (p. xiii). Much of the impetus behind the book derives from feelings of dismay and dissatisfaction, familiar especially to religious studies scholars, (...) over the fact that “philosophy of religion often takes as its primary object of inquiry either ahistorical theism or postmodern philosophy, not the religions of the world in their historical complexity and cultural diversity” (p. ix). I found this to be a clear, well-argued and often provocative book, but also one flawed in some respects in its attempt to renew and reconceive the philosophy of religion.The starting-point of Chapter 1 (The End and Ends of Philosoph. (shrink)

In his 1993 novel Headhunter, Canadian author Timothy Findley describes the tendency of some medical practitioners to put scientific interests above the therapeutic needs of the individual. As the book's title and name of the main character Dr. Kurtz attest, Findley reflects the colonialist teleology found in Heart of Darkness as an analogue for the therapeutic zeal shown by many of the physicians in Headhunter. In the novel, such zeal is especially problematic when it is combined with so-called enhancement (...) technologies, since enhancement, like colonialism, can be based in the prejudices of the practitioner and/or the dominant society, rather than in the needs of the patient. To counter therapeutic zeal, Findley, like Conrad, proposes an ethics of restraint in which the practitioner's empathy outweighs his or her desire for scientific discovery. (shrink)

Careful attention to the social situations implied in the passages of First Timothy about women indicates there is nothing there that would limit the role of women in the church.

Timothy Raylor's book constitutes a major advance in understanding Thomas Hobbes's thought in several dimensions: of course, in philosophy and rhetoric, as his title indicates, but also in Hobbes's views of history, science, and civic humanism. Raylor's scholarship is of the highest order; and his judgment about texts, Hobbes's and others', is acute. His book should be as important to historians of philosophy as to rhetoricians and intellectual historians. Placing "Philosophy" and "Rhetoric" before Hobbes's name in the title is (...) appropriate because it is the interplay between conceptions of philosophy and rhetoric in the early seventeenth century that Raylor explores, with special attention to Hobbes. At one time... (shrink)

Rhetorics of travel wander across millennia and media. Travel speaks to our inborn interest in the outside and in the other and, as a topos, it enables us to communicate in diverse ways and to divergent communities. Turning to the rhetorical power of travel invites reconsideration of the communicative interplay of governments and cultures, of movements and ideas. Timothy Luckritz Marquis's Transient Apostle: Paul, Travel, and the Rhetoric of Empire explores Paul's cultural transgressions through a study of travel in (...) the context of empire; how Marquis asks, do rhetors such as Paul invent resistant social movements under imperial conditions? Bridging understandings of the margins, affect, and identity, Marquis calls... (shrink)