Modalists think that knowledge requires forming your belief in a “modally stable” way: using a method that wouldn't easily go wrong, or using a method that wouldn't have given you this belief had it been false. Recent Modalist projects from Justin Clarke-Doane and Dan Baras defend a principle they call “Modal Security,” roughly: if evidence undermines your belief, then it must give you a reason to doubt the safety or sensitivity of your belief. Another recent Modalist project from Carlotta Pavese (...) and Bob Beddor defends “Modal Virtue Epistemology”: knowledge is a belief that is maximally modally robust across “normal” worlds. We'll offer new objections to these recent Modalist projects. We will then argue for a rival view, Explanationism: knowing something is believing it because it's true. We will show how Explanationism offers a better account of undermining defeaters than Modalism, and a better account of knowledge. (shrink)

In the recent literature on the nature of knowledge, a rivalry has emerged between modalism and explanationism. According to modalism, knowledge requires that our beliefs track the truth across some appropriate set of possible worlds. Modalists tend to focus on two modal conditions: sensitivity and safety. According to explanationism, knowledge requires only that beliefs bear the right sort of explanatory relation to the truth. In slogan form: knowledge is believing something because it’s true. In this paper, we aim to vindicate (...) explanationism from some recent objections offered by Gualtiero Piccinini, Dario Mortini, and Kenneth Boyce and Andrew Moon. Together, these authors present five purported counterexamples to the sufficiency of the explanationist analysis for knowledge. In addition, Mortini devises a clever argument that explanationism entails the violation of a plausible closure principle on knowledge. We will argue that explanationism is innocent of all these charges against it, and we hope that the strength of the defense we offer of explanationism is evidence in its favor, and a reason to investigate explanationism further as the long-elusive truth about the nature of knowledge. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements ed. by Alexis Kallio, Philip Alperson and Heidi WesterlundWilliam M. PerrineAlexis Kallio, Philip Alperson, and Heidi Westerlund, eds., Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2019)It is perhaps something of a truism–or at least a stereotype containing a grain of truth–that most academics, particularly in the United States, are notoriously bad when it comes to a (...) scholarly discussion of religion. In scholarship on education, this results in unfortunate omissions within debates regarding the philosophical aims of curriculum. Religion, after all, is an inescapable part of everyday life for billions of human beings around the globe. To ignore religion is to ignore an important part of the human experience. Part of the problem in discussing religion is undoubtedly the conventions of academic discourse itself. To qualify as “research,” academic writing has generally been expected to place a degree of distance between the author and the content matter at hand. In the case of religion, this has involved a state of remove to an ostensibly neutral vantage point, typically a perspective grounded in a philosophical naturalism. This tendency is compounded by the pressure, particularly acute within secular institutions, to compartmentalize religious belief as a private matter that should not overtly inform one’s public professional practice. Thus, while a researcher in music or music education might have an active religious life in private, an open [End Page 117] integration of personal faith and teaching practice might be considered extraordinarily unprofessional—at least if the faith in question is socially déclassé. The obvious problem inherent in this framework for understanding the relationship between religion and professional life is that, particularly when it comes to questions of philosophy, religious faith is rarely a strictly personal matter. As Charles Taylor notes, religious faith as a lived human practice traditionally involves strong evaluations: determinations of right and wrong that supersede personal choice or preference.1 These evaluations often take the form of hypergoods, positions by which moral or truth claims must be weighed. Strong evaluations and hyper-goods by nature cannot be limited to the personal; they inform all areas of our intellectual, social, and professional lives. Such commitments tend to inform and precede other philosophical commitments, rather than vice versa. Pressure to minimize the importance of hypergoods can be a profound source of frustration for religious believers within the secular academy, particularly as the assumption that deep religious commitment is incompatible with a spirit of critical inquiry runs very deep. When the academic literature touches on matters of religious concern, either directly or indirectly, it seems to either minimize the complexity or concerns of traditional religious belief as lived experience, or privilege progressive forms of religious practice. At worst, academic discourse on religion is condescending, often coupled with class-based and socio-geographic prejudice against particular religious groups and beliefs.With this framework in mind, I approached Music, Education, and Religion: Intersections and Entanglements with a degree of apprehension. Fortunately, editors Alexis Kallio, Philip Alperson, and Heidi Westerlund have put together an impressive volume that treats the complex relationship between music education and religious practice with the respect and sensitivity that the topic deserves. As the editors note in their introduction, music as a human practice cannot be artificially separated from religious beliefs. These domains are, as the volume’s subtitle makes clear, entangled through a multiplicity of intersections. The book itself consists of eighteen essays representing a wide array of viewpoints, case studies, and contextualized problems from around the world. The diversity of topics prohibits drawing any generalizable conclusions beyond the obvious observation that interaction with religion presents entanglements that cannot be ignored under an artificial banner of secular neutrality. As the first edited collection of essays in our discipline to tackle these problems in a substantive manner, however, the book is unquestionably successful in opening a space for critical discussion. With this in mind, rather than attempting to summarize each of the included chapters within this review, I will instead attempt to engage in conversation with some of the themes that emerge from the book from my own vantage point as a scholar... (shrink)

Philosophy of Law sometimes refers to Heidegger, yet Heidegger does not explicitly tackle this area of philosophy. In this paper, I will argue that it is actually possible to bring to light a theory of law in Heidegger’s writings. Such a theory would help juridical thought by tracing it back to its metaphysical presuppositions.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Reading Plato's Dialogues to Enhance Learning and Inquiry: Exploring Socrates' Use of Protreptic for Student Engagement by Mason MarshallWilliam PerrinMARSHALL, Mason. Reading Plato's Dialogues to Enhance Learning and Inquiry: Exploring Socrates' Use of Protreptic for Student Engagement. New York: Routledge, 2021. 223 pp. Cloth, $136.00; paper, $39.16One doesn't need to search to find criticism of contemporary democratic citizens. We are told we are an ignorant, dogmatic, and generally (...) vicious bunch. These traits, it's natural to think, make trouble for our democracy. One solution, Mason Marshall argues, is to read Plato to reform our vicious tendencies. This might be surprising, considering Plato is sometimes portrayed as a great enemy of democracy. But Marshall doesn't propose to read Plato to find out what Plato thought, or to mine his dialogues for promising arguments. Rather, Marshall proposes to read Plato to develop a theory of philosophical protreptic. "Protreptic," as used by Marshall, means to turn someone toward a new end. And thus, philosophical protreptic is turning someone "so that they want truth more than anything else." The idea, then, is to use Plato to protrepticize students, in order to cultivate democracy-required character traits in students.There are, broadly speaking, two parts to the book. Marshall, in one part, sketches two ways of carrying out his project, a top-down approach (chapter 1) and a bottom-up approach (chapter 2), before putting the project in action to illustrate its value (chapter 5). In the second part of the book, Marshall defends his project from the charge that it's an illegitimate approach to Plato scholarship (chapter 3) and from the charge that his approach would not be sufficiently valuable (chapter 4). Surprisingly, given the stated aim of the book, chapters 3 and 4 take up the bulk of the pages. I offer an explanation of this striking feature below. But first, I follow Marshall's structure in summarizing the two parts.Marshall begins with the top-down approach. The reader would suppose that above all else Socrates aims to foster self-examination in his interlocutors, before imagining various strategies Socrates could have pursued to satisfy this end. The reader evaluates the various imagined strategies, not for whether they are the ones Socrates uses in the text but for how well they would achieve the end. For example, one might think that Socrates, in order to protrepticize Euthyphro, must convince Euthyphro that he needs to be able to cogently answer philosophical questions, if only so that he does not look foolish when facing them. The reader would then sketch thought experiments varying along the axis of harshness—how abrasive Socrates' humiliation of Euthyphro must be—before evaluating which scenario would most likely lead to self-examination.The bottom-up approach proceeds in the opposite order: One starts by wondering what the intermediate ends motivating Socrates' actual behavior in the dialogues could be. For example, one would ask why Socrates muddies the waters in offering convoluted definitions of piety in the Euthyphro (11e7–12d4). It could be that Socrates wants to make Euthyphro look silly, that Socrates wants to overwhelm him, or that Socrates wants Euthyphro to agree to a view Socrates is anxious to refute. It could be all three. But the idea is to identify the strategies that make the [End Page 353] most sense of the supposition that Socrates aims, above all else, to foster self-examination, before evaluating them for their likelihood of turning someone to self-examination.Marshall, in the second part of the book, defends his approach from the objection that, since his project isn't aiming to articulate the content of Plato's mental states, or mining for arguments, he is co-opting Plato illegitimately. The basic defense is that we would have to know much more about Plato's intentions than we do for the charge to stick. In short, given that we are largely unable to articulate the assumptions we have regarding what goods an interpretation of a text will win us, we will be unable to arbitrate between radically different, yet internally coherent, interpretations of Plato.It is initially puzzling why Marshall spends... (shrink)

Although episodic memory is a widely studied form of memory both in philosophy and psychology, it still raises many burning questions regarding its definition and even its acceptance. Over the last two decades, cross-disciplinary discussions between these two fields have increased as they tackle shared concerns, such as the phenomenology of recollection, and therefore allow for fruitful interaction. This editorial introduction aims to provide a comprehensive and up-to-date presentation of the main existing conceptions and issues on the topic. After delineating (...) Tulving’s chief theoretical import and multifaceted legacy, it goes on to chart the different attempts to capture the episodicity feature of memory according to three categories: a first approach aims to show the cognitive abilities required for a subject to episodically remember; the second defines episodicity as a stage-specific feature; the last explains episodicity in terms of the epistemological properties of episodic memory. This state of the art thereby sets the stage for the contributions of the present volume, which will be introduced in conclusion. (shrink)

The paper argues that the issue of the Third Antinomy of Reason (the conflict between the ideas of natural and free causality) remained a central concern throughout all of Kant's ethical writings subsequent to the first Critique. In the Grundlegung, the second and third Critiques and, finally, in Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der blossen Vernunft we find Kant continually refining and modifying the concept of a transcendental freedom but never arriving at a satisfactory resolution. I argue that any such (...) resolution (such as that attempted by Professor Silber through an analysis of Kant's explication of Wille and Willkur) would not only imply the overturning of Kant's ethical philosophy but the entire Kantian system insofar as it stands astride the twin pillars of phenomenal and noumenal reality. (shrink)

English continues to rise as the lingua franca of academic philosophy. Philosophers from all types of linguistic backgrounds use it to communicate with each other across the globe. In this paper, we identify how the rise of English leads to linguistic injustices. We argue that these injustices are similar in an important regard: they are all instances of distributive epistemic injustice. We then present six proposals for addressing unjust linguistic discrimination and evaluate them on how well they can mitigate the (...) specific types of distributive epistemic injustice that we identify. We accept that there is much more to be said. But we hope that what we say will motivate other philosophers to take these types of injustices more seriously and encourage them to make academic philosophy a more inclusive global community. (shrink)

Evidentialism has shown itself to be an important research program in contemporary epistemology, with evidentialists giving theories of virtually every important topic in epistemology. Nevertheless, at the heart of evidentialism is a handful of concepts, namely evidence, evidence possession, and evidential fit. If evidentialists cannot give us a plausible account of these concepts, then their research program, with all its various theories, will be in serious trouble. In this paper, I argue that evidentialists has yet to give a plausible (...) account of evidence possession and the prospects for doing so are dim. (shrink)

Envy is, roughly, the disposition to desire that another lose a perceived good so that one can, by comparison, feel better about one’s self. The divisiveness of envy follows not just from one’s willing against the good of the other, but also from the other vices that spring from it. It is for this second reason that envy is a capital vice. This chapter begins by arguing for a definition of envy similar to that given by Aquinas and then considers (...) its relationship to other vices (e.g. jealousy, schadenfreude, and hate). At the heart of envy is a disposition to make relative comparisons which lead to a sense of inferiority. This is turn can lead a person to feel and act in ways destructive of community and the self. The present chapter also addresses recent work in both psychology and economics related to envy. (shrink)

This paper aims to provide a psychologically-informed philosophical account of the phenomenology of episodic remembering. The literature on epistemic or metacognitive feelings has grown considerably in recent years, and there are persuasive reasons, both conceptual and empirical, in favour of the view that the phenomenology of remembering—autonoetic consciousness, as Tulving influentially referred to it, or the feeling of pastness, as we will refer to it here—is an epistemic feeling, but few philosophical treatments of this phenomenology as an epistemic feeling (...) have so far been proposed. Building on insights from the psychological literature, we argue that a form of feeling-based metacognition is involved in episodic remembering and develop an integrated metacognitive feeling-based view that addresses several key aspects of the feeling of pastness, namely, its status as a feeling, its content, and its relationship to the first-order memories the phenomenology of which it provides. (shrink)

Peter Singer argues, on consequentialist grounds, that individuals ought to be vegetarian. Many have pressed, in response, a causal impotence objection to Singer’s argument: any individual person’s refraining from purchasing and consuming animal products will not have an important effect on contemporary farming practices. In this paper, I sketch a Singer-inspired consequentialist argument for vegetarianism that avoids this objection. The basic idea is that, for agents who are aware of the origins of their food, continuing to consume animal products (...) is morally bad because it leads to not appropriately disvaluing the origins of their food. That is a morally bad outcome that can be avoided by becoming vegetarian. (shrink)

Both the USA and Europe limit access to care by undocumented immigrants. In the debate over what level of access to confer to IMs, there are various public policy rationales operating either explicitly, or below the surface, ranging from minimalist humanitarianism to full cosmopolitan equality, with several intermediate positions between these two poles. This article informs the international debate by providing a conceptual mapping of these underlying policy rationales. Each position is based on different lines of reasoning or bodies of (...) evidence, and each leads to somewhat different conclusions about the extent to which IMs should have access to different types of health care. It is unlikely that broad consensus will be achieved in this ongoing debate. However, by articulating the ethical, legal, pragmatic and conceptual reasons to support or oppose various positions, we hope to help determine where in the landscape of reasoned argument various positions lie, and how each position might be best supported or refuted. In particular, we see in this debate an illustration of Michael Walzer’s classic analysis of competing spheres of justice. Various positions depend to a considerable extent on whether their advocates approach this issue from the health policy sphere rather than the sphere of immigration policy, or whether they attempt to blend the two spheres. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value by Julian JohnsonWilliam M. PerrineJulian Johnson, Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value. Oxford University Press, 2002.In Who Needs Classical Music? Cultural Choice and Musical Value, British musicologist and composer Julian Johnson defends the value of classical music in a commercialized culture fixated on the immediate gratification of popular music. At 130 pages divided into six chapters, (...) Johnson’s book is a reasonably accessible and engaging presentation of his topic. This short book contains relevant and sometimes controversial insights of interest to professional music educators. In this review I will provide a brief summary of the author’s primary arguments accompanied by critical commentary.Johnson argues that commercial forces in our society limit serious reflective discourse on music. The marketplace treats music as a commodity which derives its value from relative commercial success. In this context, classical music is relegated to one possible cultural choice among many legitimate options and is in danger of losing its distinctive features as an art form that transcends commercial concerns. Preference for particular musical products becomes an identity marker for an individual’s place within society, and criticism of a particular style of music is perceived as a personal attack. The process of turning classical music into a commodity has been aided by critics who have condemned the Western [End Page 96] canon as elitist, patriarchal, and arrogant. These critics have instead advocated a democratization of culture, placing greater emphasis on the validity of popular art forms and active participation in music-making rather than the more passive contemplation. Johnson describes this as a “pseudo-democratic” attack which encourages downward social mobility. When combined with the omnipresence of commercial culture, this approach undermines individual musical value by assuming the equal validity of all aesthetic judgments. Democracy is damaged when, refusing to discriminate between cultural products, society fails to recognize human individuality and excellence.Johnson is at his strongest when he argues for the importance of classical music fulfilling its function as art. The author argues that different types of music fulfill different functions. In contemporary society music is valued and chosen for how it is used. Music is described as “good” when it functions to provide background music for activities or when it successfully complements or enhances the listeners’ moods. Focusing solely on social use or reception, however, tends to neglect objective differences in the formal structure of music. This is the point at which Johnson begins to distinguish between classical and popular music. Popular music is composed to ensure a uniformity of affect, and deliberately avoids formal or harmonic complexity. As an aspect of popular culture, it is tied to contemporary fashion trends and rapidly becomes obsolete. Like other types of fashion, music becomes a means for expressing a current position within a larger social and cultural space. It is the music of youth; its commercial saturation of the culture blurs the boundaries between youth and adulthood. Johnson claims that the process of commercialization leads to a bland standardization. Classical music can also function as a type of popular music when it submits itself to market processes, but in doing so the music loses its distinctive features.In his discussion on popular music, Johnson presents what might be his most controversial claim: that popular music serves a pornographic function. He defines pornography as “the process by which the humane is reduced to the status of things” (p. 59) and argues that popular music takes pleasure in debasing humanity by reducing individuals to material commodities and denying the spiritual. This contention echoes Allan Bloom’s concern in The Closing of the American Mind that rock music desensitizes and debases youth by destroying imagination and deadening their capacity for passion and wonder. The strength of this language undermines Johnson’s contention in his introduction to the paperback edition that he is not trying to set up a binary opposition between art and popular music in which the classical is “better.” Moreover, if pornography is a form of dehumanization and is a legitimate concern in music, it is important to point out that such a charge is not exclusive to... (shrink)

In this chapter we identify seven transversal principles which guide our pedagogical approach, and which are today widely shared by teachers. These principles also seem to us to be consistent with research in neuroscience, in particular that of Stanislas “Dehaene, Stanislas. Apprendre! les talents du cerveau, le défi des machines. Odile Jacob, Paris, (2018)” and his four pillars of learning – attention, active engagement, error and surprise signals and the consolidation of acquired knowledge – or those of Antonio “Damasio, Antonio (...) R. L’erreur de Descartes: la raison des émotions. Odile Jacob, Paris, (1995)” on the fundamental role of emotions in supporting learning. The principles advocated are: solicitation of curiosity and commitment; learning through sensitive experiences; connection of knowledge, emotions and values; reappropriation of assessment methods; multifaceted posture of the teacher; politicization of education; self-awareness and striving for common good.The principles highlighted in this section represent the major levers to be operated in order to provide students with truly transformative learning. Tools and examples of real-life implementation of these principles will be detailed in the second part of this book. (shrink)

Since the 1960s, there have been many efforts to defend the relevance of History of Science to Philosophy of Science, and vice versa. For the most part, these efforts have been limited to providing an abstract rationale for a closer integration between the two fields, as opposed to showing: (a) how such an integrated work is to be produced concretely, and (b) how an integrated approach can lead us to a better understanding of past and/or current science. 1 In this (...) chapter, I argue that the most promising way to integrate the history and philosophy of science is the historicist-hermeneutic approach. I will present the main features of the historicist-hermeneutic approach, and will show, concretely, how it can provide a mutually beneficial integration of the History of Science and the Philosophy of Science. More specifically, I will employ the historicist-hermeneutic approach to elucidate one of the most problematic historical case studies in philosophy of science: namely, Jean Perrin’s argument for molecular reality, which he formulated at the beginning of the twentieth century. (shrink)

Emerging from thought-provoking discussions and correspondence Simone Weil had with the Reverend Father Perrin, this classic collection of essays contains her most profound meditations on the relationship of human life to the realm of the transcendant.An enlightening introduction by Leslie Fiedler examines Weil's extraordinary roles as a philosophy teacher turned mystic. "One of the most neglected resources of our century ", Waiting for God will continue to influence spiritual and political thought for centuries to come.

Recent epistemology has witnessed a substantial opposition between two competing approaches to capturing the notion of non-accidentality in the analysis of knowledge: the explanationist and the modalist. According to the latest advocates of the former, S knows that p if and only if S believes that p because p is true. According to champions of the latter, S knows that p if and only if S's belief that p is true in a relevant set of possible worlds. Because Bogardus and (...) Perrin's explanationism promises to deliver a plausible analysis of knowledge without any need for modal notions, it is an elegant proposal with prima facie appeal. However, such version of explanationism ultimately does not live up to its promises: in this paper, I raise some objections to their explanationist analysis of knowledge while showing that modalism is in much better shape than they think. In particular, I argue that their explanationist condition generates the wrong results in Gettier cases and fake-barn cases. I also offer and defend a novel version of modalism: I introduce a refined safety condition which is shown to successfully handle the same Gettier cases that beset Bogardus and Perrin's version of explanationism. The paper concludes with a reassessment of the explanationist's initial ambition to provide an analysis of knowledge without modal notions. The upshot will be that even if the prospects for such analysis remain dim, our money should be on the modalist, not the explanationist. (shrink)

Deborah Mayo propounded the epistemology of experiment in her Error and the Growth of Experimental Knowledge (1996), and the notion of severity plays an essential role in her epistemolgy. In the following two notes, I wish to point out a defect of her definition of severity, and to argue that she must revise this definition in conformity with what she actually does in her book (Note 1). The revision has some important consequence: in order to apply Mayo's severity consideration to (...) experimental tests, we have to know all alternative hypotheses, in a given experimental situation, in advance. Mayo does not seem to recognize this, and her analysis of Perrin's experiment seems to be affected by this defect. I will present what I regard as the correct way to reconstruct Perrin's argument (Note 2). (shrink)

, Peter Achinstein argues against the long-standing claim that ‘evidence’ is ambiguous in possessing a sense of confirming evidence and a sense of supporting evidence. He argues that explications of supporting evidence will necessarily violate his contentions that evidence is a discontinuous ‘threshold concept’ and that any philosophical account of supporting evidence will be too weak to be useful to working scientists. But an account of supporting evidence may be formulated which includes Achinstein's notion of epistemic thresholds that (...) finds examples in Achinstein's own historical case studies. Thresholds and the denial of ambiguity Achinstein's new account of confirming evidence Achinstein's argument against the ‘ambiguity response’ A threshold-based approach for restoring the ambiguity Maxwell and ‘a subject of rational curiosity’ Bohr and ‘future development of our understanding’ Perrin and the edge of reasonable belief Restoring ambiguity. (shrink)

Respect for patient autonomy has served as the dominant ethical principle of genetic counselling, but as we move into a genomic era, it is time to actively re-examine the role that this principle plays in genetic counselling practice. In this paper, we argue that the field of genetic counselling should move away from its emphasis on patient autonomy and toward the incorporation of a more balanced set of principles that allows counsellors to offer clear guidance about how best to obtain (...) or use genetic information. We begin with a brief history of how respect for patient autonomy gained such emphasis in the field and how it has taken on various manifestations over time, including the problematic concept of nondirectiveness. After acknowledging the field's preliminary move away from nondirectiveness, we turn to a series of arguments about why the continued dominance of patient autonomy has become untenable given the arrival of the genomic era. To conclude, we describe how a more complete set of bioethical principles can be adapted and used by genetic counsellors to strengthen their practice without undermining patient autonomy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:The Role of Malebranche in Ernest Renan's Philosophical Development BENJAMIN ROUNTREE RENANHASBEENCALLEDwith some justification the "Malebranche du dix-neuvi~me si~cle." 1 In his praise of the seventeenth-century philosopher, Renan was unconciously inclined to call attention to the similarities between himself and Malebranche by pointing out qualities which they were apt to share. A thinker as sinuous as Renan was bound to appreciate the power of subtle reasoning in such a (...) work as the admirable Recherche de la V~rit6. In a certain sense Renan is even the heir of a spirit to which Malebranche gave fresh impetus. Like Malebranche, he inveighed against pedants, dilettantes, and idolators of antiquity; he turned his back on tradition to favor modem thought over ancient, and placed his faith in a world governed by knowledge and reason in which progress and human perfectibility promise man happiness. In his basic optimism, in his belief that man is capable of knowing truth, in his somewhat pantheistic mysticism, Renan joins hands with Malebranche across the eighteenth century. How well did Renan know Malebranche? What did he think of him? Did his opinion of him undergo any evolution? To find the answers to these questions one must go back to about 1840, when Renan, a.t seventeen, began his study of Malebranche. By the time he was twenty, Renan, under the guidance of M. Gosselin, who little suspected how great a contribution Malebranche would make to Renan's decision to leave the Church, was reading the philosopher with enthusiastic regularity. Indeed, the Oratorian had become "l'objet perp6tuel" of his reflections, he tells us. The speculative terminology of the Entretiens sur la M6taphysique and the M6ditations chrgtiennes echoed through his class compositions and notebooks. His ideas on the general action of Providence in the universe were already similar to those of this philosopher, who, "illustre" and "saint," soon became for him a kind of spiritual hero, a hero whose exemplary intellectual zeal drew Renan instinctively ever more deeply into the contemplative life, into.the fervent and determined quest for "Truth." This "penseur hardi" was destined to excite Renan's own paradoxical mind as "le plus beau r~veur et le plus terrible logicien" ever to exist.~ 1L. L~vy-Bruhl, "La Religion de Renan," Journal de psychologie normale et pathologique (A~pril,1923), p. 344. Ernest Renan, Souvenirs d'en]ance et de ieunesse, in Les Oeuvres completes d'Ernest Renan (Paris: Calmann=L~vy, 1947), II, 843-846. All future references to Renan will be made from this edition unless otherwise specified. See also Lewis F. Mott, Ernest Renan (New York: D. Appleton, 1921), pp. 15-16; Jean Pommier, Renan (Paris: Perrin, 1923), p. 37; La Jeunesse clSricale d'Ernest Renan (Paris: Les Belles Lettres, 1933), p. 138; "Les Lectures de Renan au sSminaire,"La Revue d'histoire litt6raire de la France (1934), p. 93. [47] 48 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY For a moment Malebranche, like Pascal, even helped delay Renan's loss of faith. The attempt of a Christian to satisfy the intelligence through vigorous application of Cartesian rationalism to theology and science fascinated the young student in 1843 as he read the Conversations chr~tiennes and the Recherche de la Vdritd. He eagerly believed that reason leads one to knowledge of God, that the search for Truth is the search for God. Thus, equating the Diety to Truth and retaining his belief in a providence evident in immutable natural law, Renan continued to accept the Catholic dogma, the Bible and revealed truth in a "general sense," as he says in his Souvenirs. After Renan's first soul-shattering year of philosophy Malebranche still stood alongside Pascal and Bossuet as a model of piety, as a "grand esprit," a profound intelligence capable of remaining genuinely Christian, a powerful thinker "qui dit sa messe route sa vie." a He appeared as one solution to Renan's own growing spiritual problem, for Malebranche's example seemed a way of retaining intellectual independence without leaving the Church. Here was a priest, Renan thought, who, in a time of steadily increasing ecclesiastical authority, had been able to live "peacefully" even as a member of a religious congregation without... (shrink)

It is valuable for inquiry to have researchers who are committed advocates of their own theories. However, in light of pervasive disagreement, such a commitment is not well explained by the idea that researchers believe their theories. Instead, this commitment, the rational attitude to take toward one’s favored theory during the course of inquiry, is what I call endorsement. Endorsement is a doxastic attitude, but one which is governed by a different type of epistemic rationality. This inclusive epistemic rationality is (...) sensitive to reasons beyond those to think the particular proposition in question is true. Instead, it includes extrinsic epistemic reasons, which concern the health of inquiry more generally. Such extrinsic reasons include the distribution of cognitive labor that a researcher will contribute to by endorsing a particular theory. Recognizing endorsement and inclusive epistemic rationality thus allows us to smooth a tension between individual rationality and collective rationality. It does so by showing how it can be epistemically rational to endorse a theory on the basis of the way this endorsement will benefit collective inquiry. I provide a decision theoretic treatment for inclusive epistemic rationality and endorsement which illustrates how this can be accomplished. (shrink)

For them, citizenship is by definition a matter of treating people as individuals with equal rights under the law. This is what distinguishes democratic citizenship from feudal and other pre-modern views that determined people's political status by ...

What we call “the evidential argument from evil” is not one argument but a family of them, originating (perhaps) in the 1979 formulation of William Rowe. Wykstra’s early versions of skeptical theism emerged in response to Rowe’s evidential arguments. But what sufficed as a response to Rowe may not suffice against later more sophisticated versions of the problem of evil—in particular, those along the lines pioneered by Paul Draper. Our chief aim here is to make an earlier version of skeptical (...) theism more responsive to the type abductive atheology pioneered by Draper. In particular, we suggest a moderate form of skeptical theism may be able to resist Draper’s abductive atheology. (shrink)

in a very different sense, to refer to the cultural community, or cultural structure, itself On this view, the cultural community continues to exist even when its members arc free to modify the character of the culture, should they find its traditional ...

In recent years, there has been an increasing interest among philosophers of memory in the questions of how to characterize and to account for the temporal phenomenology of episodic memory. One prominent suggestion has been that episodic memory involves a feeling of pastness, the elaboration of which has given rise to two main approaches. On the intentionalist approach, the feeling of pastness is explained in terms of what episodic memory represents. In particular, Fernández has argued that it can be explained (...) in terms of memory representing itself as being caused by a past perceptual experience. On the metacognitive approach, which we have recently developed in, the feeling of pastness results from the monitoring and interpretation of the processing features of episodic remembering. In this paper, we show that the metacognitive approach should be preferred over the intentionalist approach. We argue that intentionalism, and Fernández’ causal self-referential view in particular, ultimately fail as accounts of the feeling of pastness. The difficulties faced by intentionalism allows us to single out three constraints that any satisfactory account of the temporal phenomenology of episodic remembering needs to meet. We conclude by arguing that the metacognitive view satisfies those constraints in a neat way, and as such, that it should be preferred over intentionalism. (shrink)

This paper presents the epistemic practices account, a theory about the nature of epistemic normativity. The account aims to explain how the pursuit of epistemic values such as truth and knowledge can give rise to epistemic norms. On this account, epistemic norms are the internal rules of epistemic social practices. The account explains four crucial features of epistemic normativity while dissolving some apparent tensions between them. The account also provides a unified theory of epistemic and zetetic normativity.

Intellectual courage requires acting to promote epistemic goods despite significant risk of harm. Courage is distinguished from recklessness and cowardice because the expected epistemic benefit of a courageous action outweighs (in some sense) the threatened harm. Sometimes, however, inquirers pursue theories that are not best supported by their current evidence. For these inquirers, the expected epistemic benefit of their actions cannot be explained by appeal to their evidence alone. The probability of pursuing the true theory cannot contribute enough to the (...) expected epistemic benefit for the action to count as courageous rather than reckless. Thus, there must be some other epistemic consideration which favors their action, besides evidence for their theory. I argue that the proper account of intellectual courage requires recognition of inquisitive reasons: a distinct category of epistemic reasons which concern successful inquiry. This category includes reasons to think a theory itself is promising, e.g., that the theory suggests potentially fruitful new research. It also includes social epistemic reasons, e.g., that pursuing a theory will improve the distribution of cognitive labor. Inquisitive reasons help explain why researchers who pursue improbable theories count as intellectually courageous, rather than reckless. The expected epistemic benefit of an action is partially determined by the inquisitive reasons in its favor. On my account, intellectually courageous inquiry requires acting in a way that is sensitive to inquisitive reasons. (shrink)

Conspiracy theories are frequently described as a threat to democracy and conspiracy theorists portrayed as epistemically or morally unreasonable. If these characterizations are correct, then it may be the case that reasons stemming from conspiracy theorizing threaten the legitimizing function of democratic deliberation. In this paper, I will argue the opposite. Despite the extraordinary epistemic and morally unreasonable claims made by some conspiracy theorists, belief in conspiracy theories is guided by internal epistemic norms inherent in believing. By utilizing the (...) insights of the Peircean epistemic defense formulated by Cheryl Misak and Robert Talisse, I take it that these epistemic norms implicitly commit the theorist to an open democratic society. (shrink)

A key element of Plantinga’s religious epistemology is that de jure objections to Theistic belief succeed only if de facto objections to Theistic belief succeed. He defends that element, in part, by claiming that human beings have an innate theistic faculty, the sensus divinitatis. In this paper, I argue that Plantinga’s religious epistemology makes Christian Theism open to a de facto objection due to the characteristics and distribution of religious beliefs in the world. I defend my argument from a potential (...) objection from skeptical theism, before concluding with a comparison to a similar argument. (shrink)

Many AI systems that make important decisions are black boxes: how they function is opaque even to their developers. This is due to their high complexity and to the fact that they are trained rather than programmed. Efforts to alleviate the opacity of black box systems are typically discussed in terms of transparency, interpretability, and explainability. However, there is little agreement about what these key concepts mean, which makes it difficult to adjudicate the success or promise of opacity alleviation methods. (...) I argue for a unified account of these key concepts that treats the concept of understanding as fundamental. This allows resources from the philosophy of science and the epistemology of understanding to help guide opacity alleviation efforts. A first significant benefit of this understanding account is that it defuses one of the primary, in-principle objections to post hoc explainable AI (XAI) methods. This “rationalization objection” argues that XAI methods provide mere rationalizations rather than genuine explanations. This is because XAI methods involve using a separate “explanation” system to approximate the original black box system. These explanation systems function in a completely different way than the original system, yet XAI methods make inferences about the original system based on the behavior of the explanation system. I argue that, if we conceive of XAI methods as idealized scientific models, this rationalization worry is dissolved. Idealized scientific models misrepresent their target phenomena, yet are capable of providing significant and genuine understanding of their targets. (shrink)

Virtue epistemology has been divided into two camps: reliabilists and responsibilists. This division has been attributed in part to a focus on different types of virtues, viz., faculty virtues and character virtues. I will argue that this distinction is unhelpful, and that we should carve up the theoretical terrain differently. Making several better distinctions among virtues will show us two important things. First, that responsibilists and reliabilists are actually engaged in different, complementary projects; and second, that certain responsibilist (...) critiques of reliabilism miss the mark. With these distinctions on the table, we can see that the virtue reliabilist project is in some ways more fundamental than the responsibilist project, since the latter importantly depends on the former. I argue that the distinctively epistemic value of the responsibilist’s character virtues is derived from their connections to the reliabilist’s constitutive virtues. While this will give us a unified account of the epistemic value of intellectual virtues, it is not a reduction of the responsibilist project to the reliabilist one; rather, it as a way of securing the separate importance of each project by clarifying how they relate to one another. (shrink)

Discussion of epistemic responsibility typically focuses on belief formation and actions leading to it. Similarly, accounts of collective epistemic responsibility have addressed the issue of collective belief formation and associated actions. However, there has been little discussion of collective responsibility for preventing epistemic harms, particularly those preventable only by the collective action of an unorganized group. We propose an account of collective epistemic responsibility which fills this gap. Building on Hindriks' (2019) account of collective moral responsibility, we introduce the Epistemic (...) Duty to Join Forces. Our theory provides an account of the responsibilities of scientists to prevent epistemic harms during inquiry. (shrink)

Using an innovative blend of political theory, international law, and studies on the sociological and geo-political foundations of minority rights, this landmark publication will set the debate on the likely future of the international politics of diversity.

Scientists, philosophers, and other researchers commonly assert their theories. This is surprising, as there are good reasons for skepticism about theories in cutting-edge research. I propose a new account of assertion in research contexts that vindicates these assertions. This account appeals to a distinct propositional attitude called endorsement, which is the rational attitude of committed advocacy researchers have to their theories. The account also appeals to a theory of conversational pragmatics known as the Question Under Discussion model, or QUD. Hence, (...) I call the theory the EQUD model. Motivating this account is a recognition that the speech act of assertion has two roles to play in research contexts. The first is the advocacy role, in which researchers assert a theory in order to advocate for it. The second is the evidential role, which is used to add to the common stock of information available to a field of inquiry. The EQUD model provides an account of warranted assertion for both these roles in research contexts. This success provides support for the theory of endorsement. It also provides support for information updating accounts of assertion. (shrink)

I argue that recognizing a distinct doxastic attitude called endorsement, along with the epistemic norms governing it, solves the self-undermining problem for conciliationism about disagreement. I provide a novel account of how the self-undermining problem works by pointing out the auxiliary assumptions the objection relies on. These assumptions include commitment to certain epistemic principles linking belief in a theory to following prescriptions of that theory. I then argue that we have independent reason to recognize the attitude of endorsement. Endorsement is (...) the attitude of resilient and committed advocacy which is appropriate for researchers to have toward their own theory. Recognizing the importance of endorsement, and of its resiliency, gives us reason to deny the epistemic principles that serve as auxiliary assumptions in the self-undermining objection. This defuses the objection, and provides additional support for the theory of endorsement. (shrink)

Prawitz conjectured that the proof-theoretically valid logic is intuitionistic logic. Recent work on proof-theoretic validity has disproven this. In fact, it has been shown that proof-theoretic validity is not even closed under substitution. In this paper, we make a minor modification to the definition of proof-theoretic validity found in Prawitz’s 1973paper ‘Towards a foundation of a general proof theory’ and refined by Schroeder-Heister in ‘Validity concepts in proof-theoretic semantics’ (2006). We will call the new notion generalized proof-theoretic validity and (...) show that the logic of generalized proof-theoretic validity is intuitionistic logic. (shrink)

In conspiracy theory philosophy the primary debate has been epistemic, but the concern is now also shifting to the ethical and political implications of taking conspiracy theories seriously. This shift is epitomized in the work of Quassim Cassam, whose focus has moved away from the epistemic faults of the theories and theorists to the political function of conspiracy theories. This function, he argues, is to ‘express and promote an ideology’, specifically, racist, antisemitic, and extremist ideology. In this essay, I (...) class='Hi'>will challenge two of Cassam’s assumptions. First, I will disagree with his claim that racist conspiracy theories ought to be treated dismissively as a class. This is due in part to the difficulties in defining racist conspiracy theories and due in part to what I call the Conspiracy Theory Location Problem, which is the challenge of identifying what constitutes ‘the theory’. In response, I suggest we need to be even more particularistic about ‘instances’ of a theory. Second, I disagree that the only function of conspiracy theories is to promote racist ideology. Instead, I argue that there exists a class of antiracist conspiracy theories that resist white supremacy by uncovering racist conspiracies and challenging racist institutions, systems, and ideologies. (shrink)

Thought: A Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

Sometimes inquirers may rationally pursue a theory even when the available evidence does not favor that theory over others. Features of a theory that favor pursuing it are known as considerations of promise or pursuitworthiness. Examples of such reasons include that a theory is testable, that it has a useful associated analogy, and that it suggests new research and experiments. These reasons need not be evidence in favor of the theory. This raises the question: what kinds of reasons are provided (...) by pursuitworthiness considerations? Are they epistemic reasons or practical reasons? I argue that pursuitworthiness considerations are a kind of non-evidential epistemic reason, which I call an inquisitive reason. In support of this, I first point out two important similarities between the traditional pursuitworthiness considerations discussed in philosophy of science, which I call promise reasons, and certain social epistemic reasons that I call social inquisitive reasons. Specifically, both kinds of reason (1) favor pursuing a theory in a non-evidential way, and (2) concern promoting successful inquiry. I then propose recognition of a new category of normative reason: inquisitive reasons. This category contains both promise and social inquisitive reasons. Finally, I argue that inquisitive reasons share three essential features with previously recognized epistemic reasons: a connection to epistemic aims, explanatory independence, and the presence of a specific right-kind/wrong-kind reasons distinction. Each of these features have been used to argue that evidence should be treated as part of a distinct, independent domain of epistemic normativity. Since inquisitive reasons share these features, they too should be considered part of this independent epistemic domain. Thus, inquisitive reasons, including pursuitworthiness considerations, are epistemic reasons. (shrink)

L’article propose une lecture groupale, centrée sur la famille, des comportements d’hétéro-agressivité dans la clinique de l’autisme et de la déficience intellectuelle sévère et présente l’intérêt de l’articulation de dispositifs groupaux thérapeutiques. Pour cela, l’auteure met au travail une situation clinique familiale. Elle aborde l’actualisation des dépôts d’un espace à l’autre, les enjeux d’historicisation grâce à une écoute polyphonique et au redoublement d’emboîtement. Enfin, elle montre comment les comportements d’hétéro-agressivité se manifestent comme travail psychique de la pulsion de mort au (...) sein de la famille. (shrink)

This article surveys recent work on the idea of "citizenship", not as a legal category, but as a normative ideal of membership and participation. We focus on two emerging issues. First, whereas traditional notions of citizenship assume that membership and participation are promoted by the possession of rights, many theorists now emphasize civic responsibilities. Second, whereas traditional theories assume that citizenship provides a common status and identity, some theorists now argue that the distinctive needs and identities of certain groups -such (...) as women, ethnic minorities, the disabled - can only be accommodated through "group-differentiated citizenship". The writings of neo-conservatives, participatory democrats, civic republicans, feminists, civil society theorists, virtue theorists and cultural pluralists are surveyed. (shrink)

Ayn Rand, née Alise Rosenbaum en URSS en 1905 et disparue en 1982 à New York, est aux antipodes de la pensée critique européenne : son éthique de l'égoïsme, son culte de la rationalité doublé d'une ode à la liberté, sa pensée capitaliste intransigeante, sa brutalité intellectuelle en font un personnage controversé. Anticonformiste radicale, elle reste aussi une curiosité en Amérique, puisqu'elle parvient tout à la fois à fustiger l'interventionnisme économique de Roosevelt et Kennedy, condamner la guerre du Vietnam, défendre (...) l'avortement, critiquer la religion et tailler en pièces le racisme. S'il importe de comprendre son œuvre, c'est au moins à double titre. D'abord pour saisir sa popularité aux États-Unis, où son roman La Grève reste considéré comme un des ouvrages les plus influents après la Bible. Ensuite, pour opérer un droit d'inventaire sur une pensée de l'émancipation qui exalte la confiance en l'individu, acteur de son propre destin. Elle réhabilite ainsi la notion d'héroïsme, à la croisée des idées et d'une passion pour le cinéma qui imprègne toute son œuvre. Mathilde Berger-Perrin s'essaie avec brio et empathie à ce difficile exercice d'admiration et de distanciation."--Page 4 of cover. (shrink)