Papers are made available only from January to March and only for purposes of discussion at the meeting.
Abstracts of Colloquium Papers
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| “A Challenge to Pettit’s Republican Theory of Freedom”
Waheed Hussain, University of Pennsylvania |
| | In his influential book Republicanism, Philip Pettit argues that we should understand freedom in terms of the absence of domination. The republican theory is meant to chart a third way between traditional approaches to freedom associated with both positive and negative liberty. In this paper, I argue that insofar as the republican theory is clearly an alternative to views associated with positive freedom, it suffers from a serious weakness: it lacks the resources to criticize distinctively modern forms of oppression that work, not by preventing people from doing what they want, but by shaping what they happen to want in the first place. I go on to argue that the only reasonable way to account for the facts of oppression in the modern world is to think of freedom in terms of positive liberty.
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| “A Defense of Intuitions”
S. Matthew Liao, Oxford University |
| | Radical experimentalists argue that their empirical studies show that intuitions vary according to factors such as cultural and educational background, and what other cases have recently been considered. Accordingly, radical experimentalists believe that we should give up relying on intuitions as evidence in philosophy. In this paper, I argue that the studies presented by the radical experimentalists in fact show that some intuitions are reliable. I then propose a way of understanding how intuitions can conflict, and I argue that on this understanding, both moderate experimentalism and intuition as evidence approaches to philosophy can play a role in helping to resolve these conflicts. The upshot is that we should embrace moderate experimentalism, but reject radical experimentalism.
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| “A Dilemma for Particularist Virtue Ethics”
Rebecca Lynn Stangl, University of Virginia |
| | There is an obvious affinity between virtue ethics and particularism. Both stress the complexity of the moral life, the inadequacy of rule-following as a guide to moral deliberation, and the importance of judgment in discerning the morally relevant features of particular situations. And yet, it remains an open question how deep the affinity goes. In this paper, I argue that the implications for virtue ethics of one kind of particularly strong form of particularism are more radical than has been appreciated. Adopting such a view would require the virtue theorist either to adopt an unattractive model of moral motivation or to embrace a version of the unity of the virtues.
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| “A Logical Response to Blackburn’s Supervenience Argument”
Jorn Sonderholm, Louisiana State University |
| | Simon Blackburn’s supervenience argument against moral realism has been widely discussed since its first appearance more than thirty years ago. A number of different suggestions have been made as to how the argument can be countered. In his review of Blackburn’s Spreading the Word, Crispin Wright comments on the argument and rather briefly points out some technical difficulties with it that arise from the formula used in the definition of supervenience (Mind 1985, pp. 310-19). This paper builds on Wright’s criticism and aims at showing that the Moorean realist can meet Blackburn’s explanatory charge. The main point is that by exploiting certain features of the formulae involved in classical definitions of supervenience, weak and strong supervenience claims can be made trivially true. This holds even in cases where the modal operator(s) are interpreted to denote conceptual necessity.
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| “A Puzzle about Emotion, Perception, and Rationality”
Larry A. Herzberg, University of Wisconsin–Oshkosh |
| | Two overlapping strands of recent work in the philosophy of emotion present a prima facie puzzle. The first recognizes that emotions are properly evaluated in terms of their rationality. The second holds that types of emotion are literally kinds of perception. When one tries to weave these strands together, a puzzle is generated by the fact that perceptions are generally held not to be evaluable in terms of their rationality, on the grounds that such normative assessment requires a responsible subject, and subjects are not responsible for their perceptions. In his book Gut Feelings: A Perceptual Theory of Emotion (2004), Jesse Prinz accepts these grounds but tries to weave the strands together anyway. I argue in this paper that the solution he offers to the puzzle is, at best, incomplete, but that his theory of emotion contains the resources necessary for a more adequate solution.
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| “A Puzzle about Other-directed Time-bias”
Caspar Hare, Massachusetts Institute of Technology |
| | Many of us, when we think about our own joys and miseries, are time-biased. We don’t just care about what happens to us, we also care about when it happens. In particular, we care about whether it is past or future—other things being equal, we would prefer bad things to be past and good things to be in the future. But what happens when we think about the joys and miseries of other people? Are we time-biased on their behalf? That depends. Our other-directed time-bias is sensitive, in a curious way, to things that typically come with distance. I argue that it should not be so.
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| “A Semantics for Names with Full Benefits”
Heidi Tiedke, University of Maryland–College Park |
| | A good account of the role of proper names in fiction requires one to adopt a non-standard semantics for proper names, and to reject accounts of the relation between names and truth that have it that the relation is one of determination (that the meaning of a name determines its contribution to the truth-conditions of utterances containing it). At least this is so if one makes the following assumptions: an assertive utterance of ‘Holmes smokes’ can be literally true; the intuitive truth-conditions of utterances like these are indicative of the semantics of the expressions involved; ‘Sherlock Holmes’ belongs to the same semantic category as ‘Bertrand Russell’; and an account of the truth of an utterance of ‘Holmes smokes’ must explain how natural language, as it is, is apt for expressing such truths. I here argue for a semantics for names that meets these conditions.
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| “A Tale of Two Simples”
Joshua Spencer, University of Rochester |
| | There is a puzzle, strikingly similar to one put forward by McDaniel (2003) and discussed by Hudson (2006). This puzzle is meant to show that extended mereological simples cannot be heterogeneous. Although several plausible responses have been given to this puzzle, I wish to reopen the case against heterogeneous extended simples. In this paper, I briefly canvass responses to this puzzle which may be made in defense of extended heterogeneous simples. I then present a new version of this puzzle which targets simples that occupy atomic yet extended regions of space. It seems that none of the traditional responses can be used to successfully save this particular kind of extended simple from the new puzzle. Finally, I will suggest that the similarities between the old and new cases result in a substantial case against the possibility of extended heterogeneous simples of any kind.
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| “Acquaintance and De Re Belief”
Heimir Geirsson, Iowa State University |
| | Donnellan argues that Leverrier does not have de re knowledge of Neptune. It is further plausible to conclude that if Leverrier does not have de re knowledge of Neptune then those to whom he passes the name ‘Neptune’ do not have such knowledge either. Nevertheless, many direct designation theorists have embraced the view that one acquires beliefs of objects, or de re beliefs, when one sincerely assents to a sentence expressing a singular proposition. Given the appeal of Donnellan’s view it appears that the direct designation theorists have made it too easy to acquire de re beliefs of an object.
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| “Agential Systems and Causal Deviance”
Jesús Aguilar, Rochester Institute of Technology |
| | A plausible strategy to defend the Causal Theory of Action from deviant causal chains is grounded on the proposal that an intentional bodily movement must be sensitive to the content of the mental state that causes it. This strategy is directly challenged by causally deviant cases where bodily movements are produced through the intervention of a second agent. In this essay I criticise John Bishop’s influential answer to this challenge. In particular, I criticise Bishop’s alleged “Final Breakthrough” concerning the necessary and sufficient conditions for an intentional action which is a central part of his answer to causal deviance.
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| “All Truths Are Known? The Church-Fitch Paradox and the Problem of Transworld Knowability”
Julien Murzi, University of Sheffield |
| | A well-known argument, first published by Frederic Fitch, purports to show that semantic anti-realism, the view that all truths are knowable, collapses into a naìˆve form of idealism, according to which all truths will be known by someone at some time. Following Berit Brogaard and Joe Salerno, the paper endorses the view that the proof can be seen as classically invalid. Brogaard and Salerno’s proposal requires transworld knowability – i.e., in the most striking case, possible knowledge of actual truths. Such a notion faces serious problems. According to Timothy Williamson, it is necessarily trivial. His argument has it that we can’t have substantial knowledge of what’s happening in any particular possible world. Yet, it seems, we do have knowledge of particular possible worlds. What has gone wrong? This paper defends a counterfactual account of transworld knowledge by providing two arguments against Williamson’s objection.
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| “Allais-like Preference Reversals Are Everywhere”
Mariam Thalos, University of Utah |
| | Maurice Allais had strong reservations about the classical theory of utility—reservations that are yet to be quelled. If his criticism of classical utility is accepted, then decision theory, as standardly founded upon classical utility, is doomed—at least as a prescriptive enterprise. Allais’s classic counter-example (called a “paradox” in many classic texts) involves judgment concerning risk, in which Allais himself judged “reversal” as rational. (“Reversal” refers to the orientation of judgment in relation to the prescriptions of classical utility theory.) What previous commentators have failed to appreciate is that the reversals are more pervasive. This paper demonstrates that reversals infect how humans judge cases involving time and effort, just as much as they infect cases involving risk.
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| “Anti-Berkeley”
Georges Dicker, State University of New York–Brockport |
| | I am not a Berkeleyan. This isn’t because I don’t appreciate the force of the good Bishop’s arguments against matter, for I think that many of them are highly effective against their targets. I also find Berkeley’s skeptical arguments, in sections 18-20 of the Principles of Human Knowledge, very powerful; though of course they can’t show that matter doesn’t exist, since it would be fallacious to argue that because we cannot know or be justified in believing that matter exists, therefore it does not exist. But putting these epistemological arguments to one side, I think that the targets of Berkeley’s arguments against matter fall into two classes: (1) demonstrably unsound arguments, and (2) arguments directed against views that no friend of matter needs to hold. This is too broad a thesis to defend in a 30-minute paper. So I ignore arguments that I believe fall into class (1); nor do I try to show that all of Berkeley’s remaining arguments against matter fall into class (2). But I support the hypothesis that they do, by reference to three key parts of Berkeley’s case against matter-his attacks on material substance/substratum, on representationalism, and on the distinction between primary and secondary qualities-leaving for other occasions the question of whether other Berkeleyan arguments against matter are amenable to a similar treatment.
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| “Are Persons Mere Containers for Well Being?”
Martin Peterson, University of Cambridge |
| | It is widely believed that consequentialists are committed to the view that persons are mere containers for wellbeing. I challenge this argument by proposing a new version of consequentialism, according to which the identities of persons matter in themselves. It is shown that the new theory, two-dimensional prioritarianism, is a natural extension of traditional prioritarianism. In resemblance with the latter, the two-dimensional view holds that wellbeing matters more for persons who are at a low absolute level than for persons who are better off. However, two-dimensional prioritarianism also holds that it is worse to be deprived of a given number of units than it is to gain the same number of units, even if the new distribution is a permutation of the original one.
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| “Are There Any Biological Explanations in Experimental Biology? Marcel Weber’s Account of Heteronomous Explanation in Experimental Biology”
William A. Rottschaefer, Lewis and Clark College |
| | In his recent The Philosophy of Experimental Biology, Marcel Weber argues that explanation in experimental biology, in contrast to evolutionary biology, makes use of only physical and chemical laws to explain biological phenomena. Any reference to biological phenomena is merely descriptive. Consequently, these explanations are heteronomous. I examine and find wanting four of his arguments for heteronomy. Using Weber’s own appeal to thermodynamic considerations in the case of ion flow in a neuron I argue that the biological boundary conditions referred to in experimental biological explanations indicate that they constrain physiochemical activity. Arguing for a modest autonomy thesis, I propose that understanding living systems as far from equilibrium dynamic systems suggests that biological factors play a causal role generally in the phenomena studied in experimental biology. I conclude that Weber’s heteronomy thesis has not been established and that modest autonomy hypothesis is a plausible alternative.
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| “Aristotle and McDowell on ‘Second Nature’”
David Forman, University of Nevada–Las Vegas |
| | The concept of ‘second nature’ is central to McDowell’s project of reconciling thought’s autonomy or spontaneity with its external constraint by the world. And of central importance here is his appeal to Aristotle: Aristotle’s account of ethical character formation as the development of a second nature serves as a model meant to reassure us that the acquisition of norms responsive to an autonomous space of reasons does not detach the realm of thought from nature in general and human nature in particular. But far from providing such reassurance, the Aristotelian account of second nature (when considered as an account of norms in general—as required by McDowell’s project) actually encourages an anxiety about the how the acquisition of conceptual abilities could be possible.
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| “Aristotle and the Homonymy of Cause”
Nathanael Stein, Oxford University |
| | To know is to grasp causal relations, according to Aristotle: this is his consistent claim throughout his logical, metaphysical, and scientific treatises. Famously, there are four kinds of causal relation: formal, material, efficient, and final causation. This leads to an interpretive and philosophical problem: if knowledge is the grasping of causes, but there are four kinds of cause, then knowledge is ambiguous, unless the kinds of cause can be appropriately and non-trivially unified. The problem can only be solved by appreciating that causation is one of the concepts Aristotle recognizes as homonymous: concepts which are not univocal but nonetheless organized around a core concept, or focal meaning. The core concept for causation is, in fact, the concept of predication. This result ought to be of interest both for scholars of Aristotle and for those wishing to defend causal pluralism.
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| “Aristotle on Mathematical Existence”
Philip Corkum, University of Alberta |
| | Both literalists and fictionalists deny the existence of a world of mathematical objects distinct from the empirical world. Literalists argue that mathematical objects simply exist in the empirical world; on this account, mathematical statements assert true beliefs about perceivable objects. Fictionalists, on the other hand, hold that mathematical objects do not exist at all; on this account, mathematical statements express merely fictional attitudes. Although these two positions are apparently quite opposed to one another, they nonetheless have been both ascribed to Aristotle. Indeed, Aristotle’s philosophy of mathematics exhibits some of the features characteristic of literalism and some of the features characteristic of fictionalism. However, Aristotle’s position also exhibits features interestingly different from both literalism and fictionalism. In this paper, I’ll discuss literalism and fictionalism, the ascription of literalism and fictionalism to Aristotle and the points of agreement and disagreement among Aristotle, literalists and fictionalists.
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| “Beautiful Surfaces: Kant on Beauty and Perfection”
Alex Rueger, University of Alberta |
| | Kant’s distinction of free and adherent beauty has been considered problematic on several accounts. I am interested here in the question whether Kant is really committed to claiming that we can, at least in principle, regard all cases of adherent beauty as instances of free beauty if we abstract from whatever concepts we have of what the objects are supposed to be. Are there really no plausible constraints on our power of abstraction? I argue that the operation of abstracting from concepts of the objects in Kant’s theory is not as arbitrary as might seem and that the strategy, properly understood, has its roots in aesthetic theories that preceded Kant’s.
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| “Believing in Order to Know”
John Zeis, Canisius College |
| | Evidentialism is generally taken to be a position which is not friendly to a religious epistemology. However, in this paper, I will argue for a religious epistemology which is compatible with fundamental tenets of an evidentialist position on epistemic justification. It is a position which entails both a “will to believe” which goes beyond the standard evidentialist principles governing the appropriate doxastic attitude towards a proposition, but nonetheless satisfies epistemic principles at the basis of an evidentialist position on justification. If my argument is successful, a proponent of a conception of religious faith may be able to have her cake and eat it too: namely, she may be able to fundamentally accept both the evidentialist demand that epistemically rational belief fit, or be supported by evidence as well as the position that rational faith is willing belief beyond what one’s evidence strictly demands.
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| “Better Brains, Better Selves? The Ethics of Neuroenhancements”
Richard Dees, University of Rochester |
| | The idea of enhancing our abilities through medical means makes most people uncomfortable. People have a vague feeling that altering our brains messes with the core of our personalities and the core of ourselves. It changes who we are, and doing so seems wrong, even if they exact reasons for the unease are difficult to define. However, the lack of such a clear argument against them has led some to argue that we should permit their use on a general principle of allowing people to do what they want as long as they do not harm others. In this paper, I will suggest that most of the arguments against neuroenhancements fail, and the ones that do succeed-the arguments that such changes undermine our integrity and that they prevent us from living authentic lives-will condemn only a few of the uses that are proposed.
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| “Blindsight in Monkeys, Lost and Perhaps Found”
Sean Hermanson, Florida International University |
| | The study of blindsight might contribute to general investigations of animal consciousness. Perhaps whether there is something that it is like to be a given animal perceiving visually depends on whether it exhibits the neurological and behavioral profile of conscious vision versus that of a non-conscious “natural blindsight.” One difficulty for this project is finding a way for an animal to non-verbally indicate whether or not it is perceiving consciously. Interestingly, it has become routine to claim that the work of Stoerig and Cowey shows that monkeys with lesions in the primary visual cortex have blindsight. However, Mole and kelly argue that this conclusion is unwarranted because their evidence is compatible with an alternative hypothesis positing a deficit in attention and perceptual working memory. I describe a revised experimental paradigm that can distinguish between these hypotheses. I also offer reasons for thinking that the blindsight hypothesis will prevail.
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| “Can Liberalism Account for Women’s ‘Adaptive Preferences’?”
Lisa H. Schwartzman, Michigan State University |
| | Feminist philosophers have questioned whether liberal theory can account for the phenomenon of adaptive preferences, specifically women’s preferences that are formed under conditions of sexist oppression. In this paper, I examine one feminist attempt to address the problem of women’s “deformed desires” by relying on a liberal framework. Assessing this argument, I conclude that liberalism provides inadequate resources for responding to this issue since it errs in understanding adaptive preferences as exceptional, it provides little explanation of how changes in individual preferences are motivated, and it often fails to identify the adaptive nature of such preferences. I illustrate my arguments through a brief discussion of women’s choices around motherhood and sexuality, and I conclude by offering several suggestions of how an alternative theory might better address the problems raised by preference adaptation in the context of oppression.
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| “Clearing a Path Towards a Critical Theory of Social Identity”
Brian Thomas, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill |
| | For those working on race and gender, one useful way of making traction in the project of developing a critical theory of social identity is to consider what would a good or just society make of an individual’s race or sex, and whether racial and sexual distinctions would ever properly be taken into account. These questions should sound familiar, having been discussed by Richard Wasserstrom and recently by Sally Haslanger and Linda Martin-Alcoff. Though there are disagreements amongst these theorists about whether the ideal society would, as it were, contain gender, they all agree that the ideal society would not contain race. I argue two points. First I argue that Wasserstrom’s criteria for deciding the status of racial identity in the good society are mistaken. Second, I argue that the attempts by Haslanger and Martin-Alcoff to argue in favor of gender but against race are inconsistent.
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| “Cognitive Abilities and the Conceptualist / Nonconceptualist Debate”
Ted Poston, University of South Alabama |
| | In a recent paper “Are there different kinds of content?” Richard Heck argues for nonconceptualism, the thesis that perceptual content is different in kind than cognitive content. Heck’s argument is interesting and helps to regiment and clarify the central issue between conceptualists and nonconceptualists. I defend conceptualism against Heck’s central argument. Conceptualists can utilize a number of Heck’s points to clarify and argue for their own view. Additionally, I explain how the debate between conceptualists and nonconceptualists has been misled by conceiving of cognitive abilities as involving language-like representation. Once this picture is set aside Heck’s central argument for nonconceptualism collapses and the conceptualist claim has a much more natural and unobjectionable formulation.
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| “Collective Epistemic Virtues”
Reza Lahroodi, University of Northern Iowa |
| | At the intersection of social and virtue epistemology, lies the important, yet so far entirely neglected, project of articulating the social dimensions of epistemic virtues. Perhaps the most obvious way in which epistemic virtues may be social is that they may be possessed or instantiated by social groups and collectives. We often speak of groups as if they could instantiate epistemic virtues. It is tempting to think of these expressions as ascribing virtues, not to the groups themselves, but to their members. I argue that this temptation should be resisted. I show that individualist accounts of group virtues are either too weak or too strong. I then formulate a non-individualist account modeled after Margaret Gilbert’s influential account of collective beliefs. Crucial disanalogies between collective traits and beliefs, I argue, make the success of this model unlikely. I end with some questions the future work on collective epistemic virtues should engage.
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| “Connubium Rationis et Experientiae: Christian Wolff on the Relation Between Empirical and Rational Psychology”
Corey Dyck, Boston College |
| | Rational psychology was first introduced among the topics of metaphysics by Christian Wolff; nevertheless, historians of philosophy borrow their conception of rational psychology not from Wolff but from Kant who subjects this science to critical scrutiny in the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Accordingly, rational psychology is often identified as a rationalist psychology and associated with the abjuration of observation typically associated with philosophical rationalism. By contrast, I demonstrate that Wolff accorded an important function to those observations catalogued in empirical psychology within rational psychology. While empirical and rational psychology are distinguished in method and emphasis, the latter was considered to be heavily reliant upon the former for its principles and for confirmation of its results. This conception of rational psychology prevailed until Kant’s introduction of the (non-empirical) I think as the sole text of rational psychology.
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| “Constitutivism and Self-Knowledge”
Paul Katsafanas, Harvard University |
| | Lately, a new account of account of practical reason has found its place among the familiar contenders: constitutivism. Constitutivists argue that we can derive substantive conclusions about reasons for acting from an account of the nature of action itself. One of the foremost proponents of this view is David Velleman. In this essay, I argue that Velleman’s constitutivist project fails. While objections to Velleman’s account of intentional action are common, I take a different approach. I show that even if we grant Velleman the analysis of action, his arguments fail to establish any substantive conclusions about practical reason. Put differently: even if Velleman were right about the nature of action, he would be wrong about practical reason.
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| “Construction Without Spatial Constraints: Locke on Geometrical Reasoning”
Mary Domski, University of New Mexico |
| | In a number of recent articles, Emily Carson (2002, 2005a, 2005b) has brought attention to what she takes to be a tension in Locke’s account of geometrical reasoning. On the one hand, Locke claims that our ideas of geometrical figures are simple modes that the mind creates by modifying the simple idea of space. On the other hand, Locke claims that we can have certain knowledge in mathematics because mathematical objects are ideal, that is, because they are products of the understanding. According to Carson, a clear tension in this general argument begins to emerge once we consider that our construction of geometrical figures is constrained by the general conditions of space. As a result of these constraints, the simple modes of space are not free creations of the understanding, and thus, not ideal in the sense Locke claims them to be. Consequently, the certainty of mathematical knowledge becomes problematic at best and untenable at worst. My goal in this paper is to offer a reply on Locke’s behalf. For while I agree with Carson that our creation of geometrical figures must be constrained by something, I do not agree that these constraints are tied to features of space we learn from experience. By appealing to Locke’s presentation of the simple idea of space in Book II of the Essay, I want to show that space, by his definition, cannot play a restrictive role on our constructions. I will thus suggest that any constraints must be ‘internal’ to our constructions, i.e., such constraints must be tied to the power of the imagination. By embracing the imagination as that which determines which figures we can or cannot create, I will argue that Locke can preserve the ideality of geometrical figures on which he grounds the certainty of geometrical knowledge.
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| “Counterfactual Exemplar-Based Virtue Accounts of Right Action”
Robert Johnson, University of Oklahoma
Russell Jones, University of Oklahoma |
| | Rosalind Hursthouse and Linda Zagzebski defend different versions of counterfactual exemplar-based virtue theory. Their theories share the following definition of right action: [R] A right act in some circumstances is an act a virtuous agent might characteristically do in like circumstances. Our central purpose in this essay is to evaluate counterfactual exemplar-based virtue theories of the sort proposed by Hursthouse and Zagzebski in light of two related objections to [R]. One of these, which we call the Williams objection, is familiar in the literature. According to this objection, theories of the sort we are considering often give mistaken evaluation or bad advice to non-virtuous people. The second objection is not developed in the literature, but is hinted at by Gilbert Harman. The Harman objection is that [R] often fails to give any action-guidance and evaluation for non-virtuous people. After spelling out these two objections, taking particular care to develop the less familiar Harman objection, we consider how [R] might avoid both objections. The discussion turns on developing the concept of like circumstances. We argue that the strength of the objections depends on the conception of like circumstances adopted; changing the conception of like circumstances may weaken or eliminate the force of the objections. However, a problem still remains for [R], for it is important to Hursthouse and Zagzebski that counterfactual exemplar-based virtue ethics remain practical. We argue that adopting a conception of like circumstances which weakens or eliminates the force of the Williams and Harman objections results in an unacceptable loss of practicality for [R].
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| “Crossing Species Boundaries: A Feminist Critique of Human-Nonhuman Chimeras”
Pamela Lomelino, University of Colorado–Boulder |
| | In this paper, I examine a particular article, Baylis and Robert’s “Crossing Species Boundaries” (American Journal of Bioethics, 2003), in order to illustrate the extent to which a feminist critique is called for in the current Bioethical debate regarding the moral permissibility of creating human-nonhuman chimeras. In addressing the common objections in the literature, as well as Baylis and Robert’s proposed objection. I argue that all of these objections rely on harmful and mistaken stereotypes regarding “human” and “nonhuman”. In arguing this, it is my hope to evoke the reader to understand the importance of addressing these stereotypes as a necessary part of an ethical analysis of creating these chimeras.
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| “DeGrazia, MacIntyre, and Dolphins: A Case Study in the Necessary Evolution of Methodology”
Thomas White, Loyola Marymount University |
| | Despite the fact that recent philosophical discussions of nonhumans have shown an increased interest in dolphins, these discussions have been characterized by fundamental weaknesses. These investigations have been based on a faulty methodology that has led thinkers to argue for positions that are neither scientifically nor philosophically defensible. The methodology at issue is characterized by insufficient familiarity with the relevant scientific literature, no direct observation of dolphins in their native habitat, and an unintentional anthropocentrism. This essay illustrates these weaknesses by examining the work of two philosophers (David DeGrazia and Alasdair MacIntyre) and calls for an improved methodology. (While this paper concentrates solely on the problems connected with how these two philosophers have discussed dolphins, I believe that a similar methodological weakness appears to pervade the “animal rights” discussion in general.)
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| “Democracy and Children’s Suffrage”
Jason Hanna, University of Colorado–Boulder |
| | I challenge the arguments typically offered in favor of child disfranchisement by showing that they speak against universal adult suffrage. My thesis is conditional: if all adults are allowed to vote, then nearly all children should be allowed to vote. I argue, first, that concerns about voters’ political knowledge support the implementation of voter competency tests rather than age limits. Second, I show that the rationale behind child disfranchisement could be used to support the disfranchisement of most adults. I then consider the objection that child disfranchisement is justified because we must balance the need for an inclusive electorate against the need for an informed electorate. This objection fails because it implies that some adults should be disfranchised or given less voting power than other adults. Finally, I argue that it is unreasonable to disfranchise children on the grounds that their political preferences would be shaped by their parents.
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| “Democratic Deliberation, Public Reason, and Environmental Politics”
Scott Aikin, Vanderbilt University |
| | The activity of democratic deliberation is governed by the norm of public reason—namely, that reasons justifying public policy must both be pursuant of shared goods and be shareable by all reasonable discussants. Environmental policies based on controversial theories of value, as a consequence, are in danger of breaking the rule that would legitimate their enforcement.
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| “Descartes and the Question of Direct Doxastic Voluntarism”
Rico Vitz, University of North Florida |
| | One issue that has received a fair amount of attention from philosophers interested in the ethics of belief is the question of whether (or the extent to which) people have direct voluntary control over their beliefs—that is, the question of direct doxastic voluntarism. Happily, so it might seem, this is one issue on which contemporary philosophers appear to have reached a consensus: namely, that people cannot voluntarily control their occurrent beliefs, or judgments, directly. In this paper, I elucidate Descartes’s strikingly different answer to the question and explain its implications for the current consensus. More specifically, I argue that on Descartes’s account, people can have direct voluntary control over their judgments, and I contend that a careful look at what he actually says suggests that contemporary philosophers have failed to make a compelling case against his position and, hence, that the current consensus is unsubstantiated.
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| “Descartes on Consciousness and Forms of Thought”
David L. Clemenson, University of St. Thomas–Minnesota |
| | Descartes’s view of thoughts as self-perceptions implies that all thoughts are ideas; this seems at first to contradict his claim (Third Meditation, AT VII 37) that many thoughts are not ideas, strictly speaking. However, closer analysis reveals not only that there is no contradiction here, but that the self-perception involved in pure perceptions (‘ideas’ in the strict sense of AT VII 37) is radically confused: all such perceptions, no matter how distinctly they may exhibit their proper objects, fail to exhibit themselves distinctly even as things (the case is different with ‘impure’ perceptions such as volitions; here self-perception may be perfectly distinct). If sensory ideas of cold, heat, colors, etc. are pure self-perceptions (as the Fourth Replies, AT VII 233 would suggest) then the foregoing holds out hope for a clear and consistent explanation of the material falsity and radical confusion of sensory ideas in Cartesian theory.
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| “Disappearing Appearances: A Critique of Alva Noë’s Approach to Spatial Perceptual Content”
René Jagnow, University of Georgia |
| | A round plate seen from an angle looks elliptical. How is it possible to see one shape, even though it looks another shape? This question has an important phenomenal aspect. The roundness of the plate is perceptually present in the experience. Alva Noë has recently argued that his version of the enactive approach to perception is able to explain this phenomenal aspect. In this paper, I argue that Noë’s proposal is problematic because his notion of appearances as occlusion properties is phenomenologically inadequate. On Noë’s enactive approach, appearances as occlusion properties would have to be dependent on the perceiver’s actions while simultaneously retaining their independence from other perceived properties. I show on phenomenological grounds that it is not possible to define a notion of appearance that fulfills both conditions.
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| “Dispositional and Counterfactual Logic”
Charles Hermes, Florida State University |
| | Recently, the problems of finks, masks, and mimics made counterfactual accounts of dispositions much less attractive. Many theorists remain hopeful, however, that merely being more precise in stating what the antecedent of the relevant counterfactual is will solve these problems. Nevertheless, even if these problems can be rectified, a more serious problem exists. The logic of dispositional ascription is distinct from standard counterfactual logic. The reason for these differences is that unusual features of the world that are extrinsic to an object are not relevant in ascribing dispositions to that object. Nevertheless, two principles of standard counterfactual logic ensure that these features will be relevant in counterfactual evaluation. Endorsing a counterfactual analysis of dispositions requires endorsing a non-standard account of counterfactuals that rejects these principles. Nevertheless, one of these principles is essential in any adequate analysis of counterfactuals. So, counterfactual accounts of dispositions are doomed.
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| “Does Spontaneity Relate Rationally to Receptivity?”
Apaar Kumar, Emory University |
| | Contra the view held by Davidson and Sellars that sense-impressions can only relate to our beliefs and active judgments in a causal way, I argue that McDowell provides a coherent philosophical framework that can indeed serve as the basis for our being able to view sensory perceptions as rational justifications for our beliefs or judgments. I show how we can coherently argue that the objects we receive from the world can rationally relate to our beliefs and judgments if we construe rational justifications as justification by “pointing” from thinking to objects in the world, if we conceptualize experience as a mutually-constituting relation, and, finally, if we accept that human beings operate in the realm of second nature and not “disenchanted” nature.
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| “Dreyfus’s Phenomenological Foundations: A Reply”
Aaron Allen Schiller, University of California–San Diego |
| | In his 2005 Presidential Address at the Pacific Division Meeting of the APA, Hubert Dreyfus proposed that philosophers of all stripes should work together to address the following problem: to show “how the ground floor of pure perception and receptive coping supports the conceptual upper stories of the edifice of knowledge.” While much of the address focused on what sorts of phenomena pure perception and receptive coping could be, much less time was spend defending the claim that such phenomena are foundational in the way seemingly required by his formulation. In this paper, I consider the meaning of, and arguments for, Dreyfus’ phenomenological foundations. I argue that, even if one can agree with Dreyfus that there are some capacities which are minimal or receptive or reactionary, there seems to be no good reason to accept, and several good reasons to reject, that they form any kind of “foundation.”
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| “Empiricism and the Vehicles of Thought”
Daniel Weiskopf, University of South Florida |
| | According to concept empiricism, concepts are nothing more than perceptual representations. One line of evidence for empiricism comes from neuroscientific studies showing that perceptual regions of the brain are activated during cognitive tasks. But the extant neuroscientific evidence falls short of establishing empiricism. First, there is widespread activity outside perceptual systems during conceptual processing. This suggests that concepts are partially non-perceptual representations. Second, many brain regions are multimodal. These multimodal regions often implement complex processing of perceptual information beyond what takes place inside sensory systems. Third, the key notion of a copy of a perceptual representation is a slippery one. On the most plausible conception of a copy, we have little reason to believe that perceptual copies are widespread in the brain. In sum, the causal structure of the brain involves widespread activity in perceptual and non-perceptual systems, and no subset of this activity can be singled out as the unique neural vehicle of conceptual thought.
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| “Employment Freedom”
Anne Baril, University of Arizona |
| | A person’s employment so permeates the rest of her life that if she doesn’t have a real choice about her employment, she can’t properly be said to have a real choice about the way she lives her life. Effective freedom- the actual ability to make real, substantial decisions about the direction of one’s life- requires effective freedom with respect to one’s choice of employment (‘work freedom’). I propose that work freedom is not merely a matter of acceptable alternatives, but also of the number and diversity of choices one has about what kinds of effective freedom one will have as a result of one’s employment. Number and diversity of such choices is not the whole story, however; some choices matter more than others. Finally, which kinds of choices make a difference to one’s
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| “Epistemic Agency and the Non-Local Truth Goal”
Patrick W. Rysiew, University of Victoria |
| | Knowledge is widely held to be more valuable than true belief. Further, we place higher value on the possession of some truths over others. Each of these facts has been said to conflict with ‘epistemic value monism’ (EVM) – the view that truth is the epistemic goal. I argue that a plausible version of the truth-goal, together with an acknowledgement of our cognitive-epistemic finitude, explains the valuations upon which these objections to EVM turn.
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| “Externalism and Conceptual Analysis”
Jussi Haukioja, University of Turku |
| | Does an externalist theory of the meaning of natural kind terms commit one to the view that conceptual analysis about natural kinds is impossible? It is clear that externalism makes the application conditions of natural kind terms a posteriori, but what about reference-fixing conditions? Can one come to know, merely on the basis of reflecting on one’s own semantic intuitions, which properties fix the reference of a natural kind term? Many philosophers have recently claimed that the externalist has to answer in the negative to this question as well. In this paper, I distinguish between three ways of specifying reference-fixing conditions and argue that standard forms of externalism are in fact committed to the a priori knowability of reference-fixing conditions in one of these senses. I will also claim that we should be optimistic about the possibility of the other two.
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| “Fictional Realism Rescued”
Mary Beth Willard, Yale University |
| | Defenders of pretense theories of fiction have argued against fictional realism by noting that the fictional realist would be committed to the existence of objects that are logically problematic, and as pretense theories of fiction have no need to postulate the existence of such problematic objects, they should be favored over fictional realism. In particular, Anthony Everett argues that fictional realists are committed to two propositions that jointly entail the existence of vague, logically incoherent, ontologically indeterminate objects: ‘Invented’ If the world of a story concerns a creature a, and if a is not a real thing, then a is a fictional character, and, ‘Symmetry’ If a story concerns a and b, and if a and b are not real things, then a and b are identical in the world of the story iff the fictional character of a is identical to the fictional character of b. While both propositions are intuitively appealing, I will argue that ‘Symmetry’ is false. Within the world of a story, where we imagine fictional characters as real persons who could have done otherwise, we do not require ‘Identity,’ but a much looser relationship of similarity and authorial intent. As a result, identity within the world of the story does not necessarily entail identity outside the world of the story, and thus the fictional realist is not committed to the existence of incoherent objects.
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| “Fitting Attitudes and Welfare”
Chris Heathwood, University of Colorado–Boulder |
| | The purpose of this paper is to present a new argument against so-called fitting attitude analyses of value, according to which, roughly, for something to be intrinsically good is for there to be reasons to want it for its own sake. The argument is indirect. First, I submit that advocates of such a theory should also, for the sake of theoretical unity, endorse a fitting attitude analysis of a closely related but distinct concept: the concept of welfare. Then I argue directly against fitting attitude analyses of welfare. This argument, which is the focus of the paper, is based on the idea that whereas whether an event is good for a person doesn’t change over time, the attitudes it is rational to have towards such an event can change over time. Therefore, one cannot explain the former in terms of the latter, as fitting attitude analyses attempt to do.
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| “Freedom in Nature: The Moral of Kant’s Critique of Judgment”
James Reid, Metropolitan State College of Denver |
| | Kant’s philosophy is organized around the concept of freedom. But the account of freedom defended and developed in the writings of the 1780s has been criticized for failing to register the moral requirements of embodied natural agents. The Critique of Judgment offers Kant’s first attempt to defend a view of the concepts of freedom and nature as two aspects of a single, undivided human agent concerned about the realization of her purposes in the only world in which it is her lot to live. The author argues for the moral import of the third Critique and defends a reading of its view of freedom in nature as compatible with both our scientific interest in naturalistic explanation and our moral interest in the realization of our purposes in the world of nature.
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| “Generalism about Practical Reasons: A Defense from the Analogy with the Epistemic”
Joshua Gert, Florida State University |
| | The point of this paper is to undermine the support that particularism in the domain of epistemic reasons might seem to give to particularism in the domain of practical reasons. In the epistemic domain, there are two related notions: truth and the rationality of belief. Epistemic reasons are related to the rationality of belief, and not directly to truth. Because of this, they inherit the messiness of human nature and its idiosyncratic cognitive limitations. In the domain of practical reasons, however, the role of truth is taken by the notion of objective rationality. Practical reasons are directly relevant to this objective notion, and therefore the reasons to expect holism and particularism in the epistemic domain do not transfer to the domain of practical rationality. This undermines one popular strategy for rendering particularism about practical reasons plausible.
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| “Generality, Complexity, and Approaches to Explanation”
Angela Potochnik, Stanford University |
| | On the assumption that explanations are causal, the question may be posed of which among the potentially many causal factors influencing an event should be included in the event’s explanation. This problem is particularly pressing when facing the task of explaining events that result from highly complex causal processes, such as cumulative evolutionary change, for such events have multitudinous causal influences. One possible solution is maximal inclusion: perhaps the best explanation would include all factors that make a difference to the occurrence of an explanandum. I argue, to the contrary, that some subset of the causal factors at work often provides the best explanation. In my view, the causal factors that should be included depend in part upon what I will refer to as the context of inquiry, which is shaped by the interests of the explanation-seekers. This position has implications for the debate over levels of explanation.
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| “Generics and Plural Quantification”
Bernhard Nickel, Harvard University |
| | Generics both characterize kinds and state generalizations about the instances of kinds. Many theorists endorse an ambiguity view that mirrors this distinction, taking bare plural expressions in generics to be ambiguous between reference to kinds and reference to their instances. I argue that this ambiguity view is untenable, and that we can achieve better empirical coverage by giving semantics for plural expressions that follow the work of George Boolos.
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| “Genetic Discrimination in Health Insurance: An Ethical and Economic Analysis”
Ben Eggleston, University of Kansas |
| | Current research on the human genome holds enormous promise for improvements in health care, but it poses an immediate ethical challenge in the area of health insurance, by raising the question of whether insurers should be allowed to take genetic information about customers into account in the setting of premiums. It is widely held that such discrimination is immoral and ought to be illegal, and the prevalence of this view is understandable, given the widespread belief, which I endorse, that every individual has a right to affordable health care. But prohibiting genetic discrimination in health insurance is not an effective way to protect this right. On the contrary, I argue that because of the nature of insurance as a product sold in a competitive market, such a prohibition is misguided, and its worthy aims must, instead, be pursued through reforms in our country’s system of publicly provided health care.
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| “Getting a Clue about Consequences: Counterfactual Semantics, Agent Ability, and the Epistemic Objection”
Eric Moore, Longwood University |
| | James Lenman’s “Consequentialism and Cluelessness” offers a new and ingenious version of the epistemic objection to consequentialism. His basic point is that the remote consequences of any action will often swamp its nearby, visible consequences, and that this fact renders consequentialism extremely implausible. In this paper, I argue that a proper interpretation of the relevant counterfactuals shows just the opposite: the visible consequences of an action will usually outweigh its distant effects.
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| “How Reliable Is That Monkey?”
Stephen Crowley, Boise State University |
| | Naturalism is currently a popular position within epistemology. Not all naturalisms however are equally naturalistic. I focus on an ‘ideal type’ of naturalism (which I call Epistemology as Science, or EaS for short) that represents the empirical extreme in the continuum of naturalized epistemologies. Current work in the EaS framework standardly links EaS with a reliabilist approach to knowledge and justification. I argue that although this alliance is immune, by its own lights, to standard epistemic criticisms of reliabilism, serious challenges to its adequacy are raised by current work in comparative psychology on uncertainty monitoring in monkeys.
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| “How the Transparency of Visual Experience Impacts Inverted Earth”
Robert Schroer, Arkansas State University |
| | Ned Block’s “Inverted Earth Argument” is a well-known objection to Representationalist theories of phenomenal character that offer externalist accounts of representational content. In this paper, I explore the question of what impact assumptions about the so-called “transparency” of perceptual experience can make on this argument. More specifically, I examine what the Inverted Earth Argument looks like if you assume that visual experiences are transparent and what it looks like if you assume that visual experiences are not transparent. The conclusions I reach are these: If you assume that visual experiences are not transparent, then the Inverted Earth Argument looks like a strong argument against externalist Representationalism, but only because it’s seriously begging the question. If you assume that visual experiences are transparent, then the Inverted Earth Argument looks like a good objection against one version of externalist Representationalism, but does little to impugn externalist Representationalism in general.
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| “Hume, Distinctions of Reason, and Differential Resemblance”
Donald L.M. Baxter, University of Connecticut |
| | In explaining the distinction of reason, Hume’s main concern is to resolve a tension with his principle that “all ideas, which are different, are separable.” However, a deeper problem arises. Hume holds that the same thing, even a simple, uncomposed, thing, can resemble something in one respect and differ from it in another. Additionally, Hume thinks that the respects of resemblance are numerically identical with the thing itself. Unfortunately, it follows that in the identical respect of resemblance, the same thing does and does not resemble something else. Differential resemblance yields a contradiction. The contradiction undermines not only his account of distinctions of reason, but also his account of abstract ideas, and ultimately the Empiricist program of deriving all ideas from inner and outer sense.
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| “If You Like Pina Coladas…”
L. Bryce G. Huebner, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill |
| | If you like pina coladas… One might think that even if we had a complete story regarding the neurophysiology of wetness, there would remain what Joe Levine has called an “explanatory gap.” I don’t buy it, and I don’t think you should either! In this paper, I argue that the explanatory gap can be dissolved by way of a strategy of divide and conquer. I claim that there are actually two sorts of gaps, neither of which is all that problematic for the materialist.
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| “Illusions Without Contents?”
Kranti Saran, Harvard University |
| | It is widely assumed that perceptual experiences have contents. M.G.F. Martin, John Campbell, Bill Brewer and Charles Travis have recently criticized this assumption. The central rationale for the assumption is that it allows a natural and elegant treatment of illusion in terms of bearing a perceptual attitude to false contents. Travis argues that his alternative account of illusion—which does not invoke contents—undermines the central rationale for the assumption. This paper reconstructs and assesses Travis’s account of illusion. He explains illusory experiences in terms of false expectations about the world rather than as misrepresentations of it. I argue that his proposal fails to plausibly account for the robustness of certain illusions. The central rationale for the assumption remains untouched.
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| “In Defense of (a Formulation of) the Date Theory”
Stephan Torre, University of Massachusetts–Amherst |
| | In this paper I evaluate the date theory in light of objections that have been raised against it by Quentin Smith. The force of Smith’s arguments has been acknowledged by a number of B-theorists and many agree that they pose a serious threat to the date theory. Smith provides an objection to the date theory given a reductionist account of time and an objection to the date theory given a substantivalist account of time. I argue that Smith’s objection against the reductionist date theorist fails because he attributes to the reductionist an implausible account of the identity of times across worlds. I argue that Smith’s objection against the substantivalist date theorist can a) be reformulated to apply to the reductionist as well and b) succeeds in refuting one formulation of the date theory. There is another formulation of the date theory, however, that avoids Smith’s objections entirely.
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| “In Defense of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy”
Malte Willer, University of Texas–Austin |
| | The Phenomenal Concept Strategy—the view that the explanatory gap between physical processes and consciousness stems from the way we think about consciousness—is defended against a recent criticism articulated by David Chalmers. Contra Chalmers, it is claimed that proponents of the Phenomenal Concept Strategy can provide a non-physical explanation of the explanatory gap which is neither regressive nor circular.
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| “International Political Obligations”
Helga Varden, University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign |
| | In this paper I argue that the liberal ideal of political obligations in the international sphere is non-voluntarist in nature. I argue with Kant that the impartial form of the international authority gives it, and no one else, rightful standing to solve problems of assurance and specification in the international sphere. The legitimacy of the international authority stems from how it represents each interacting state, stateless person and member of an oppressive state—and yet none of them individually. Any state that insists on providing assurance or applying international laws on its own commits wrongdoing in the highest degree, since it thereby fails to respect the sovereignty of other states and the rights of stateless individuals. Because international justice is possible only through the establishment of an international authority, I conclude that the international authority has a special status in international relations that individual states cannot possibly have.
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| “Is Consistency in the Application of Unjust Laws a Form of Justice?”
Alistair M. Macleod, Queen’s University |
| | Partly on the footing that justice requires consistency (or uniformity, or equality) of treatment—with similar cases having to be treated similarly—it is still sometimes supposed that consistency in the application even of unjust laws or rules to particular cases is a form of justice. On this view judgments about the justice or injustice of law- or rule-applying decisions are logically independent of judgments about the justice or injustice of the laws or rules they presuppose. I distinguish two versions of this “independence” thesis. According to the first, the lack of connection between judgments about the justice of laws and rules on the one hand and judgments about the justice of the decisions that apply these laws and rules to particular cases on the other is taken to be grounded in the claim that the former have normative force while the latter are normatively neutral. According to the second, there is no connection despite the fact that judgments of both sorts have normative force. The first version of the independence thesis is false because—unlike the term “rights” to which talk about the “just” and the “unjust” is often assumed to be systematically related—“just” and “unjust” haven’t acquired any purely descriptive connotation. In discussing the (somewhat more plausible) second version, I examine—and reject—five arguments that have been presented in its support. I conclude that while consistency in the application of laws and rules to particular cases is a necessary condition of justice in the administration of these laws and rules it is not a sufficient condition of a special form of justice.
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| “Is Michael Otsuka’s Conception of Robust Self-Ownership Too Robust for a Left-Libertarian?”
Eric Roark, University of Missouri–Columbia |
| | In this paper I explore Michael Otsuka’s left-libertarian attempt to reconcile robust self-ownership and equality. I argue that Otsuka’s left-libertarian reconciliation fails because his offering of robust self-ownership, in place of the formal libertarian right of self-ownership, falls prey to glaring egalitarian worries. Robust self-ownership, that is, ought to be rejected by anyone who incorporates a serious egalitarian component into their theory of justice. Michael Otsuka’s robust self-ownership is indeed too robust for a left-libertarian. I offer that a left-libertarian must be content with endorsing merely the formal libertarian right of self-ownership or give up the left-libertarian reconciliation of self-ownership and equality altogether.
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| “Is Ugliness a Pure Aesthetic Category in Kant’s Theory of Taste?”
Joseph Cannon, Northwestern University |
| | A central claim in Henry Allison’s Kant’s Theory of Taste is that “ugliness” is for Kant a pure aesthetic category. In this paper I will argue that this is incorrect. A pure judgment of taste pronounces something beautiful or not-beautiful. Ugliness is not a pure aesthetic category—judgments of which for Kant must be disinterested—but a category that is intrinsically interested. Thus, judgments that declare something ugly cannot be pure aesthetic judgments. For Kant, when we claim that an object is ugly, we make an aesthetic claim bound up with either a moral claim or a prudential claim. I show that one does not find a pure aesthetic account of ugliness in Kant’s text, and additionally show that the attempt to introduce one produces intractable problems for the requirement that judgments of taste be disinterested.
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| “John Stuart Mill on Economic Justice and the Alleviation of Poverty”
Stephen L Nathanson, Northeastern University |
| | In spite of the great interest in J. S. Mill’s political thought and in problems of poverty and economic justice, Mill’s views on these subjects are seldom discussed. This results partly from their appearing in his generally unread Principles of Political Economy but also from erroneous extrapolations from On Liberty and Utilitarianism. In this paper, I sketch some of Mill’s ideas on justice and poverty alleviation and their relation to Mill’s utilitarianism. Like socialists, Mill condemned the economic distribution of his time, but he mainly argues for a reformed capitalism whose principles of justice require distribution of resources based on people’s “exertions” and on the abstinence required for investing capital. He applies these ideas to issues like land ownership, inheritance, and state assistance to the poor. In addition, Mill stresses high productivity, population control, free education, and equal status for women as means for combatting poverty.
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| “Justice as a Self-regarding Virtue”
Paul Bloomfield, University of Connecticut |
| | The benefit of being a just person has long appeared inscrutable at best. Assuming that self-respect is a benefit to a person, an argument is given for the conclusion that without the virtue of justice a person cannot have self-respect. The argument proceeds by an investigation of the role of supervenience in justice (understanding supervenience here as treating like cases alike), the need for fair judgment in order to possess self-knowledge, and the need for the latter for self-respect.
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| “Kant’s Critique of Leibniz on the Distincition Between Sensible and Intellectual Representations”
Steven M. Bayne, Fairfield University |
| | Kant believed Leibniz failed to realize there is a distinction in kind between intellectual and sensible representations. Kant believed, Leibniz thought the difference between concepts and sensible intuitions was a only a difference of degree not type—that is, concepts and sense perceptions turn out to be the same type of mental representation and they only differ from each other in terms of their relative distinctness. Concepts possess this distinctness, while sense perceptions do not. Kant believed that, Leibniz held sense perceptions to be nothing but sets of confused concepts. I argue that although this interpretation seems initially plausible, the textual evidence for it is at best inconclusive. I then argue that there are clear texts in which Leibniz does seem to draw a distinction in kind between sensible and intellectual representations. Finally, I argue that these passages cannot consistently be reinterpreted as being consistent with the Kantian interpretation of Leibniz.
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| “Kantian Respect: Why Should Humanity, Not the Good Will, Be Treated as an End in Itself?”
Zachary Hoskins, Washington University in St. Louis |
| | Kant instructs us to respect humanity as an end in itself. On one popular interpretation, “humanity” for Kant consists in the capacity to set ends. I argue for a broader interpretation of humanity as including a disposition toward morality. Another, related problem remains, however. Kant maintains that humanity has unconditional worth and hence warrants respect. But this appears to contradict his claim that a good will is the only unconditional good. Why would Kant not instruct us to respect a good will, rather than humanity, as an end in itself? On Kant’s account, I contend, it would be incredibly difficult to respect a good will, because we could not pick out instances of it with any certainty. Motives may be opaque, and it may never be clear whether an agent exhibits a good will. All rational agents, however, have the disposition toward a good will (i.e., humanity), which warrants respect.
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| “Knowledge, Assertion, and Risk”
William S. Larkin, Southern Illinois University–Edwardsville |
| | I will propose a Moorean solution to the puzzle that arises from considering such propositions as: (L) My multi-million-dollar-lottery ticket is a loser. We normally deny knowing propositions like L, resist flat out asserting them, and avoid using them in our practical deliberations even though our epistemic relation to them is very often stronger than it is to more ordinary propositions. I will argue that knowledge and risk tolerance naturally come apart with respect to propositions like L, and then I will rely on a new act account of assertion to explain why it is normally inappropriate to assert or attribute knowledge of such propositions.
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| “Later Selves and Legal Paternalism”
Louis-Philippe Hodgson, York University |
| | I defend a new way to reconcile certain types of paternalistic intervention with the doctrine of individual sovereignty—the idea that competent adults should be free to make their own choices, and their own mistakes. I proceed in two steps. I first argue that an authorization to use force against one’s future self cannot be irrevocable: each person has the right to decide what can be done to her body at any given moment, and cannot alienate that right through an act of authorization. I then show that setting off a mechanism that will cause injury to one’s future self violates that right, and that consequently a competent adult can justifiably be prevented from doing so. This suggests a justification for forbidding certain dangerous activities (taking certain recreational drugs, or riding a motorcycle without a helmet, for instance) that is paternalistic, yet compatible with the doctrine of individual sovereignty.
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| “Liberalism and Economic Growth”
Kevin Vallier, University of Arizona |
| | Modern liberal theories of justice tend be unconcerned with economic growth. Instead, they emphasize that all members of society should possess equal or decent shares of society’s common resources. But this emphasis has led liberal theories of justice away from their goal of helping the least advantaged. I argue that a lack of emphasis on growth is due in part to modern liberals’ failure to countenance the possibility that the economic policies they typically defend hurt the least advantaged by reducing economic growth. If we take the possibility seriously then many putative obligations to redistribute may be undermined. I argue that if redistributive policies hurt the people they were intended to benefit by reducing economic growth then they cannot be justified. Modern liberal theories of justice must pay more attention to the moral matter of economic growth.
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| “Locke: The Role of Consciousness in Sensitive Knowledge”
Shelley Weinberg, University of Toronto |
| | Locke makes the enigmatic claim that knowledge is the perception of an agreement or disagreement between ideas and that sensitive knowledge consists in the perception of an “actual real Existence agreeing to an Idea” (IV.i.7). What could he be thinking? I argue that Locke has a conception of consciousness that makes sense of this claim. Consciousness interpreted as a reflexive awareness that ideas have particular sources provides evidence internal to perception that makes sense of Locke’s claim that sensitive knowledge does not extend beyond our ideas yet is the perception of an actual real existence. It also explains why the perception of an actual real existence constitutes a case of knowledge rather than probable judgment. Although sensitive knowledge concerns the existences of particular things, it satisfies the criteria for knowledge, namely a clear and relatively immediate perception of an agreement of real existence between ideas.
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| “Luck and Standard Libertarianism”
E. J. Coffman, University of Notre Dame |
| | ‘Standard Libertarianism’ (‘SL’) says that you act freely on a given occasion only if the past and laws of nature do not entail your acting as you do then. The so-called “Luck Argument” is one of the premier objections to SL. I here provide a reply to the Luck Argument that’s superior to ones prominent in the literature. Section 1 presents a common version of the Luck Argument, and highlights a challenge its proponents face. Section 2 identifies two desiderata of a reply to the Luck Argument, and uses them to reveal considerable shortcomings of prominent replies. Section 3 assesses the best extant version of the Luck Argument, one due to Alfred Mele. I present two replies to Mele’s argument, each of which meets Section 2’s desiderata. Section 4 evaluates another version of the Luck Argument, one involving an account of luck different from Mele’s. I argue that this version impugns nothing in SL’s neighborhood.
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| “Many-One Identity and the Trinity”
Shieva J. Kleinschmidt, Rutgers University |
| | Trinitarians claim there are three Divine persons each of which is God, and there’s only one God. It seems they want three to equal one. It just so happens, some metaphysicians claim exactly that. They accept the Strong Composition Thesis (SC): each fusion is identical to the plurality of its parts. I evaluate SC’s application to the doctrine of the Trinity, and argue it fails to give the Trinitarian any options he/she didn’t already have. Further, while SC does give us a new way to assert polytheism, its help requires us to endorse a claim that undercuts any Trinitarian motivation for the view.
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| “Margins of Error in Value Comparisons”
Nicolas Espinoza, Royal Institute of Technology |
| | In this paper margin of error principles for comparative value judgements are outlined. They are based on the idea that if a proposition concerning the value relation between two value bearing options is true, but there are sufficiently similar cases in which it is false, it is not available to be known. To demonstrate the usefulness of the principles, they are applied in building an epistemological case against the so-called small-improvement argument (SIA), which is often considered the strongest case for value incomparability. If we acknowledge margins for error in comparative value judgement, it follows that some of the crucial steps in SIA are epistemically unwarranted.
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| “Meta-metaethics: Moderate Skepticism about Some Concepts of Metaethical Inquiry”
James Harold, Mount Holyoke College |
| | The dispute in metaethics between cognitivists and non-cognitivists is at bottom a dispute over the correct way to characterize our psychology: are moral judgments beliefs, or a kind of pro-attitude? In this paper, I argue that this dispute comes to nothing; it dissolves in the light of a reasonable skepticism about folk psychology, and with it, the distinction between cognitivism and non-cognitivism collapses. I begin by briefly reviewing some contemporary positions in metaethics on cognitivism and non-cognitivism that are intended to emphasize the supposed psychological differences between the two views. I show that the appearance of a clear difference between these views depends on one’s having a very strong commitment to the accuracy and completeness of certain concepts of folk psychology. I then review several arguments that support moderate skepticism about folk psychology. I conclude that folk concepts like “belief” are not well-defined enough to settle this metaethical dispute.
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| “Michael Slote’s Unjustified Rejection of Neo-Aristotelian Ethics”
Eric Silverman, St. Louis University |
| | Michael Slote has recently criticized Neo-Aristotelian virtue theory in favor of a sentimentalist approach to ethics. While Slote claims that virtues such as benevolence and care cannot be supported by a Neo-Aristotelian theoretical structure, this paper demonstrates that Neo-Aristotelian eudaimonistic accounts of virtue ethics can incorporate these virtues. Furthermore, this paper demonstrates that Slote’s ethical theory is far more limited than Neo-Aristotelian ethics in its ability to provide nuanced ethical evaluations of moral agents in moral dilemmas.
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| “Modal Property Comprehension”
Ulrich Meyer, Colgate University |
| | To define new property terms, we combine already familiar ones by means of certain logical operations. Given suitable constraints, these logical operations may presumably include the resources of standard first-order logic: truth-functional connectives and quantification over objects. What is less clear, however, is whether we can also use modal operators for this purpose. The aim of this paper is to clarify what is involved in this question, and to argue in favor of modal property definitions. To define new property terms, we combine already familiar ones by means of certain logical operations. Given suitable constraints, these logical operations may presumably include the resources of standard first-order logic: truth-functional connectives and quantification over objects. What is less clear, however, is whether we can also use modal operators for this purpose. The aim of this paper is to clarify what is involved in this question, and to argue in favor of modal property definitions.
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| “Modality, Individuation, and the Ontology of Art”
Ben Caplan, Ohio State University
Carl Matheson, University of Manitoba |
| | David Davies uses the work-relativity of modality (according to which different works composed at the same time are not equally modally flexible with respect to musico-historical context) to argue for The Performance Theory (according to which a musical work is a performance) and against The Contextualized Product Theory (according to which a musical work is a product that is generated by a performance and that is individuated in part by the musico-historical context in which it is produced). We argue that The Contextualized Product Theory can accommodate the work-relativity of modality if The Performance Theory can.
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| “Motor Perception: A Third Way to Perceive Pictures?”
Alessandro Pignocchi, Institut Jean Nicod |
| | Philosophers traditionally distinguish two ways of perceiving pictures: we can perceive the content of the picture (what the picture represents) or its design (the picture as an object, with its own physical properties). Traditional questions regard the factors that determine what the content of a picture is, and the relations between the content and the design (Gombrich 2002, Wolheim 2003). I will argue that the perception of the design has not received sufficient attention from researchers, and that many pictorial phenomena could be understood in a more efficient way by separating design perception into two essentially distinct kinds of perception: first, the perception of the picture as a historical object. Properties of the picture are in this case perceived as pertaining to an object that has neither representational nor historical properties. Second, the motor perception, in this case properties are perceived as the result of the actions of an intentional agent. I will give arguments drawing on neuroscience to show that at the functional level the motor perception is a natural third kind of perception. I will then suggest that motor perception should have particular subjective manifestations that have been neglect by phenomenologist. Motor perception allows us to explain and describe very punctual pictorial phenomena, and it then could be a good field to see neuropsychology and phenomenology make progress hand in hand.
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| “Names and Public Language”
Stavroula Glezakos, Wake Forest University |
| | The influential theory of names developed by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity possesses many virtues, not least among them, the provision of “an explanation of how a name in local use can be connected with a remote referent.” Kripke motivates his view, which has come to be known as the direct reference theory of names, by providing examples that amply demonstrate that typical speakers do not possess the descriptive or conceptual means to uniquely identify the referents of many of the names that they use; he then develops a framework which locates the mechanism of reference not in those who use names, but in the names themselves. Essential to the direct reference account is the notion of a shared, public language. Kripke writes that a name comes into existence via an “initial baptism” of a referent; once created, a name can be passed from one language user to another. The notion of a public and passable name is a necessary element in Kripke’s explanation of how a language user who does not possess identifying information sufficient to specify a referent can nonetheless refer: success in reference stems from the fact that the name being used can be traced from user to user all the way back to its introduction as a name of a particular object, the referent. In this paper, I highlight a serious deficiency in the picture developed by Kripke: its failure to include an explanation of how language users are able to stand in the proper relations to names in the public language. I argue that the direct reference picture’s embrace of public language names, while providing a mechanism by means of which a name can be connected with a remote referent, comes at the cost of an explanation of how a local user attains the required connection to that name.
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| “Narrative Unity: A Defence”
Anthony Rudd, St. Olaf College |
| | Over the last two or three decades, a number of influential philosophers, psychologists and others have invoked the notion of narrative unity as having a central role to play in our thinking about ethics. However, something of a backlash now seems to be developing, exemplified in recent work by, for instance, Galen Strawson, Martha Nussbaum and John Christman. My intention here is to defend the value of a narrative approach, based mainly on the work of Alasdair MacIntyre and Charles Taylor from some of the most common recent criticisms. One centrally important aspect of the dispute is a first-order ethical one about the extent to which we should seek for a unity based on narrative coherence in our lives, and I will offer a defence of Taylor’s claim that an ethical life must aspire to, and to some extent achieve, narrative unity.
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| “On a Moment’s Notice: Aristotle on Perceiving Instants in Time”
Tony Roark, Boise State University |
| | Aristotle claims in the De Sensu that instants in time are individually per se perceptible. As it happens, this claim is a crucial component of the metaphysics of time he develops in the Physics, but it stands in stark contrast to another view that he endorses in the De Sensu, namely the view that arbitrarily small sense-quality instances (e.g., patches of color) are only potentially, not actually, perceived. I reconstruct Aristotle’s argument for the perceptibility of instants and in so doing elucidate the meaning of the claim. I then explain the incongruity of the two views mentioned and consider some of the salient consequences thereof.
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| “On Essentially Conflicting Desires”
Patricia Marino, University of Waterloo |
| | Some philosophers have argued that desire-ambivalence—wanting A and not-A—is rare and possibly irrational. Others have tried to show that pressure toward evaluative coherence can ground the non-relativity of normative reasons and moral obligation. This raises the question, just what is wrong with “inconsistent” desires? I argue for two claims. First, the proper characterization of “evaluative inconsistency” involves not logical form—whether the desires have the form A and not-A—but rather whether there is a possible world in which one’s desire are mutually fulfillable. Second, the “essential” conflicts involved in evaluative inconsistency are quite common and no worse than contingent ones. If this is right, it can be rational and appropriate to be evaluatively inconsistent, and those relying on evaluative coherence will have to find another explanation of its normative status.
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| “On Idiom, Ambiguity, and What Is Said”
Madeleine Arseneault, University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| | There are a host of expressions whose meaningfulness goes beyond their compositionally derived ordinary meaning. Unlike metaphor, idiomatic phrases have received considerably little attention from philosophers of language. Presumably this is because idiomatic phrases are accommodated into the lexicon of the language and are treated as a limit of, while not a challenge to, semantic compositionality. I reexamine idiomatic phrases and how they inform the concepts of ambiguity and saying. I draw out a surprising consequence of the standard view of idiom. I argue that the standard view is committed to holding that it is unintelligible to describe idioms as cases of saying one thing but meaning something else by it. Though this might not constitute a refutation of the standard view, I think it warrants a reexamination of idiomaticity.
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| “On Matter and Two Models of Change in Aristotle’s Physics A”
Beverly Hinton, West Virginia University |
| | There are two uses of ex hou that Aristotle employs to talk about change. One use is that “out of which” a change occurs, i.e., that which is replaced in the change—the privation. The other use is that “out of which” a substance is constituted—the matter. Aristotle appears to conflate these two uses in his account of change in Physics A 7. I argue that there is no confusion; instead, every change is out of a substratum in which the functions of matter and privation are both made possible by a more general concept of matter. I examine Aristotle’s two models of change to show that privation is said at the same time to be in opposition to matter and to be a part of matter. As such, the concept of matter for Aristotle is best seen as a principle of complexity.
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| “On the Representation of Decision Problems for a Unified Theory of Deliberation and Action”
Kenneth A. Presting, University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill |
| | The object of this paper is to offer a new diagnosis of a shortcoming which is commonly attributed to Richard Jeffrey’s The Logic of Decision. Proponents of the so-called “causal” decision theories object that Jeffrey’s system depends on probabilistic correlations which can be misleading. I will argue that Jeffrey’s system does not err in its recommendations, but rather, that it cannot consistently represent decision problems in which causal and statistical correlations occur together but disagree. The argument is conducted by formalizing The Logic of Decision in a first-order language with identity, so that a decision problem may be represented as a finite set of assertions, rather than as a matrix of probability and utility values. If this finite set is consistent with the axiomatized first-order theory, then the agent’s choice is represented as a logical consequence of the assertions stating that the choice is offered.
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| “Ontological Conventionalism: The New Essentialism”
Dana Lynne Goswick, University of California–Davis |
| | I argue that we are not justified in endorsing Kripkean Essentialism because Kripke has never bridged the Modal Gap. That is, he has never provided a satisfactory explanation of how we make the leap from our mere imaginative inability to conceive of object o lacking property p to the claim that o has p essentially. I examine the most promising attempt to close the Modal Gap: Bealer’s Moderate Rationalist theory of a posteriori necessity. I explain why I think Bealer fails to close the Modal Gap. Finally, I present a new version of Essentialism which retains Kripke’s Essentialist conclusions while also solving the Modal Gap.
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| “Open Borders and the Right to Immigration”
Peter Higgins, University of Colorado–Boulder |
| | Liberals and cosmopolitans have argued that the moral equality of individuals entails that liberal states must acknowledge a universal human right to immigration. To the contrary, I argue that liberal cosmopolitan arguments in favor of such a right make false assumptions about the social location of those affected by the admissions policies of liberal states, especially with respect to their gender, race, and class. Such assumptions mask the fact that acknowledgement of this right by liberal states would benefit most those who are already relatively advantaged (including residents of liberal states themselves), while positively harming those currently most disadvantaged by the global economic order. For this reason, I argue that, in order to be just, even by their own standards, the admissions policies of liberal states must take account of the social location of those affected by them and the effect open borders would have in perpetuating economic inequalities globally.
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| “Perceptual Experience and Error”
James Genone, University of California–Berkeley |
| | Many philosophers, psychologists, and cognitive scientists hold the view that perceptual experiences are, in some sense, representational. I begin by differentiating two versions of this thesis: first, the view that perceptual experiences involve awareness by a subject of a representation of her environment, and second, that perceptual experiences have representational content. After mentioning some general reasons for rejecting the first version of the view, I turn to focus on the second version, and consider several challenges that have been raised to it by the disjunctive theory of perceptual experience. I argue that these challenges can only hope to undermine the view that perceptual experiences have representational content if an alternative account can be provided that respects the motivations behind the representational content view. I attempt to achieve this by sketching and defending a relational view of perceptual experience in such a way as to give an adequate account of illusory and hallucinatory
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| “Physical Causation and Difference-making”
Alyssa Ney, University of Rochester |
| | This paper examines the relationship between physical and difference-making accounts of causation. It then considers in a preliminary way the consequences that this issue has for a current debate regarding mental causation.
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| “Possible Bridges and Hypothetical Consent”
Brian Prince, Rice University |
| | Some arguments based on hypothetical consent contain an important feature that may be easily overlooked. The feature can be brought out by asking why it is important, in these arguments, that I actually be in the situation to which I might have consented. Gregory Kavka’s work on Hobbesian moral theory contains two arguments of this type, one of which I discuss in this paper. These arguments cannot be understood without giving an account of the role of the actuality of the situation hypothetically agreed to. This will point toward a principle that can only be vaguely outlined in this paper, but some of whose general features will be described. I refer to this as a bridge principle, since its function would be to extend normative force from one possible world, in which something had been agreed to, to some other worlds in which the agreement had not taken place.
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| “Practical Reasoning and the Varieties of Agency”
Jennifer Morton, Stanford University |
| | I use an argument modeled on Hume’s discussion of the conditions of justice to motivate the idea that practical reason might vary depending on an agent’s psychology and environment. I argue that we should be skeptical of constitutive aim theories of agency that attempt to derive the norms of practical reasoning from a substantial aim because they fail to take into account this variety. I develop an argument against David Velleman’s theory of agency in particular by making a case for a whimsical agent that doesn’t aim at self-knowledge. If we weaken the aim of self-knowledge enough to account for this kind of agency, the theory ends up losing its normative grip on us. However, if we strengthen it, the theory ends up not being able to make sense of a whimsical agent as such.
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| “Properly Functioning Vision: On Block on Noë?”
Anne Jacobson, University of Houston |
| | It is a commonplace among those working on the philosophy of vision that contemporary vision neuroscience follows David Marr’s computational approach closely. Two claims characteristic of recent work show up in Ned Block’s review of Alva Noë’s Action in Perception. (1) Any contribution from outside the brain is merely causal, and does not affect the supervenience base for vision; (2) If A and B are in the same brain state, then they each have the same experiential state, where the latter exemplifies a category important in understanding vision. I argue in contrast that vision science importantly is and should be concerned with explaining human successes, which has a large effect on the taxonomy and the research questions considered central. It turns out relatedly that Block’s category of “same experiential state” revealed in philosophical thought experiments cannot be useful in cognitive neuroscience.
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| “Punishment and Collective Responsibility”
Erin I. Kelly, Tufts University |
| | Worries about proper regard for the rights of offenders are difficult to settle with a deterrence rationale for punishment. General deterrence especially is hard to justify, because it certainly seems like we are “using” someone when we make an example out of him in order to discourage other people from committing crimes. A deterrence rationale may also seem to permit punishing either too little or too much. I propose a solution to these worries that appeals to the idea of collective responsibility rather than individual blameworthiness. I use the idea that offenders bear collective responsibility for the social harm their crimes cause in order to develop a nonretributivist account of proportionality in sentencing.
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| “Relational Autonomy and Human Capabilities”
Suze Berkhout, University of British Columbia |
| | The growing interest in alternative conceptions of autonomy within philosophy in general, and medical ethics in particular, reflects many of the reasons given for rejecting the individualistic, decision-focused account of autonomy. But outside of the demand for attention to background social and material conditions, there is little suggestion of exactly how to make these assessments meaningful when dealing with individual patients within a medical context. Here I argue that Nussbaum’s capability approach is able to operationalize a general conception of relational autonomy to the extent that would be necessary for its practical use within medicine. Focusing on capabilities better reflects the aims and objectives of medical practice and medical ethics, while providing a means of establishing where interventions and policy might make an impact on the health and well-being of individuals and the communities within which they live.
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| “Relations and Powers”
Walter Ott, Virginia Tech |
| | After decades of abuse at the hands of the Cartesians, the Aristotelian notion of power was resuscitated by Robert Boyle and John Locke. A chief complaint against powers was that they were ontologically mysterious, since, on the Scholastic view, they are not reducible to the size, shape, and motion of extended substances. In the first two sections, I explain how Locke and Boyle ‘sanitize’ the notion of power by treating it as a species of relation and then arguing for a reductive account of relations generally. In the third, I turn to some implications for the question of Locke’s commitment to mechanism. Given Locke’s reductionism, God cannot imbue bodies with powers independent of their primary qualities.
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| “Reliability and Probability”
Juan Comesaña, University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| | It can often be heard in the hallways, and occasionally read in print, that a reliabilist theory of epistemic justification runs into trouble regarding fair lottery cases. My main aim in this paper is to argue that this is not so. Nevertheless, fair lottery cases do force us to pay close attention to the relation between reliability and probability.
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| “Reliance in Shared Intention”
Facundo Martin Alonso, Stanford University |
| | Bratman (1999a) and Tuomela and Miller (1988) propose that we regard the intentions of individuals in shared intention as intentions in favor of the joint activity. In this paper I explore what cognitive attitudes an individual is required to have in order for him to intend the joint activity in the way involved in shared intention. I argue that both Bratman and Tuomela and Miller are right in claiming that the content of these cognitive attitudes must include the other participants’ intentions in favor of the joint activity (Bratman) and their respective actions (Tuomela and Miller). However, I claim that these authors are wrong in thinking that these cognitive attitudes need to be beliefs. I argue that an individual’s reliance on the other participant’s relevant intentions and actions provides sufficient epistemic elements, even in the absence of belief, for him to intend the joint activity.
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| “Sea Battle Semantics”
Berit Brogaard, University of Missouri–Saint Louis |
| | The assumption that the future is open makes well-known problems for traditional semantics. We have a strong intuition to the effect that today’s occurrence of the sentence “there will be a sea battle tomorrow,” while truth-valueless today, will have a determinate truth-value by tomorrow night. Yet given traditional semantics, sentences that are truth-valueless now cannot later “become” true. Relativistic semantics supposedly does a better job accommodating our intuitions about future contingents than does non-relativistic semantics. I will argue, however, that our intuitions about future contingents cannot by themselves motivate such a paradigm shift, for, initial appearances to the contrary, standard non-relativistic semantics (plus an account of truth-value gaps) can accommodate both of our intuitions about future contingents
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| “Sexual Coercion and the Problem of Preemptive Consent”
Jeff Gauthier, University of Portland |
| | In his recent book, Alan Wertheimer disputes feminist theorists who would move away from a consent criterion in rape law, and argues that the transformative power of consent is not imperiled by conditions of inequality. In my paper, I argue that even if we accept Wertheimer’s general account of coercion, we need not follow him in finding that gender inequality is irrelevant to the validity of sexual consent. I argue that a broad range of quid pro quos involving the exchange of sex for other goods may be judged coercive using Wertheimer’s criterion. Moreover, I argue that the general failure to acknowledge the coerciveness of these proposals plays a key part in the evidentiary difficulties that accompany a certain class of rape prosecutions.
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| “Sibley and Defeasible Reasons: Holism about Reasons in Aesthetic Evaluations”
Anna Bergqvist, University of Reading |
| | In this paper, I outline a new reading of Sibley’s conception of prima facie reasons in aesthetic evaluations, which is outlined in his article ‘General Criteria and Reasons in Aesthetics’. Sibley seems to think that there are general prima facie aesthetic reasons, for he maintains that there are general features or criteria whose aesthetic value-polarity is inherently positive or negative when taken in isolation from other features with which they may interact. So there is some excuse for approaching Sibley’s position in terms of Rossian intuitionism. Nevertheless, I shall argue that Sibley’s overall discussion of aesthetic reasoning and aesthetic evaluation is more akin to a version of holism that figures in Jonathan Dancy’s recent defence of moderate particularism, which employs the notion of a default reason instead of that of a prima facie reason. In particular, it is my aim to show that Sibley would do better to abandon the notion of inherent or prima facie aesthetic polarity for features that may be possessed by artworks (and hence to aesthetic evaluations), since this conception is at odds with his discussion of the way the actual aesthetic polarity of such features is always contextually determined.
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| “Singular Limits, Explanation, and Emergence in Physics”
Andrew Wayne, University of Guelph |
| | Recent work on emergence in physics by Robert Batterman and Alexander Rueger has focused on the presence of asymptotic and singular limit relations between basal and upper-level theories. This paper argues that emergent properties are not due to singular limiting relations in the way that Batterman and Rueger claim. It shows that in the case of the van der Pol oscillator, a classic example of singular limit problem, novel upper-level properties are not emergent and can be entirely explained in basal terms. The paper suggests that the failure of basal explainability is constitutive of emergence in physics.
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| “Singular-Term Semantics Simplified”
John Justice, Randolph-Macon Woman’s College |
| | Singular-term semantics has been intractable. Frege took the referents of singular terms to be their semantic values, which left vacuous terms without values. Russell separated the semantics of definite descriptions from the semantics of proper names, which caused truth-values to be composed in two different ways and still left vacuous names without values. Montague gave all noun phrases sets of verb-phrase extensions for values, which created type mismatches when noun phrases were objects. There is a type of value for noun phrases that dissolves the difficulties besetting singular-term semantics.
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| “Solving the Problem of Timing Maxims in Kantian Ethics”
Jason Wyckoff, University of Colorado–Boulder |
| | One plausible interpretation of Kant’s notion of a contradiction in conception is that of a “practical contradiction,” meaning that the universalized form of the agent’s maxim would frustrate the agent’s purposes at the world in which the maxim is universalized. Barbara Herman argues that this interpretation would force the Kantian mistakenly to conclude that so-called “timing maxims,” in which agents coordinate their actions with the behavior of others, would be morally problematic. I argue that the Practical Contradiction Interpretation can be rescued from Herman’s objection by restricting the question of universalizability to the closest possible world to ours.
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| “Some Identity Statements in Plato: An Old Puzzle in the Sophist and a New Sense of ‘To Be’”
Richard Mohr, University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign |
| | In addition to the common senses of “to be” used in identity statements of the sort “Jones is Prime Minister” and “The lion is a four-legged mammal,” there exists in both English and Attic Greek a sense of “to be” that states identities of another sort, exemplified by the sentences “Business is business,” “I’m not myself today,” “Let Poland be Poland,” and “Enough is enough.” The function of these sentences—I call them simple identities—is to assert the existence of an essence. Simple identities are not disguised descriptions, not analytically true statements, not telescoped definitions. Nor are they vacuous, for they affirm states of affairs. We should not be surprised that simple identity provides a resource for understanding key elements in Plato’s metaphysics. For Platonism is basically the view that some simple identity statements are true.
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| “Spinoza on the Intelligence of the Passions”
Matthew J. Kisner, University of South Carolina |
| | Since Spinoza’s ethics revolves around mastering negative emotions, one might imagine that the passions do not have a positive role to play in a virtuous life. This paper aims to show that Spinoza’s philosophy allows for a more complicated understanding of the value of our passivity. Since pleasure and pain correspond to changes in our perfection and most passions are forms of pleasure and pain, it follows that the passions provide a kind of intelligence about the state of our perfection which is important to practical reasoning, for instance, indicating what contributes to or hinders our perfection. I defend this claim from two objections: (1) since the passions are ideas of the body, they are too confused to provide genuine intelligence; (2) since pains can sometimes be good and pleasures sometimes bad, pain and pleasure must not reliably indicate increases or decreases in our
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| “Stage Theory and Resurrection Replicas”
Eric Charles Steinhart, William Paterson University |
| | According to John Hick, resurrection is replication. If Fallen is resurrected as Risen, then Risen is a replica of Fallen at the last stage of Fallen’s earthly life. But replication is not identity. An endurantist says that diachronic sameness entails identity. So on endurantism, Risen cannot be the same person as Fallen. A worm theorist says that diachronic sameness is co-membership in the same 4D space-time worm. But there is no 4D worm that contains both Risen and Fallen. So on worm theory, Risen cannot be the same person as Fallen. A stage theorist says diachronic sameness is a temporal counterpart relation. If stage theory is right, then Hick can defend the view that Risen is the same person as Fallen. We show how stage theory helps Hick’s resurrection theory.
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| “Taking the Raven Paradox with a Grain of Salt”
Barry M. Ward, University of Arkansas–Fayetteville |
| | It is argued that the raven hypothesis and similar claims, such as “all sodium salts burn with a yellow flame”, are not universal generalizations. They are nomic claims for which Hempel’s paradox cannot be generated. Further, it is argued that standard Bayesian treatments of the confirmation of such hypotheses are mistaken, and an alternative Bayesian account is sketched.
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| “Teleology and Deontology in Distributive Justice”
Benjamin A. Sachs, University of Wisconsin–Madison |
| | In this article I introduce two views—teleology in distributive justice (TDJ) and deontology in distributive justice (DDJ). TDJ is the view that we should determine which distribution would be best, and then aim to achieve it. DDJ is the view that we should choose the distribution at which to aim based on some other consideration. I discuss the implications of the distinction between telic and deontic views for luck egalitarianism, egalitarianism, and prioritarianism. I argue that luck egalitarianism is not a version of egalitarianism, and that, in fact, the two views stand on opposite sides of the telic/deontic divide. Luck egalitarianism is a telic view, while egalitarianism, like prioritarianism, is most promising as a deontic view. My main point is that if we want to adjudicate the dispute among egalitarians, prioritarians, and luck egalitarians, we need to start debating the relative merits of teleology and deontology in distributive justice.
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| “Teleology and Embryonic Personhood”
Timothy Mosteller, California Baptist University |
| | This paper argues to the conclusion that teleology is real in human organisms, and because it implies personhood, the intentional killing of early stage human embryos is morally unjustified. First, I present reasons to believe that teleology is necessarily present in the natural world, especially in biological organisms. Second, I argue that the concept of biological teleology is conceptually tied directly to the concept of personhood for human beings. Third, I argue that if human beings are persons at every stage of teleological development, then the intentional disruption of teleological development is morally unjustified.
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| “Testimonial Defeat: A Reply to Lackey”
Jeffrey Glick, Rutgers University |
| | In her 1999 paper, Jennifer Lackey attempts to undermine the view that in cases of testimony the speaker must know that p when she testifies that p if the hearer is to come to know that p via the speaker’s assertions. Her criticisms are centered around the fact that problems with the epistemic status of a statement for a speaker do not necessarily transfer from speakers to hearers in cases of testimony. In such cases, her audience can come to know that p on the basis of her testimony even though the speaker does not herself know that p. This paper seeks to dissolve Lackey’s criticisms. In any case of testifying that p where the speaker does not know that p, there will always be a defeater which arises as a result of the testimonial act.
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| “The ‘Structure’ of Physics: A Case Study”
Jill North, Yale University |
| | We are familiar with talking about the “structure” posited by a given theory of physics, such as the spacetime structure of relativity. We also talk of the “existence” of these structures. What, exactly, do we mean by this? What is “structure” in this sense, and what do we mean by the existence of one structure rather than another? Modern theories of physics are formulated in mathematical language, using abstract mathematical objects. What does the structure of the mathematics used to formulate a theory tell us about the physical structure of the world according to that theory? This is particularly puzzling when there are different mathematical formulations of a given theory. Different mathematical formulations means different mathematical structures. Then what do we infer from the theory about the structure of the world? Do different mathematical formulations posit different structures, or are they mere notational variants, different ways of describing the same underlying structure? I consider these questions by looking at the case of Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics. I argue that, contrary to the usual view, these are not genuinely equivalent. For there is a difference in structure, and this is an all-important difference. I suggest more generally that we should be realists about structure.
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| “The Freedom of Collective Agents”
Frank Hindriks, Rijksuniversiteit Groningen |
| | Conceiving of groups as collective agents that perform joint actions, I propose an analysis of the conditions under which a group is free to perform a joint action. According to a reductive account of group freedom, a group is free if and only if (the requisite number of) the individuals who constitute the group are free. It is argued here, contra Kramer (2003), that individual freedoms are neither necessary nor sufficient for group freedom. I offer an alternative account of group freedom in terms of the ability of the members to perform their parts of a joint action jointly.
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| “The Illusion of Transmission: Where Wright Goes Wrong”
Stephen Wykstra, Calvin College |
| | In important and much-discussed recent papers, Crispin Wright argues “transmission” differs fundamentally from “closure”: he then argues that some situations generate failure of transmission, but not of closure. (Closure, in Wright’s sense, requires only that when you have grounds that warrant certain premises and see that they entail a conclusion, it is also the case that you are warranted in believing the conclusion. Transmission requires that by virtue of having grounds that “supply a warrant” for believing premises and seeing they entail a conclusion, you can acquire warrant for that conclusion.) I argue Rudolf Carnap’s distinction between “static” and “dynamic” senses of “confirm” can be extended to epistemic realtions like “supply a warrant.” Wielding this extended “Carnapian Distinction,” I show that Wright’s main argument suffers from severe equivocation. I then consider one way of trying to reconstruct his argument, and argue that it threatens to make Transmission itself—considered as distinct from the Closure Principle—an illusion.
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| “The Least Discerning an |
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