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Dark Futures: Toward a Philosophical Archaeology of Hope Philosophy Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Paul C. Taylor
Early in World War I, Virginia Woolf wrote these words: ‘The future is dark, which is on the whole, the best thing the future can be […]’. It is tempting to assume that darkness simply hides the unknown and the threatening. It is more challenging to think of it as Woolf did: rich with possibility in even the most desperate times.We live in what many would readily describe as dark times. These times
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Feeling Responsible: On Regret for Others’ Harms Philosophy Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Magnus Ferguson
This paper investigates the moral emotion of being socially, but non-agentially connected to a harm. I propose understanding the emotion of an affiliated onlooker as a species of regret called ‘social-regret’. Breaking from existing guilt- and shame-based accounts, I argue that social-regret can be a fitting, expressive, and revelatory reactive attitude that opens the way for deliberation over accountability
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Mobility, Migration, and Mobile Migration Philosophy Pub Date : 2024-03-14 Anna Milioni
Our world is mobile. People move, either within the state or from one state to another, to access opportunities, to improve their living conditions, or to start afresh. Yet, we usually assume that migration is an exceptional activity that leads to permanent settlement. In this paper, I invite us to reconsider this assumption. First, I analyse several ways in which people experience mobility in contemporary
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Being Open-Minded about Open-Mindedness Philosophy Pub Date : 2024-02-20 Kasim Khorasanee
Within the field of virtue and vice epistemology open-mindedness is usually considered an archetypal virtue. Nevertheless, there is ongoing disagreement over how exactly it should be defined. In this paper I propose a novel definition of open-mindedness as a process of impartial belief revision and use it to argue that we should shift our normative assessments away from the trait itself to the context
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The Role of Emotions in the Capabilities Approach: A Critical Analysis Philosophy Pub Date : 2024-02-06 Giulio Sacco
The capabilities approach is the theory according to which, in order to assess people's quality of life and reflect on the basic political entitlements, we should consider what people are capable of doing and being. Focusing mostly on Nussbaum's account, a number of scholars analysed the metaethical structure underlying the approach, showing her Aristotelian and Kantian sources. This article explores
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P.F. Strawson on Punishment and the Hypothesis of Symbolic Retribution Philosophy Pub Date : 2024-01-04 Arnold Burms, Stefaan E. Cuypers, Benjamin de Mesel
Strawson's view on punishment has been either neglected or recoiled from in contemporary scholarship on ‘Freedom and Resentment’ (FR). Strawson's alleged retributivism has made his view suspect and troublesome. In this article, we first argue, against the mainstream, that the punishment passage is an indispensable part of the main argument in FR (section 1) and elucidate in what sense Strawson can
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Race and the Problem of Empty Concept Dependency Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-12-15 George Hull
Defences of racial anti-realism typically proceed by establishing that nothing possesses the descriptive characteristics associated with the term ‘race’. This leaves them vulnerable to the externalist challenge that the descriptive meaning of ‘race’ is subject to revision based on discoveries about the nature of its referent. That referent is, according to constructionist realists, the groups we call
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Duty, Virtue, and Filial Love Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-31 Sungwoo Um
The aim of this paper is to argue that the normative significance of the inner aspects of filial piety – in particular, filial love – is better captured when we understand filial love as part of the virtue of filial piety rather than as an object of duty. After briefly introducing the value of filial love, I argue that the idea of a duty to love one's loving parents faces serious difficulties in making
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J.S. Mill's Puzzling Position on Prostitution and his Harm Principle Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Mark Tunick
J.S. Mill argues against licensing or forced medical examinations of prostitutes even if these would reduce harm, for two reasons: the state should not legitimize immoral conduct; and coercing prostitutes would violate Mill's harm principle as they do not risk causing non-consensual harm to others, their clients do. There is nothing puzzling about Mill opposing coercive restrictions on self-regarding
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Later Wittgenstein on ‘Truth’ and Realism in Mathematics Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-19 Philip Bold
I show that Wittgenstein's critique of G.H. Hardy's mathematical realism naturally extends to Paul Benacerraf's influential paper, ‘Mathematical Truth’. Wittgenstein accuses Hardy of hastily analogizing mathematical and empirical propositions, thus leading to a picture of mathematical reality that is somehow akin to empirical reality despite the many puzzles this creates. Since Benacerraf relies on
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Would a Viable Consent App Create Headaches for Consequentialists? Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-10-13 Scott Woodcock
Greater public awareness of the occurrence of sexual assault has led to the creation of mobile phone apps designed to facilitate consent between sexual partners. These apps exhibit serious practical shortcomings in realistic contexts; however, in this paper I consider the hypothetical case in which these practical shortcomings are absent. The prospect of this viable consent app creates an interesting
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Empathy and Psychopaths’ Inability to Grieve Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Michael Cholbi
Psychopaths exhibit diminished ability to grieve. Here I address whether this inability can be explained by the trademark feature of psychopaths, namely, their diminished capacity for interpersonal empathy. I argue that this hypothesis turns out to be correct, but requires that we conceptualize empathy not merely as an ability to relate (emotionally and ethically) to other individuals but also as an
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Fitting Diminishment of Anger: A Permissivist Account Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Renee Rushing
There has been recent discussion of a puzzle posed by emotions that are backward looking. Though our emotions commonly diminish over time, how can they diminish fittingly if they are an accurate appraisal of an event that is situated in the past? Agnes Callard (2017) has offered a solution by providing an account of anger in which anger is both backwards looking and resolvable, yet her account depends
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Political Rage and the Value of Valuing Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Mica Rapstine
This paper focuses on the question of political anger's non-instrumental justification. I argue that the case for anger is strong where anger expresses a valuable form of valuing the good. It does so only when properly integrated with non-angry emotional responsiveness to the good. The account allows us to acknowledge the non-instrumentally bad side of anger while still delivering the intuitive verdict
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The Passage of Time is Not an Illusion: It's a Projection Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Adrian Bardon
This essay aims to review and clarify an emerging consensus among philosophers of time: that belief in the passage of time is not a matter of illusion but rather the result of a variety of cognitive error. I argue that this error is best described in terms of psychological projection, properly understood. A close analysis of varieties of projection reveals how well this phenomenon accounts for belief
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The Personal/Subpersonal Distinction Revisited: Towards an Explication Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-09-05 Lars Dänzer
The distinction between the personal and the subpersonal is often invoked in philosophy of psychology but remains surrounded by confusion. Building on recent work by Zoe Drayson, this paper aims to help further improve this situation by offering a satisfactory explication of the distinction that remains close to Dennett's original intentions. Reasons are offered for construing the distinction as applying
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Induction, Conjunction Introduction, and Safety Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-07-19 Bin Zhao
Depending on whether we are somewhat tolerant of nearby error-possibilities or not, the safety condition on knowledge is open to a strong reading and a weak reading. In this paper, it is argued that induction and conjunction introduction constitute two horns of a dilemma for the safety account of knowledge. If we opt for the strong reading, then the safety account fails to account for inductive knowledge
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Changing Our Nature: Ethical Naturalism, Objectivity, and History Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Matthew Congdon
This paper argues that Aristotelian ethical naturalism can combine two commitments that are often held to be incompatible: (a) a commitment to a strong form of ethical objectivity and (b) a thoroughgoing historicism about ethical value. The notions of species and life-form invoked by ethical naturalism do not, I argue, rely upon an ahistorical picture of human nature. I develop this idea by building
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Identity Matters: Foetuses, Gametes, and Futures like Ours Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Nicholas Rimell
Recently, a number of philosophers have argued that, despite appearances, the success of Don Marquis's well-known future-like-ours argument against abortion does not turn, in an important way, on the metaphysics of identity. I argue that this is false. The success of Marquis's argument turns on precisely two issues: first, whether it is prima facie seriously wrong to deprive something of a future like
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The Persistent Power of Cultural Racism Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Linda Martín Alcoff
‘Cultural racism’ is central to understanding racism today yet has receded into the background behind the focus on attitudinal racism. Even the turn to structural racism is largely circumscribed to inclusion without substantive challenge to existing processes or profit margins. When portions of the racist public are targeted, it is often the least elite members of society. Without question, the concept
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The Problems of Creeping Minimalism Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-06-16 Farbod Akhlaghi
The problem of creeping minimalism threatens the distinction between moral realism and meta-ethical expressivism, and between cognitivism and non-cognitivism more generally. The problem is commonly taken to be serious and in need of response. I argue that there are two problems of creeping minimalism, that one of these problems is more serious than the other, and that this more serious problem cannot
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Two Emphases of Virtue and Vice Epistemology Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-05-15 Pierre Le Morvan
This paper discusses two important emphases of epistemology – of virtue and vice epistemology in particular – one concerning agency and patiency, and the other concerning self-regard and other-regard. The paper offers, for the first time in the literature, a framework in which four types of epistemological work can be categorized according to their respective dual emphases: Type 1 (agent/self-regarding)
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Differentiating Scientific Inquiry and Politics Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-04-05 Heather Douglas
Protecting science from politicization is an ongoing concern in contemporary society. Yet some political influences on science (e.g., setting public funding amounts) are fully legitimate. We need to have a clear account of when a political influence is politicization (an illegitimate political influence) in order to properly detect and address the problem. I argue in this paper that understanding how
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Dumbfounded by the Facts? Understanding the Moral Psychology of Sexual Relationships Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-04-05 Camilla Kronqvist, Natan Elgabsi
One of the standard examples in contemporary moral psychology originates in the works of social psychologist Jonathan Haidt. He treats people's responses to the story of Julie and Mark, two siblings who decide to have casual, consensual, protected sex, as facts of human morality, providing evidence for his social intuitionist approach to moral judgements. We argue that Haidt's description of the facts
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The Perils of Rejecting the Parity Argument Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-04-05 Yili Zhou, Rhys Borchert
Many moral error theorists reject moral realism on the grounds that moral realism implies the existence of categorical normativity, yet categorical normativity does not exist. Call this the Metaphysical Argument. In response, some moral realists have emphasized a parity between moral normativity and epistemic normativity. They argue that if one kind of normativity is rejected, then both must be rejected
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Grief and the Inconsolation of Philosophy Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-04-03 Dominic J. C. Wilkinson
Can metaphysics yield the consolations of philosophy? One possibility, defended by Derek Parfit, is that reflection on the nature of identity and time could diminish both fear of death and grief. In this paper, I assess the prospect of such consolation, focussing especially on attempts to console a grieving third party. A shift to a reductionist view of personal identity might mean that death is less
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Friendship and Blackballing for Bad Beliefs Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-02-14 Jason Brennan
Many people believe that we should not be friends with others if they have bad enough moral and political beliefs. For instance, they think that we should not befriend KKK members or Nazis. However, not all errors in moral and political belief disqualify people from friendship. If so, then there is some line to be drawn somewhere which indicates when a person's beliefs are bad enough that we should
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Citizenship, Ability, and Contribution Philosophy Pub Date : 2023-01-31 David Devidi, Catherine Klausen, Christopher Lowry
People with significant cognitive disabilities and others who advocate on their behalf routinely state their claims in terms of enabling people to claim their full citizenship. Informed by the results of a study by one of the authors, we draw attention to some of these claims, and discuss what a just society ought to do so that members with significant cognitive disabilities see themselves – and are
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On Gregariousness Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-09-20 Jonas Faria Costa
There seems to be a difference between drinking coffee alone at home and drinking coffee in a café. Yet, drinking coffee in a café is not a joint action. It is an individual action done in a social environment. The café, with each person minding their own business next to others, is what I call a gregarious state of affairs. Gregariousness refers to the warmth of the social world. It is the difference
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Rethinking Acts of Conscience: Personal Integrity, Civility, and the Common Good Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-09-20 Ernesto V. Garcia
What should we think about ‘acts of conscience’, viz., cases where our personal judgments and public authority come into conflict such that principled resistance to the latter seems necessary? Philosophers mainly debate two issues: the Accommodation Question, i.e., ‘When, if ever, should public authority accommodate claims of conscience?’ and the Justification Question, i.e., ‘When, if ever, are we
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Systemic and Structural Injustice: Is There a Difference? Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-09-09 Sally Haslanger
The terms ‘structural injustice’ and ‘systemic injustice’ are commonly used, but their meanings are elusive. In this paper, I sketch an ontology of social systems that embeds accounts of social structures, relations, and practices. On this view, structures may be intrinsically problematic, or they may be problematic only insofar as they interact with other structures in the system to produce injustice
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Remorse and the Ledger Theory of Meaning Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-08-30 Lucas Scripter
A common idea about assessing meaning in life is that one draws up a list of those various positive values that one has achieved and subtracts from it one's negative deeds in life. The resulting balance is the meaningfulness of one's existence. I call this the ledger theory. Drawing on the work of Raimond Gaita and Julian Barnes's novel The Sense of an Ending, I argue for a phenomenology of remorse
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David Wiggins: A Personal Philosophical Memoir Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Christopher Peacocke
My first encounter with David Wiggins’ thought occurred a few weeks before I took my undergraduate final examinations in Oxford in 1971. In Blackwell's Bookshop I came across a slim blue volume Identity and Spatio-Temporal Continuity. I purchased it and read it cover-to-cover the same day. It was immediately clear that this was contemporary writing in a different league from anything I had previously
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A Sensible Pragmatist Conception of Truth Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Cheryl Misak
This essay traces the evolution of the pragmatist elements in Wiggins's distinctive view of truth and shows its connections to the founder of pragmatism, C.S. Peirce and one of Peirce's greatest successors, F.P. Ramsey. Wiggin's pragmatism, like that of Peirce and Ramsey, is a pragmatism that attempts to arrive at what Wiggins calls ‘a sensible subjectivism’ – an account of truth that respects both
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Truth, Marks of Truth, and Conditionals Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Ian Rumfitt
This essay assesses the account of truth presented in Wiggins's 2002 paper ‘An indefinibilist cum normative view of truth and the marks of truth'. I agree with Wiggins that we should seek, not to define truth, but to elucidate it by unfolding its connections with other basic notions. However, I give reasons for preferring an elucidation based on Ramsey's account of truth to Wiggins's Tarski-inspired
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Wiggins on Ethical Objectivity and ‘Des Cannibales’ Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Adam Etinson
This short essay offers a commentary on Chapter 11 of David Wiggins’, Ethics (2006). The essay asks how we should interpret Wiggins’ defense of ethical ‘objectivity’ given his subjectivist metaethics. An interpretation is drawn from Sharon Street's work on metaethical constructivism, of which Wiggins’ view is taken to be one variety.
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Ethics, Economics and Sustainability Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-08-04 John O'Neill
On the dominant economic approach to environmental policy, environmental goods are conceptualised as forms of capital that provide services for human well-being. These services are assigned a monetary value to be weighed against the values of other goods and services. David Wiggins has offered a set of arguments against central assumptions about the nature of well-being, practical reason and ethical
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Respect for Nature, Respect for Persons, Respect for Value Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-08-04 Jeffrey Seidman
I elucidate a frame of mind that David Wiggins calls respect for nature, which he understands as a special attitude toward a sui generis object, Nature as such. A person with this frame of mind takes nature to impose defeasible limits on her action, so that there are some courses of action that she will refuse even to entertain, except in circumstances of dire exigency. I defend the reasonableness
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The Pragmatic Hypothesis Testing Theory of Self-Deception and the Belief/Acceptance Distinction Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-07-28 Kevin Lynch
According to the pragmatic hypothesis testing theory, how much evidence we require before we believe something varies depending on the expected costs of falsely believing and disbelieving it. This theory has been used in the self-deception debate to explain our tendencies towards self-deceptive belief formation. This article argues that the application of this theory in the self-deception debate has
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Hegel on spirited animals Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Christoph Schuringa
Hegel conceives of human beings as both natural and spirited. On Robert Pippin's influential reading, we are natural by being ‘ontologically’ like other animals, but spirited through a ‘social-historical achievement’. I contest both the coherence of this reading and its fidelity to Hegel's texts. For Hegel the human being is the truth of the animal. This means that spirit's self-production is not,
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Is Practical Deliberation Bound by a Coherency Requirement? Foundational Normative States, Volitional Conflict, and Autonomy Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-07-27 Henk Jasper van Gils-Schmidt
Harry G. Frankfurt has put the problem of volitional conflict at the center of philosophical attention. If you care fundamentally about your career and your family, but these cares conflict, this conflict undermines the coherency of your decision standard and thereby your ability to choose and act autonomously. The standard response to this problem is to argue that you can overcome volitional conflict
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The Philosophical Retreat to the Here and Now: Notes on Living in Time Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-07-14 Richard Moran
The ordinary human concerns with the past and the future can be seen both as forms of suffering (anxiety toward the future, regret toward the past, etc.) and as illusory because they involve the failure to appreciate the primary reality of the present. In this lecture I argue that while there are certainly ways of being occupied with past or future times that we have reason to criticize, such criticism
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A Reformed Division of Labor for the Science of Well-Being Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-05-06 Roberto Fumagalli
This paper provides a philosophical assessment of leading theory-based, evidence-based and coherentist approaches to the definition and the measurement of well-being. It then builds on this assessment to articulate a reformed division of labor for the science of well-being and argues that this reformed division of labor can improve on the proffered approaches by combining the most plausible tenets
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Confronting Leviathan: A History of Ideas by David Runciman (London: Profile Books). Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-04-26 James Alexander
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Body and Soul in Hellenistic Philosophy, edited by Brad Inwood and James Warren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2020). Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-03-07 John Sellars
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Spinoza on the Distinction Between Substance and Attribute Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-03-01 Antonio Salgado Borge
I examine Spinoza's claim in the Metaphysical Thoughts (CM) that the attributes of God are only distinguished by a distinction of reason. I contend that for Spinoza essential attributes, such as Thought or Extension, cannot be distinguished by Francisco Suarez's distinction of reasoning reason, as Martin Lin (2019) suggests, nor can he be using Suárez’ distinction of reasoned reason for this purpose
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‘Labour’, A Brief History of a Modern Concept Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-02-17 Axel Honneth
As has often been observed, neither the thinkers of antiquity nor those of the Middle Ages exhibited a great theoretical interest in the social value or even the ethical significance of labour. Throughout this long period of history, the labour an individual had to carry out to make a living, and thus under compulsion, was understood more or less solely as a heavy burden. It signified daily toil and
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The Parmenidean Ascent by Michael Della Rocca (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2020). Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-02-15 Emanuele Costa
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Good, Actually: Aristotelian Metaphysics and the ‘Guise of the Good’ Philosophy Pub Date : 2022-02-02 Adam M. Willows
In this paper I argue that both defence and criticism of the claim that humans act ‘under the guise of the good’ neglects the metaphysical roots of the theory. I begin with an overview of the theory and its modern commentators, with critics noting the apparent possibility of acting against the good, and supporters claiming that such actions are instances of error. These debates reduce the ‘guise of
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Making Sense of Shame Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-12-10 James Laing
In this paper, I argue that we face a challenge in understanding the relationship between the ‘value-oriented’ and ‘other-oriented’ dimensions of shame. On the one hand, an emphasis on shame's value-oriented dimension leads naturally to ‘The Self-Evaluation View’, an account which faces a challenge in explaining shame's other-oriented dimension. This is liable to push us towards ‘The Social Evaluation
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The Relationship Between Conscious and Unconscious Intentionality Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-12-10 Raamy Majeed
The contemporary view of the relationship between conscious and unconscious intentionality consists in two claims: (i) unconscious propositional attitudes represent the world the same way conscious ones do, and (ii) both sets of attitudes represent by having determinate propositional content. Crane (2017) has challenged both claims, proposing instead that unconscious propositional attitudes differ
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Something Rather Than Nothing Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-11-22 Guido Imaguire
Peter van Inwagen (2001) has given a probabilistic answer to the fundamental question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’: There is something, because the probability of there being nothing is 0. Some philosophers have recently examined van Inwagen's argument and concluded that it does not really work. Three points are central in their criticism: (i) the premise which states that there is
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Personal and Objective Ethics: How to Read the Crito Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-10-08 Hiroshi Ohtani
Dominant interpretations of Plato's Crito attempt to reconstruct the text deductively, taking the arguments in the famous Laws’ speech as consisting solely in the application of general principles to facts. It is thus conceived that the principles and facts are grasped independently of each other, and then the former are applied to the latter, subsequently reaching the conclusion that Socrates must
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Natural Goodness, Sex, and the Perverted Faculty Argument Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-10-01 Christopher Arroyo
There is a longstanding and widely held view, often associated with Catholicism, that intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts are intrinsically immoral. Some philosophers who hold this view, such as Edward Feser, claim that they can defend the view on purely philosophical grounds by relying on the perverted faculty argument. This paper argues that Feser's defense of the perverted faculty argument
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Truth and Truthfulness in Painting Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-09-14 John Hyman
This article explores the place of truth and truthfulness in painting and drawing, and criticises logocentrism in the theory of truth.
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The Purity of Agent-Regret Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-08-03 Jake Wojtowicz
I argue for a novel understanding of the nature of agent-regret. On the standard picture, agent-regret involves regretting the result of one's action and thus regretting one's action. I argue that the standard picture is a flawed analysis of agent-regret. I offer several cases of agent-regret where the agent feels agent-regret but does not regret the result itself. I appeal to other cases where an
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Personal Information as Symmetry Breaker in Disagreements Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-07-22 Diego E. Machuca
When involved in a disagreement, a common reaction is to tell oneself that, given that the information about one's own epistemic standing is clearly superior in both amount and quality to the information about one's opponent's epistemic standing, one is justified in one's confidence that one's view is correct. In line with this natural reaction to disagreement, some contributors to the debate on its
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Fichte's Moral Philosophy by Owen Ware (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2020) Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-07-02 Rory Lawrence Phillips
Contemporary philosophers interested in Fichte have more reason to rejoice.1 In the last few years, a number of significant publications have appeared on J. G. Fichte, concerned primarily with his moral philosophy. Owen Ware’s new book Fichte’s Moral Philosophy is one of these. In this review, I shall say a few remarks about how Ware’s book fits into the territory being mapped by Fichte scholars, and
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Ludwig Wittgenstein: Dictating Philosophy edited by Arthur Gibson and Niamh O'Mahony (Springer, 2020). Philosophy Pub Date : 2021-06-16 Nuno Venturinha