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Are there really any dual-character concepts? Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-11-20 Jonathan Phillips, David Plunkett
There has been growing excitement in recent years about “dual-character” concepts. Philosophers have argued that such concepts can help us make progress on a range of philosophical issues, from aesthetics to law to metaphysics. Dual-character concepts are thought to have a distinctive internal structure, which relates a set of descriptive features to an abstract value, and which allows people to use
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Functionalism and tacit knowledge of grammar Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-11-17 David Balcarras
In this article, I argue that if tacit knowledge of grammar is analyzable in functional-computational terms, then it cannot ground linguistic meaning, structure, or sound. If to know or cognize a grammar is to be in a certain computational state playing a certain functional role, there can be no unique grammar cognized. Satisfying the functional conditions for cognizing a grammar G entails satisfying
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Conditional emotions Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-11-13 Christina Hope Dietz
Some conditional involving factive emotives present a prima facie challenge to the thesis that conditionals obey modus ponens. Drawing on recent work by Timothy Williamson, I offer an error-theoretic diagnosis of the phenomenon, one that appeals to a heuristic that we use in suppositional reasoning.
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Disagreement and alienation Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-30 Berislav Marušić, Stephen J. White
This paper proposes to reorient the philosophical debate about peer disagreement. The problem of peer disagreement is normally seen as a problem about the extent to which disagreement provides one with evidence against one's own conclusions. It is thus regarded as a problem for individual inquiry. But things look different in more collaborative contexts. Ethical norms relevant to those contexts make
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Compositionality and constituent structure in the analogue mind Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-27 Sam Clarke
I argue that analogue mental representations possess a canonical decomposition into privileged constituents from which they compose. I motivate this suggestion, and rebut arguments to the contrary, through reflection on the approximate number system, whose representations are widely expected to have an analogue format. I then argue that arguments for the compositionality and constituent structure of
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Kripke's knowledge argument against materialism Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-26 Adriana Renero
In his unpublished 1979 Lectures on the Philosophy of Mind, Saul Kripke offers a knowledge argument against materialism focusing on deaf people who lack knowledge of auditory experience. Kripke's argument is a precursor of Frank Jackson's better-known knowledge argument against materialism (1982). The paper sets out Kripke's argument, brings out its interest and philosophical importance, and explores
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Neural decoding, the Atlantis machine, and zombies Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-25 Rosa Cao, Jared Warren
Neural decoding studies seem to show that the “private” experiences of others are more accessible than philosophers have traditionally believed. While these studies have many limitations, they do demonstrate that by capturing patterns in brain activity, we can discover a great deal about what a subject is experiencing. We present a thought experiment about a super-decoder — the Atlantis machine — and
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Knowing what it's like Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Andrew Y. Lee
David Lewis—famously—never tasted vegemite. Did he have any knowledge of what it's like to taste vegemite? Most say ‘no’; I say ‘yes’. I argue that knowledge of what it's like varies along a spectrum from more exact to more approximate, and that phenomenal concepts vary along a spectrum in how precisely they characterize what it's like to undergo their target experiences. This degreed picture contrasts
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Grounding physicalism and the knowledge argument Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-23 Alex Moran
Standard responses to the knowledge argument grant that Mary could know all of the physical facts even while trapped inside her black-and-white room. What they deny is that upon leaving her black-and-white room and experiencing red for the first time, Mary learns a genuinely new fact. This paper develops an alternate response in a grounding physicalist framework, on which Mary does not know all of
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Facing up to the problem of intentionality Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Angela Mendelovici, David Bourget
We distinguish between different problems of “aboutness”: the “hard” problem of explaining the everyday phenomenon of intentionality and three less challenging “easy” sets of problems concerning the posits of folk psychology, the notions of representation invoked in the mind-brain sciences, and the intensionality (with an “s”) of mental language. The problem of intentionality is especially hard in
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Whither naïve realism? – I Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-18 Alex Byrne, E. J. Green
Different authors offer subtly different characterizations of naïve realism. We disentangle the main ones and argue that illusions provide the best proving ground for naïve realism and its main rival, representationalism. According to naïve realism, illusions never involve perceptual error. We assess two leading attempts to explain apparent perceptual error away, from William Fish and Bill Brewer,
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Morgan's Quaker gun and the species of belief Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Devin Sanchez Curry
In this article, I explore how researchers’ metaphysical commitments can be conducive—or unconducive—to progress in animal cognition research. The methodological dictum known as Morgan's Canon exhorts comparative psychologists to countenance the least mentalistic fair interpretation of animal actions. This exhortation has frequently been misread as a blanket condemnation of mentalistic interpretations
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Are infants conscious? Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Claudia Passos-Ferreira
I argue that newborn infants are conscious. I propose a methodology for investigating infant consciousness and I present two approaches for determining whether newborns are conscious. First, I consider behavioral and neurobiological markers of consciousness.Second, I investigate the major theories of consciousness, including both philosophical and scientific theories, and I discuss what they predict
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The function of perceptual learning Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Zoe Jenkin
Our perceptual systems are not stagnant but can learn from experience. Why is this so? That is, what is the function of perceptual learning? I consider two answers to this question: The Offloading View, which says that the function of perceptual learning is to offload tasks from cognition onto perception, thereby freeing up cognitive resources (Connolly, 2019) and the Perceptual View, which says that
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How to judge intentionally Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-17 Antonia Peacocke
Contrary to popular philosophical belief, judgment can indeed be an intentional action. That's because an intentional judgment, even one with content p, need not be intentional as a judgment that p. It can instead be intentional just as a judgment wh- for some specific wh- question—e.g. a judgment of which x is F or a judgment whether p. This paper explains how this is possible by laying out a means
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Symbolic belief in social cognition Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-15 Evan Westra
Keeping track of what others believe is a central part of human social cognition. However, the social relevance of those beliefs can vary a great deal. Some belief attributions mostly tell us about what a person is likely to do next. Other belief attributions tell us more about a person's social identity. In this paper, I argue that we cope with this challenge by employing two distinct concepts of
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(In defence of) preservationism and the previous awareness condition: What is a theory of remembering, anyway? Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-11 James Openshaw
I suggest that the theories of remembering one finds in the philosophy of memory literature are best characterised as theories principally operating at three different levels of inquiry. Simulationist views are theories of the psychofunctional process type remembering. Causalist views are theories of referential remembering. Epistemic views are theories of successful remembering. Insofar as there is
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The myth of full belief Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-10-11 Jeremy Goodman
Belief is typically understood to be the success-neutral counterpart of knowledge. But there is no success-neutral counterpart of knowledge.
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Against Representational Levels Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-04-10 Nicholas K. Jones
Some views articulate reality's hierarchical structure using relations from the fundamental to representations of reality. Other views instead use relations from the fundamental to constituents of non-representational reality. This paper argues against the first kind of view.
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Dasgupta's Detonation Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-02-06 Theodore Sider
In “Putnam's Paradox”, David Lewis defended the “realist philosophy we know and love” against Hilary Putnam's “bomb”, an argument that a realist must count practically any consistent theory as being true. Many of us thought that Lewis defused that bomb with his “reference magnetism” (and many more would have, had that doctrine been properly understood1). But Shamik Dasgupta (2018) has devised a new
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How to Trace a Causal Process Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2023-01-11 J. Dmitri Gallow
According to the theory developed here, we may trace out the processes emanating from a cause in such a way that any consequence lying along one of these processes counts as an effect of the cause. This theory gives intuitive verdicts in a diverse range of problem cases from the literature. Its claims about causation will never be retracted when we include additional variables in our model. And it
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From Nomic Humeanism to Normative Relativism1 Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2022-12-20 Verónica Gómez Sánchez
It is commonly thought that that the best system account of lawhood ((Mill (1843), Ramsey (1978)[fp. 1928], Lewis (1973)) makes available a nice explanation for why laws are ‘distinctively appropriate targets of scientific inquiry’ (Hall, 2015). The explanation takes the following general form: laws are especially valuable for agents like us because they efficiently encode a lot of valuable (non-nomic)
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Lawful Persistence Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2022-12-15 David Builes, Trevor Teitel
The central aim of this paper is to use a particular view about how the laws of nature govern the evolution of our universe in order to develop and evaluate the two main competing options in the metaphysics of persistence, namely endurantism and perdurantism. We begin by motivating the view that our laws of nature dictate not only qualitative facts about the future, but also which objects will instantiate
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Stating Structural Realism: Mathematics-First Approaches to Physics and Metaphysics Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2022-12-14 David Wallace
I respond to the frequent objection that structural realism fails to sharply state an alternative to the standard predicate-logic, object / property / relation, way of doing metaphysics. The approach I propose is based on what I call a ‘math-first’ approach to physical theories (close to the so-called ‘semantic view of theories') where the content of a physical theory is to be understood primarily
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Plenitude, Coincidence, and Humility Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2022-12-08 Maegan Fairchild
It is a persistent trope in period dramas that the most garishly extravagant character — the matriarch with all the feathers — is most concerned to trumpet their conservative virtues. And so too in metaphysics! Fairchild (2019) advertised the humility of material plenitude, arguing that despite the profligate ontology of coincident objects it entails, the best version of plenitude is one that takes
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No “Easy” Answers to Ontological Category Questions Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Vera Flocke, Katherine Ritchie
Easy Ontologists, most notably Thomasson (2015), argue that ontological questions are shallow. They think that these questions can either be answered by using our ordinary conceptual competence—of course tables exist!—or are meaningless, or else should be answered through conceptual re-engineering. Ontology thus is “easy”, requiring no distinctively metaphysical investigation. This paper raises a two-stage
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Relativity in a Fundamentally Absolute World Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Jack Spencer
1 INTRODUCTION There is a simple argument against relativism. The first premise is the widely accepted claim that the way things are must be necessitated by the way things are fundamentally.1 Fundamental Entailment. Necessarily, the fundamental facts entail every fact.2 The second premise—which, as we will see later, follows from two plausible principles—says that there is always a modal gap between
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Tensed Facts and the Fittingness of our Attitudes1 Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Kristie Miller
We direct different attitudes towards states of affairs depending on where in time those states of affairs are located. Call this the type asymmetry. The type asymmetry appears fitting. For instance, it seems fitting to feel guilt or regret only about states of affairs that are past, and anticipation only of states of affairs that are future. It has been argued that the type asymmetry could only be
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The Power to Govern Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2022-11-28 Erica Shumener
I provide a new account of what it is for the laws of nature to govern the evolution of events. I locate the source of governance in the content of law propositions. As such, I do not appeal to notions of ground, essence, or production to characterize governance. After introducing the account, I use it to outline previously unrecognized varieties of governance. I also specify that laws must govern
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Evidence, ignorance, and symmetry Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-31 Tamar Lando
The Principle of Indifference (POI) is a rule for rationally assigning precise degrees of confidence to possibilities among which we have no reason to discriminate. Despite criticism of the principle stemming from Bertrand's paradox, many have recently come to the defense of POI or adopted some restricted version of that principle, especially in discussions of self-locating belief. I argue that POI
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Moral and epistemic evaluations: A unified treatment Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-23 Bob Beddor
A rich tradition in metaethics seeks to explain the meaning of moral language in terms of desire-like attitudes. This approach can be implemented in di erent ways. On a contextualist implementation, moral discourse describes the desire-like attitudes of some agent(s), for example, the speaker or the speaker’s community. On an expressivist implementation, moral discourse does not describe desire-like
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Epistemological solipsism as a route to external world skepticism Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-23 Grace Helton
There are almost 8 billion human beings on the planet. Some of these I know personally. They are my colleagues, neighbors, friends, and family members. Others are distant strangers, most of whom I will never meet. I take it for granted that all of these beings are, like myself, sentient. I presume that they have opinions and aspirations, hopes and dreads; that they experience intense pleasures and
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Deference Done Better Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-23 Kevin Dorst, Benjamin A. Levinstein, Bernhard Salow, Brooke E. Husic, Branden Fitelson
There are many things—call them ‘experts'—that you should defer to in forming your opinions. The trouble is, many experts are modest: they're less than certain that they are worthy of deference. When this happens, the standard theories of deference break down: the most popular (“Reflection”-style) principles collapse to inconsistency, while their most popular (“New-Reflection”-style) variants allow
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The rationality of epistemic akrasia Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-15 John Hawthorne,Yoaav Isaacs,Maria Lasonen‐Aarnio
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Contextualism preserved Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-14 James Ravi Kirkpatrick
This paper aims to reconcile the context-sensitivity of natural language with the essential epistemological role that language plays in the preservation and transmission of content.
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Divine hiddenness: An evidential argument Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-14 Charity Anderson
This paper presents and examines the argument from divine hiddenness as an evidential argument. It argues that a key thought that motivates the argument, namely, that it's surprising that God's existence is not more obvious, does not alone secure the conclusion that divine hiddenness is evidence against God. The evidential problem of divine hiddenness is illustrated using Bayesian models.
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Shrinking three arguments for conditionalization Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-10 Sophie Horowitz
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The unrevisability of logic Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-06 Thomas Hofweber
Can it ever be rational to revise one's own logic by one's own lights? In this paper I argue that logic is never rationally revisable, even if one's own logic gives rise to paradoxes and allows one to derive any conclusion whatsoever. Instead of revising logic, we need to revise a certain widely held position in the philosophy of logic, one tied to the standard conception of validity and to the alleged
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Abduction, perception, emotion, feeling: Body maps and pattern recognition Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-05 Miroslava Trajkovski,Timothy Williamson
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Pro tem rationality Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-05 Julia Staffel
Epistemologists routinely distinguish between two kinds of justification or rationality – the propositional and the doxastic kind – in order to characterize importantly different ways in which an attitude can be justified or rational for a person. I argue that these notions, as they are commonly understood, are well suited to capture rationality judgments about the attitudes that agents reach as conclusions
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Human Foreknowledge Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-05 Fabrizio Cariani
I explore the motivation and logical consequences of the idea that we have some (limited) ability to know contingent facts about the future, even in presence of the assumption that the future is objectively unsettled or indeterminate. I start by formally characterizing skepticism about the future. This analysis nudges the anti-skeptic towards the idea that if some propositions about the future are
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Knowledge and mentality Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-05 Carlotta Pavese
This paper reexamines the case for mentality — the thesis that knowledge is a mental state in its own right, and not only derivatively, simply by virtue of being composed out of mental states or by virtue of being a property of mental states — and explores a novel argument for it. I argue that a certain property singled out by psychologists and philosophers of cognitive science as distinctive of skillful
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Knowledge by constraint Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-04 Ben Holguín
This paper considers some puzzling knowledge ascriptions and argues that they present prima facie counterexamples to credence, belief, and justification conditions on knowledge, as well as to many of the standard meta-semantic assumptions about the context-sensitivity of ‘know’. It argues that these ascriptions provide new evidence in favor of contextualist theories of knowledge—in particular those
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Inference to the best explanation and the new size elitism 1 Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2021-10-03 Katrina Elliott
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Permissibility Is the Only Feasible Deontic Primitive Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2020-09-23 Johan E. Gustafsson
Moral obligation and permissibility are usually thought to be interdefinable. Following the pattern of the duality definitions of necessity and possibility, we have that something's being permissible could be defined as its not being obligatory to not do it. And that something's being obligatory could be defined as its not being permissible to not do it. In this paper, I argue that neither direction
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ERRATUM Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2020-08-25
In the article by Berker (2019), two corrections were made to page 24 of the published version online: Footnote 18: “Humean” was changed to “Humean constructivists.” References: “Joyce, Richard. 2001. The Myth of Morality. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press” was changed to: “Joyce, Richard. 2005. ‘Moral Fictionalism.’ In Fictionalism in Metaphysics, edited by Mark Eli Kalderon, 287–313. Oxford:
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Act Consequentialism without Free Rides Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2020-08-12 Preston Greene, Benjamin A. Levinstein
Consequentialist theories determine rightness solely based on real or expected consequences. Although such theories are popular, they often have difficulty with generalizing intuitions, which, in their pre-theoretic form, require concern for the question “What if everybody did that?” When generalizing versions of consequentialism have been attempted, as with rule consequentialism, the results are messy
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Enkratic Rationality Is Instrumental Rationality* Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2020-08-09 Wooram Lee
It is widely agreed that there is a rational requirement, “Enkrasia”, which requires that you intend what you believe you ought to do. This paper argues that Enkrasia is not an independent requirement of practical rationality: it is a special case of the requirement to be instrumentally rational. I argue for this view of Enkrasia through an analysis of an all‐things‐considered belief about what you
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Conditional Reasons and the Procreation Asymmetry Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2020-08-09 Johann Frick
This paper sketches a theory of the reason-giving force of well-being that allows us to reconcile our intuitions about two of the most recalcitrant problem cases in population ethics: Jan Narveson’s Procreation Asymmetry and Derek Parfit’s Non-Identity Problem. I show that what has prevented philosophers from developing a theory that gives a satisfactory account of both these problems is their tacit
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Doxastic Cognitivism: An Anti‐Intellectualist Theory of Emotion Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2020-07-25 Christina H. Dietz
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Counterproductive Altruism: The Other Heavy Tail Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2020-05-30 Daniel Kokotajlo, Alexandra Oprea
First, we argue that the appeal of effective altruism (henceforth, EA) depends significantly on a certain empirical premise we call the Heavy Tail Hypothesis (HTH), which characterizes the probability distribution of opportunities for doing good. Roughly, the HTH implies that the best causes, interventions, or charities produce orders of magnitude greater good than the average ones, constituting a
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Varieties of Moral Encroachment Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2020-05-27 Renée Jorgensen Bolinger
Several authors have recently suggested that moral factors and norms ‘encroach’ on the epistemic, and because of salient parallels to pragmatic encroachment views in epistemology, these suggestions have been dubbed ‘moral encroachment views’. This paper distinguishes between variants of themoral encroachment thesis, pointing out how they address different problems, are motivated by different considerations
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Local Evolutionary Debunking Arguments Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2020-04-29 Richard Rowland
Evolutionary debunking arguments in ethics aim to use facts about the evolutionary causes of ethical beliefs to undermine their justification. Global Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (GDAs) are arguments made in metaethics that aim to undermine the justification of all ethical beliefs. Local Evolutionary Debunking Arguments (LDAs) are arguments made in first‐order normative ethics that aim to undermine
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Asymmetries in the Value of Existence Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2019-12-01 Jacob M. Nebel
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PHILOSOPHICAL METHODOLOGY AND LEVELS OF GENERALITY Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2019-12-01 Sarah McGrath
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THE TYRANT'S VICE: PLEONEXIA AND LAWLESSNESS IN PLATO'S REPUBLIC Philosophical Perspectives Pub Date : 2019-12-01 Karen Margrethe Nielsen
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