A Note on the Nomic Possibility of a Dynamic Shift

In this note, I argue that a dynamically shifted world—i.e. a world identical to our own except for a fixed constant difference in the absolute acceleration of each object—is nomically impossible in a Newtonian world populated by finitely many objects. A dynamic shift however seems to be nomically possible in a world populated by infinitely many objects, but only in a broad sense of nomic possibility.

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Danto’s Dialectic

Arthur C. Danto’s Analytical Philosophy of History has a Kantian ambition: to state the conditions that make historical knowledge possible and to show “the unhappy destiny” that attends attempts to extend modes of representation beyond these conditions. Even though Danto’s book fails to achieve this ambition, it succeeds in making a number of important—if neglected—suggestions in the course of its attempt. One concerns the significance of the progressive tense for our thinking about human agency. Another concerns the way agency can impact negatively on the possibility of foreknowledge.

Transcendental Arguments and Practical Reason in Indian Philosophy

This paper examines some Indian philosophical arguments that are understandable as transcendental arguments—i.e., arguments whose conclusions cannot be denied without self-contradiction, insofar as the truth of the claim in question is a condition of the possibility even of any such denial. This raises the question of what kind of self-contradiction is involved—e.g., pragmatic self-contradiction, or the kind that goes with logical necessity. It is suggested that these arguments involve something like practical reason—indeed, that they just are arguments against the primacy of “theoretical reason.” This characterization illuminates a characteristically Indic appeal to ordinary language.

Avoiding certain frustration, reflection, and the cable guy paradox

We discuss the cable guy paradox, both as an object of interest in its own right and as something which can be used to illuminate certain issues in the theories of rational choice and belief. We argue that a crucial principle—The Avoid Certain Frustration (ACF) principle—which is used in stating the paradox is false, thus resolving the paradox. We also explain how the paradox gives us new insight into issues related to the Reflection principle. Our general thesis is that principles that base your current opinions on your current opinions about your future opinions need not make reference to the particular times in the future at which you believe you will have those opinions, but they do need to make reference to the particular degrees of belief you believe you will have in the future.

Proliferation of Western Methodological Thought in Psychology in Japan: Ways of Objectification

When the field of psychology was first introduced into Japan, it was based on the proliferation of Western thought, particularly experimentation and Darwinian evolutionary theory. The current Japanese word for psychology, shinrigaku, was coined by scholar Amane Nishi in the early 1870s. It originally meant “mental philosophy,” not psychology. Nishi also translated “subject” and “object” into Japanese. Before that, objectivity was not a concept in Japan. And although psychological experimentation must have prompted the subject/object division, experiments did not take root in Japanese psychology until Yujiro Motora, considered the founder of Japanese psychology, established the first psychological laboratory in 1903 at the University of Tokyo. In regards to Darwinian evolutionary theory, it is likely that scholars (e.g., biologists, sociologists, politicians) more readily accepted the theory when introduced into Japanese society in the 1870s because Japanese embrace a view that maintains diffuse boundaries between humans and animals. Finally, the roles of Japanese scholars who studied abroad during of the inception of psychology in Japan are discussed.

Punishment as Fair Play

This article defends the fair-play theory of legal punishment against three objections. The first, the irrelevance objection, is the long-standing complaint that fair play fails to capture what it is about crimes that makes criminals deserving of punishment; the others are the recently raised false-equivalence and lacks-integration objections. In response, I sketch an account of fair-play theory that is grounded in a conception of the political order as a meta-cooperative practice—a conception that falls somewhere between contractual and communitarian conceptions—and draw on this account to show how the theory can overcome the objections.

A Conundrum Concerning Creation

In this paper, I expose a conundrum regarding divine creation as Leibniz conceives of such creation. What energizes the conundrum is that the concept of omnibenevolence—“consequential omnibenevolence”—that the Leibnizian argument for the view that the actual world is the best of all possible worlds presupposes, appears to sanction the conclusion that God has no practical reasons to create the actual world.

Speaking to Pictures

A review of Peter Steele’s Plenty, a book in which each poem is faced by a colour plate of the painting or object which sparked it off. Hollander’s ecphrasis and Krieger’s ekphrasis are held in – possibly unresolvable – dialectic by Steele’s poems. The only resolution which one can find is one of wit rather than of philosophy.

Relativism about Reasons

Historians must be sensitive to the alienness of the past. Insofar as they are concerned with their actors’ reasoning, they must (through open-minded empirical investigation) find out how their actors thought, and not assume that they thought like us. This is familiar historiographical advice, but pushed too far it can be brought to conflict with rather weak assumptions about what historians must presuppose if they are to interpret their actors at all. The present paper sketches those assumptions, and argues that the influential ‘Strong Program’ in the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge (SSK) falls foul of them. We do not argue from the correctness of the assumptions to the falsity of SSK. Rather, we note the incompatibility, and then show how SSK theorists’ tendency to take interpretation for granted blinds them—and perhaps their readers—to the existence of the conflict.

Diabetes,Chronic Illness and the Bodily Roots of Ecstatic Temporality

This article studies the phenomenology of chronic illness in light of phenomenology’s insights into ecstatic temporality and freedom. It shows how a chronic illness can, in lived experience, manifest itself as a disturbance of our usual relation to ecstatic temporality and thence as a disturbance of freedom. This suggests that ecstatic temporality is related to another sort of time—“provisional time”—that is in turn rooted in the body. The article draws on Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception and Heidegger’s Being and Time, shedding light on the latter’s concept of ecstatic temporality. It also discusses implications for self-management of chronic illness, especially in children.

Sortals for Dummies

Advocates of sortal essentialism have argued that concepts like “thing” or “object” lack the unambiguous individuative criteria necessary to play the role of genuine sortals in reference. Instead, they function as “dummy sortals” which are placeholders or incomplete designations. In disqualifying apparent placeholder sortals, however, these philosophers have posed insuperable problems for accounts of childhood conceptual development. I argue that recent evidence in psychology demonstrates that children do possess simple or basic sortals of physical objects or things. I contend that these concepts provide the genuine individuative criteria necessary for reference. As a consequence, sortalism can be made compatible with the developmental facts of conceptual development.

Aesthetics and literature: a problematic relation?

The paper argues that there is a proper place for literature within aesthetics but that care must be taken in identifying just what the relation is. In characterising aesthetic pleasure associated with literature it is all too easy to fall into reductive accounts, for example, of literature as merely “fine writing”. Belleslettrist or formalistic accounts of literature are rejected, as are two other kinds of reduction, to pure meaning properties and to a kind of narrative realism. The idea is developed that literature—both poetry and prose fiction—invites its own distinctive kind of aesthetic appreciation which far from being at odds with critical practice, in fact chimes well with it.

The Easy Approach to Ontology

This paper defends the view that ontological questions (properly understood) are easy—too easy, in fact, to be subjects of substantive and distinctively philosophical debates. They are easy, roughly, in the sense that they may be resolved straightforwardly—generally by a combination of conceptual and empirical enquiries. After briefly outlining the view and some of its virtues, I turn to examine two central lines of objection. The first is that this ‘easy’ approach is itself committed to substantive ontological views, including an implausibly permissive ontology. The second is that it, like neo-Fregean views, relies on transformation rules that are questionable on both logical and ontological grounds. Ultimately, I will argue, the easy view is not easily assailed by either of these routes, and so remains (thus far) a tenable and attractive approach.

Shanahan on Symbolization

In his article ‘A New View of Language, Emotion and the Brain,’ Dan Shanahan claims that the post-war Cognitive Turn focused mainly on information processing and that little attention was paid to the dramatic role played by emotion in human cognition. One key argument in his defence of a more comprehensive view of human cognition rests upon the idea that the process of symbolization—a unique capacity only developed by humans—combines, right from the start, information processing and feelings. The author argues that any theory ignoring this fact would miss the whole point, just as mainstream cognitive science has done since Noam Chomsky published Syntactic Structures, exactly 50 years ago.

Fitting Attitudes, Welfare, and Time

Chris Heathwood has recently put forward a novel and ingenious argument against the view that intrinsic value is analyzable in terms of fitting attitudes. According to Heathwood, this view holds water only if the related but distinct concept of welfare—intrinsic value for a person—can be analyzed in terms of fitting attitudes too. Moreover, he argues against such an analysis of welfare by appealing to the rationality of our bias towards the future. In this paper, I argue that so long as we keep the tenses and the intrinsic/extrinsic distinction right, the fitting-attitudes analysis of welfare can be shown to survive Heathwood’s criticism.

Searle on the unity of the world

According to mentalism some existing things are endowed with (subjectively) conscious minds. According to physicalism all existing things consist entirely of physical particles in fields of force. Searle holds that mentalism and physicalism are compatible and true—“the world is one”. The aim of this paper is to show that Searle fails to make the compatibility between mentalism and physicalism intelligible. The paper has three parts: first, I criticize drawing an analogy between solidity and consciousness as macro-features of systems with micro-features. Second, I argue that Searle’s defence of the ontological irreducibility of consciousness is terminologically confused and that his argument for the trivial nature of that irreducibility is unsuccessful. Third, I defend Nagel’s argument for the causal irreducibility of conscious minds by answering some of Searle’s objections to it.

Envy,Facts and Justice: A Critique of the Treatment of Envy in Justice as Fairness

A common anti-egalitarian argument is that equality is motivated by envy, or the desire to placate envy. In order to avoid this charge, John Rawls explicitly banishes envy from his original position. This article argues that this is an inconsistent and untenable position for Rawls, as he treats envy as if it were a fact of human psychology and believes that principles of justice should be based on such facts. Therefore envy should be known about in the original position. The consequences for Rawlsian theory—both substantive and methodological—are discussed.

The Transcendence and Non-Discursivity of the Lifeworld

This paper points to two little-discussed interrelated features—among sociologists—about the nature of the lifeworld (Lebenswelt): that the experience of transcendence is an essential component of human actions, and that lived experience (Erlebnis) is founded on the non-discursivity of the lifeworld, i.e., the pre-predicative background expectancies from which the discursive arises. I examine the intellectual route of Alfred Schutz who developed his mundane lifeworld theory from appropriating Edmund Husserl’s notions of appresentation and apperception. Harold Garfinkel later extended Schutz’s concept of lifeworld to the empirical investigations of constitutive social orders. By way of conclusion, I warn against a strain of constructionism in sociology, which tends to ignore the two said features of lived experience and inaccurately conceives social realities as essentially the actor’s discursive accomplishments.