“On the essence of temporal directionality and its irreversibility”

Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences - My analysis of temporal direction begins by establishing that time-reversal scenarios, scenarios in which the direction of time itself is reversed,...     

Conventional Fouls - A Note on Strategic Fouls

ABSTRACT

Strategic fouls (SF) are intentional violations of the rules ‘in which the violator expects to be detected and penalized but expects some benefit to his or her competitive effectiveness’ (Fraleigh 2003, 169). Sometimes SF are widely viewed within a playing practice as acceptable—possibly as legitimate prices) e.g. stopping the clock in Basketball). In other instances, they are considered illegitimate (e.g., handling the ball to prevent a goal in dying minutes of a football match). And of course sometimes the issue is contested (e.g., fouling to stop a counterattack in football). My aim is to defend Converionalsim: Conventionalism: SF of a certain type in a particular sport is justifiable if there is a legitimate agreement or a convention according to which it is legitimate. Simply put, Conventionalism means that stopping the clock in Basketball is justified because there is a convention that it is legitimate. After briefly setting out the initial case in favor of conventionalism, I will utilize some prominent discussions of SF to challenge Conventionalism, and will offer a response to these challenges.     

HUME'S GENERAL POINT OF VIEW: A TWO-STAGE APPROACH

I offer a novel two-stage reconstruction of Hume's general-point-of-view account, modeled in part on his qualified-judges account in ‘Of the Standard of Taste’. In particular, I argue that the general point of view needs to be jointly constructed by spectators who have sympathized with (at least some of) the agents in (at least some of) the actor's circles of influence. The upshot of the account is twofold. First, Hume's later thought developed in such a way that it can rectify the problems inherent in his Treatise account of the general point of view. Second, the proposed account provides the grounds for an adequate and well-motivated modest ideal observer theory of the standard of virtue.     

The indeterminacy of computation

Synthese - Do the dynamics of a physical system determine what function the system computes? Except in special cases, the answer is no: it is often indeterminate what function a given physical...     

Making sense of Smith on sympathy and approbation: other-oriented sympathy as a psychological and normative achievement

ABSTRACT

Two problems seem to plague Adam Smith’s account of sympathy and approbation in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (TMS). First, Smith’s account of sympathy at the beginning of TMS appears to be inconsistent with the account of sympathy at the end of TMS. In particular, it seems that Smith did not appreciate the distinction between ‘self-oriented sympathy’ and ‘other-oriented sympathy’, that is, between imagining being oneself in the actor’s situation and imagining being the actor in the actor’s situation. Second, Smith’s account of approbation, according to which a sentiment of approval arises when there is recognition of concordance between the spectator’s sympathetic passion and the actor’s original passion, seems to face the following problem: since the spectator attains both his own sympathetic passion and the actor’s original passion by sympathizing with the actor, the sympathetic passion of the spectator and the original passion of the actor will necessarily be identical. Therefore, Smith’s account of approbation requires that the spectator utilize both self-oriented and other-oriented sympathy (‘the double-sympathy model of approbation’). I offer a novel developmental account of sympathy in TMS that renders Smith’s account of sympathy consistent and allows for the utilization of the double-sympathy model of approbation.