Intention as action under development: why intention is not a mental state

This paper constructs a theory according to which an intention is not a mental state but an action at a certain developmental stage. I model intention on organic life, and thus intention stands to action as (e.g.) tadpole stands to frog. I then argue for this theory by showing how it overcomes three problems: intending while (1) merely preparing, (2) not taking any steps, and (3) the action is impossible. The problems vanish when we see that not all actions are mature. Just as some frogs (such as tadpoles) are immature frogs, some actions (such as intentions) are immature actions.     

Which Are the Genuine Properties?

This article considers three views about which properties are genuine. According to the first view, we should look to successful commonsense and scientific explanations in determining which properties are genuine. On this view, predicates that figure in such explanations thereby pick out genuine properties. According to the second view, the only predicates that pick out genuine properties are those that figure in our best scientific explanations. On this view, predicates that figure in commonsense explanations pick out genuine properties only if such explanations are vindicated by the sciences. According to the third view, the only genuine properties are the fundamental, microphysical ones. On this view, although there are “higher‐level” predicates that figure in true commonsense and scientific explanations, there are no “higher‐level” properties corresponding to such predicates. The article argues that the third view is superior to the others.     

What is the Accordion Effect?

In "Action and Responsibility,' Joel Feinberg pointed to an important idea to which he gave the label "the accordion effect.' Feinberg's discussion of this idea is of interest on its own, but it is also of interest because of its interaction with his critique, in his "Causing Voluntary Actions,' of a much discussed view of H. L. A. Hart and A. M. Honoré that Feinberg labels the "voluntary intervention principle.' In this essay I reflect on what the accordion effect is supposed by Feinberg to be, on differences between Feinberg's understanding of this idea and that of Donald Davidson, and on the interaction between Feinberg's discussion of the accordion effect and his critique of the voluntary intervention principle.     

Kant's One World: Interpreting 'Transcendental Idealism'

The relationship between divine and created causality was widely discussed in medieval and early modern philosophy. Contemporary scholars of these discussions typically stake out three possible positions: occasionalism, concurrentism, and mere-conservationism. It is regularly claimed that virtually no medieval thinker adopted the final view which denies that God is an immediate active cause of creaturely actions. The main aim of this paper is to further understanding of the medieval causality debate, and particularly the mere-conservationist position, by analysing Peter John Olivi's neglected defence of it. The paper also includes discussion of Thomas Aquinas's arguments for concurrentism and an analysis of whether Olivi's objections refute his position.     

There must be a First: Why Thomas Aquinas Rejects Infinite,Essentially Ordered,Causal Series

Several of Thomas Aquinas's proofs for the existence of God rely on the claim that causal series cannot proceed in infinitum. I argue that Aquinas has good reason to hold this claim given his conception of causation. Because he holds that effects are ontologically dependent on their causes, he holds that the relevant causal series are wholly derivative: the later members of such series serve as causes only insofar as they have been caused by and are effects of the earlier members. Because the intermediate causes in such series possess causal powers only by deriving them from all the preceding causes, they need a first and non-derivative cause to serve as the source of their causal powers.     

Books Received

This paper is an attempt to answer the question, ‘could there be causation in a timeless world?’ My conclusion: tentatively, yes. The paper and argument have three parts. Part one introduces salient issues and spells out the importance of this (initially somewhat baroque seeming) line of investigation. Section two of the paper reviews recent arguments due to Baron and Miller, who argue in favour of the possibility of causation in a timeless world, and looks to reject their arguments developed there. Section three is a response to a response. In their, Baron and Miller also argue that an argument in favour of the possibility of causation at timeless worlds, that I put forward, is an argument that fails. In section three, my response to Baron and Miller is that their argument against me succeeds, but that there is a nearby argument that we can appeal to in order to demonstrate the possibility of causation at timeless worlds.     

DIVINE PURPOSE AND EVOLUTIONARY PROCESSES

When Darwin's theory of natural selection threatened to put Paley's Designer out of a job, one response was to reemploy God as the author of the evolutionary process itself. This idea requires an account of how God might be understood to act in biological history. I approach this question in two stages: first, by considering God's action as creator of the world as a whole, and second, by exploring the idea of particular divine action in the course of evolution. As creator ex nihilo God acts directly in every event as its sustaining ground. Because God structures the world as a lawful order of natural causes, God also acts indirectly by means of creatures. More controversially, God might act directly within the world to affect the course of events; this action need not take the form of a miraculous intervention, if the natural order includes the right sort of indeterministic chance. In each of these ways God's purposes can shape evolutionary processes.     

Socio-economic health inequalities: Their origins and implications

Abstract

Evidence attests to substantial variations in health contingent on socioeconomic position. It is argued that these effects cannot be dismissed as artefact nor can they be explained, in the main, by either social selection or an unequal distribution of accepted behavioural risk factors among different social groups. The most likely explanation would seem to be social causation. However, it is continuing social and material inequality that appears most implicated; accounts which locate the effects in childhood social and material causes are far less compelling. The persistence of socioeconomic health differentials into the materially better-off social strata and the possible determining role of relative as well as absolute living standards suggest that psychological, in addition to material, variables are likely to be involved. Isolating the key psychological variables and identifying the nature of their influences will not be easy tasks, although social relations, psychological stress, uplifts, and control have emerged as possible candidates. However, psychological mediators of this sort most probably constitute surface rather than basic causes. Socio-economic inequality, it is contended, remains the basic cause, and, as such, the proper target for intervention. Psychological interventions are unlikely to yield much in the way of dividends in this context and indeed could inadvertently contribute to victim blaming.     

Proportionality,Contrast and Explanation

If counterfactual dependence is sufficient for causation and if omissions can be causes, then all events have many more causes than common sense tends to recognize. This problem is standardly addressed by appeal to pragmatics. However, Carolina Sartorio [2010] has recently raised what I shall argue is a more interesting problem concerning omissions for counterfactual theories of causation—more interesting because it demands a more subtle pragmatic solution. I discuss the relationship between the idea that causes are proportional to their effects, the idea that causation is contrastive, and the question of the dimensions along which causal explanations should be evaluated with respect to one another.     

Whiteheadian Societies and Peirce's Law of Mind: Actuality and Potentiality in the Cosmic Process

Abstract

A more suitable philosophical position to counter the claims of scientific materialism re the nature of physical reality can possibly be found in combining the metaphysics of A.N. Whitehead and C.S. Peirce. Peirce postulated a habit-forming tendency or inbuilt potentiality of the cosmic process as a whole to move over time toward ever greater organization and more complex structure. But he is vague on how “the law of the mind” applies to nature below the level of human self-awareness. Whitehead's notion of actual entities (momentary self-constituting subjects of experience) as the “final real things of which the world is made up” logically allows for some primitive form of subjectivity with the requisite potentiality for habit-formation at all levels of existence and activity within nature. In addition, Whitehead's notion of structured societies made up of subsocieties with a “regnant” subsociety seems philosophically to justify the new emphasis on bottom-up rather than top-down causation in the emergence of more complex levels of existence and activity within the life-sciences.