Excuses,justifications, and the just war tradition: are there good reasons to kill the Naked Soldier?

In war there is a phenomenon known as the Naked Soldier problem (NS). A combatant discovers a vulnerable enemy combatant who is unable to defend himself and usually unaware of the combatant’s presence. This enemy combatant is not presently engaged in fighting and not threatening the lives of others. While killing the NS is legally permissible, the question I address in this essay is whether or not there can be a moral justification for doing so. I think such a moral justification is lacking, and there are only excuses for killing the NS. In this essay, I distinguish between a justification and an excuse and then I examine four traditional reasons given for the acceptability of killing in war to see if any of them are (a) justifications for killing in war in general and (b) justifications for killing the Naked Soldier, specifically.     

目标取向与社会认知冲突调节的关系

本研究采用问卷法考察目标取向与社会认知冲突调节的关系.结果表明:任务取向对认识冲突调节有显著的正向预测作用;趋向型自我取向对关系冲突调节有显著的正向预测作用;逃避型自我取向对社会认知冲突调节无显著的预测作用;社会认知冲突调节的直接与间接测量方式具有等价作用.     

Virtuous intuitions: comments on Lecture 3 of Ernest Sosa’s <Emphasis Type="Italic">A Virtue Epistemology</Emphasis>

I agree with Sosa that intuitions are best thought of as attractions to believe a certain proposition merely on the basis of understanding it. However, I don’t think it is constitutive of them that they supply strictly foundational justification for the propositions they justify, though I do believe that it is important that the intuition of a suitable subject be thought of as a prima facie justification for his intuitive judgment, independently of the reliability of his underlying capacities. I also think that we need to be able to explain how mere understanding of a proposition can confer upon us an ability to have reliable intuitions, that we cannot simply take that idea for granted. And that when try to explain that, our best avenue for doing so is to take the intuitions as constituting the understanding of which they are said to be a manifestation.

A Quintet,a Quartet,a Trio,a Duo? The Epistemic Regress Problem,Evidential Support,and Skepticism

In his topical article, Andrew Cling claims that the best extant formulation of the so-called epistemic regress problem rests on five assumptions that are too strong. Cling offers an improved version that rests on a different set of three core epistemic assumptions, each of which he argues for. Despite of owing a great deal to Cling’s ideas, I argue that the epistemic regress problem surfaces from more fundamental assumptions than those offered by Cling. There are ultimately two core assumptions—in fact two contradictory strands within the concept of epistemic support—which jointly create a powerful challenge for our pursuit of paramount epistemic values.

On the regress argument for infinitism

This paper critically evaluates the regress argument for infinitism. The dialectic is essentially this. Peter Klein argues that only an infinitist can, without being dogmatic, enhance the credibility of a questioned non-evident proposition. In response, I demonstrate that a foundationalist can do this equally well. Furthermore, I explain how foundationalism can provide for infinite chains of justification. I conclude that the regress argument for infinitism should not convince us.     

Perception2

The article is an overview of some central philosophical problems associated with perception. It discusses what distinguishes perception from other sensory capacities and from conception. It discusses anti‐individualism, a view according to which the nature of a perceptual state is dependent not just causally but for its identity or ‘essence’ on relations to a normal environment in which systems containing that state were formed. It discusses different views about epistemic warrant. By emphasising the deep ways in which human and animal perceptual systems, especially visual systems, are similar, it criticises a dominant view of the last century, in both philosophy and large parts of psychology, according to which a range of sophisticated supplementary abilities have to be learned before a child can perceive objective features of the physical world.     

Chisholm's Grand Move

Abstract: Roderick Chisholm famously held that our knowledge of the world is supported entirely by a foundation of self‐justifying statements, none of which logically implies the existence of any physical object in that world. The only contingent statements to be found in the foundation, he maintained, are those that are “about our own psychological states and the ways we are ‘appeared to’.” It is a view that, as Chisholm was well aware, tallies poorly with our ordinary practice of justifying statements. We are typically happy to justify statements by ultimate appeal to what we have seen or heard; that is, by ultimate appeal to statements that logically imply that certain things in the world are as we take them to be. This essay examines how Chisholm sought to explain away this apparent disconfirmation of foundationalism by ordinary practice—in effect, how Chisholm responded to one of the chief criticisms of foundationalism launched by J. L. Austin. My suggestion will be that, when the dust clears, it is Austin who comes out ahead.     

Epistemic Justice and a Role for Virtue in the Politics of Knowing

The dual aim of this article is to reveal and explain a certain phenomenon of epistemic injustice as manifested in testimonial practice, and to arrive at a characterisation of the anti–prejudicial intellectual virtue that is such as to counteract it. This sort of injustice occurs when prejudice on the part of the hearer leads to the speaker receiving less credibility than he or she deserves. It is suggested that where this phenomenon is systematic it constitutes an important form of oppression.     

A Map of Common Knowledge Logics

In order to capture the concept of common knowledge, various extensions of multi-modal epistemic logics, such as fixed-point ones and infinitary ones, have been proposed. Although we have now a good list of such proposed extensions, the relationships among them are still unclear. The purpose of this paper is to draw a map showing the relationships among them. In the propositional case, these extensions turn out to be all Kripke complete and can be comparable in a meaningful manner. F. Wolter showed that the predicate extension of the Halpern-Moses fixed-point type common knowledge logic is Kripke incomplete. However, if we go further to an infinitary extension, Kripke completeness would be recovered. Thus there is some gap in the predicate case. In drawing the map, we focus on what is happening around the gap in the predicate case. The map enables us to better understand the common knowledge logics as a whole.     

Being German,Paraguayan and Germanino: Exploring the Relation Between Social and Personal Identity

Despite people’s claims, their national, ethnic and other identities are not ubiquitously relevant, they are rather situationally evoked and performed. Such is the case with the German, Paraguayan and Germanino identity in the municipality of Nueva Germania, in Paraguay. Recognising such contextual epistemic permissibility allows us to form a de-essentialised understanding of groups and individuals. One of the challenges that emerge from this approach, is to understand how a person can perform different identities, which differently define who they are, while remaining certain of being a continuous and persistent person. The objective of this article is to provide a theoretical grounding for theories of social identity in theories of personal identity. It allows us to analytically accommodate the situational and multiscalar character of identities, while recognising their existential importance for personal identity (for the Self).