PHILOSOPHICAL STUDIES最新文献

To accept divine satisficing is to hold that it is possible for God to choose a worse option over a better one provided that the worse option is “good enough.” Divine satisficing plays an important role in certain responses to the problem of evil and problems of divine creation. Here I argue that if God is perfectly free, then divine satisficing is not possible even if it is permissible. To be perfectly free, in the sense intended here, is to be free from all non-rational influences, including desires or preferences not derived simply from the recognition of one’s external reasons. An account of divine motivation which allows for brute preferences is thus needed to accommodate divine satisficing. Thus, we should either accept a brute preference model of divine motivation or reject divine satisficing. In Sect. 1 I will give an overview of the debate on divine satisficing. After clarifying the nature of God’s reasons in Sect. 2, I will present my main argument that a perfectly free God cannot satisfice in Sect. 3 and introduce a brute preference model of divine action as an alternative to divine perfect freedom in Sect. 4. Finally, in Sect. 5 I discuss how my argument addresses countervailing considerations and the possibility that God does not face a single best option.

In this paper, I argue that four common prejudices have proven to be rather persistent obstacles to the development of an appropriate philosophical understanding of scientific discoveries: (1) the, already somewhat out-dated prejudice according to which scientific discoveries are non-rational and therefore not apt to philosophical analysis, (2) the prejudice that newly discovered scientific entities always possess sharp conceptual boundaries, (3) the prejudice that the notion of scientific discovery entails a commitment to realism about discovered entities, and (4) the prejudice that scientific discoveries are point events. In Sects. 2 to 5, I will present evidence against these four prejudices, mainly relying on the discovery of Alzheimer´s disease. In particular, while Kuhn (The Essential Tension, Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 165–177, 1962) had dismissed prejudice (4) only with regard to discoveries that violate an existing paradigm, I will show it to be untenable even in a case (Alzheimer´s disease) where no paradigm has already prevailed. The rejection of prejudices (1) to (4) will lead us to a new picture according to which scientific discoveries do not always present fixed and conceptually well-determined entities, but may rather be constituted by successive steps of knowledge acquisition with respect to some moving target (Sect. 6).

In this essay, I argue that despite the apparent promise of the recently popular “robust omissions reply” to John Martin Fischer’s well-known robustness objection to flicker of freedom style responses to arguments against the Principle of Alternative Possibilities (PAP) based on Frankfurt-style cases (FSCs), the robustness objection succeeds after all. Though I concede that the robust omissions reply is successful with the most promising extant variety of FSC (modified blockage) in view, I present a new kind of case—“Fischer-type modified blockage”—in which I claim the subject is basically morally responsible for what he’s done despite his lacking access to any robust alternative possibilities, and against which the robust omissions reply is ineffective. Along the way, I take advantage of an opportunity to show that my Fischer-type modified blockage case also serves to effectively undermine an otherwise promising recent defense, from Justin Capes, of David Widerker’s “W-defense” argument for PAP.

The topic of disagreement has captured a great deal of attention among epistemologists in recent years. In this paper, I want to raise the issue of disagreement for the epistemic aim of understanding. I will address three main issues. The first concerns the nature of understanding disagreement. What do disagreements in understanding amount to? What kind of disagreement is at play when two agents understand something differently, or have a different understanding of something? The second concerns the norms of rational epistemic behavior in dealing with understanding disagreements. How should an agent react in realizing that another agent understands things differently than she does? The third concerns the value of understanding disagreements. Are understanding disagreements valuable? What is there to gain from understanding disagreements, and what is there to learn from those who understand things differently than we do? My arguments lend support to three main theses. The first is that understanding disagreements are interestingly different from familiar doxastic disagreements. The second is that reasonable understanding disagreements are possible, and hence that we are often entitled to stand our ground in face of an understanding disagreement. The third is that understanding disagreements can have epistemic value, because they can lead to modal insight.

David Wallace has argued that there is no special problem for free will in the many-worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, beyond the well-known problem of reconciling free will with physical determinism. I argue to the contrary that, on the plausible and popular “deep self” approach to compatibilism, the many-worlds interpretation does face a special problem. It is not clear on the many-worlds picture how our actions can issue from our most central character traits, given that copies of us in other branches are certain to act differently than we do.

The Neurodiversity (ND) movement demands that some psychiatric categories be de-pathologized. It has faced much criticism, leading some to despair whether it can ever be brought together with psychiatry. In this paper, we argue for a particular understanding of this central demand of the ND movement. We argue that the demand for de-pathologizing is the rejection of (paradigmatically) autism as a hypostatic abstraction; the ND movement is committed, first and foremost, to the reconceptualization of autism not as something one has, but as something one is. We distinguish between two senses of autistic identity —one pre-reflective, and one social and political— operative in this reconceptualization. This understanding of the ND movement is centrally about a rethinking of the relation between a subject and a psychiatric label. It is not about reconceptualizing psychiatric categories in terms of advantageous variations, as we believe critics fear. Our understanding of what the ND movement is asking for has the noteworthy consequence that many of the most influential criticisms of the ND movement are missing the mark and worries about the impossibility of reconciling the movement with psychiatry are unwarranted.

A consensus is emerging in the philosophy of science that value judgements are ineliminable from scientific inquiry. Which values should then be chosen by scientists? This paper proposes a novel answer to this question, labelled the public reason view. To place this answer on firm ground, I first redraw the boundaries of the political forum; in other words, I broaden the range of actors who have a moral duty to follow public reason. Specifically, I argue that scientific advisors to policy makers have that duty—a duty that is needed to create a barrier against any nonpublic values that scientific researchers might let enter their work. Next, I specify how scientific advisors should approach value judgements to satisfy public reason, arguing that they should work within a conception of justice that is political and reasonable in several distinct senses. Scientific researchers at large should instead communicate their value judgements by following norms of transparency that facilitate scientific advisors’ public reasoning. Finally, I contrast my account with the dominant response to the which-values question, which focuses instead on citizens’ values, demonstrating that that response shares several problematic features with the heavily criticised external conception of public reason.

This is a contribution to a book symposium on Bias: A Philosophical Study, in which I respond to commentaries by Gabbrielle Johnson, Daniel Greco, and Selim Berker. In response to Johnson, I argue that many paradigmatic cases of bias are not best understood as involving underdetermination, and I defend my alternative account of bias against the concerns that she raises. In response to Greco, I note some of the ways in which the credibility of my claims depends on further empirical research, and I clarify my claims about introspection in order to show that they are consistent with the possibilities that he raises. In response to Berker, I offer a view about the metaphysical status of “non-pejorative” biases while resisting his suggestion that all non-evaluative uses of the term “bias” are misuses of the term. I defend my proposal that our knowledge that skeptical hypotheses are false is a case of “biased knowing” against a dilemma that he raises for that possibility.

Many people believe that it is better to extend the length of a happy life than to create a new happy life, even if the total welfare is the same in both cases. Despite the popularity of this view, one would be hard-pressed to find a fully compelling justification for it in the literature. This paper develops a novel account of why and when extension is better than replacement that applies not just to persons but also to non-human animals and humanity as a whole.

There has been widespread opposition to so-called essentialism in contemporary social theory. At the same time, within contemporary analytic metaphysics, the notion of essence has been revived and put to work by neo-Aristotelians. The ‘new essentialism’ of the neo-Aristotelians opens the prospect for a new social essentialism—one that avoids the problematic commitments of the ‘old essentialism’ while also providing a helpful framework for social theorizing. In this paper, I develop a neo-Aristotelian brand of essentialism about social kinds and show how it avoids the legitimate worries of social theorists. I then argue that neo-Aristotelian social kind essentialism provides a helpful framework for a wide range of projects in social ontology and feminist metaphysics, including debunking projects, descriptive inquiries, and the project of achieving social change. I further argue that an essentialist framework is more useful than a grounding framework when it comes to certain legitimate theoretical and practical purposes in social theory.