Asian journal of philosophy最新文献

In their paper “AI Wellbeing,” Simon Goldstein and Cameron Domenico Kirk-Giannini argue that some language agents plausibly possess the capacity for wellbeing and moral standing even if they lack consciousness. My response is ambivalent. On the one hand, I am skeptical of theories of wellbeing and moral standing that lack a consciousness requirement. On the other hand, I agree with Goldstein and Kirk-Giannini (2025) that several leading theories of wellbeing and moral standing jointly imply that some language agents may be welfare subjects and moral patients and that this implication should be taken seriously. In fact, I argue that if we fully account for moral and descriptive uncertainty, we may need to lower the bar for moral standing even further, to include entities with only minimal forms of goal-orientedness or information processing. The question of whether and how to account for uncertainty might thus determine whether the arguments in “AI Wellbeing” go too far — or not far enough.

Contemporary debates about the metaphysics of material composition occur within the framework set by the Special Composition Question, as proposed famously by Peter van Inwagen. This question asks what one must do, what conditions must be satisfied, for some things to compose one object as proper parts. Hylomorphism is a theory that has regained prominence in contemporary metaphysics, explaining the unity of composite material objects by appealing to a special metaphysical part of those objects: structure or form. My book defends hylomorphism as a meaningful and significant answer to questions about the composition of material objects. Specifically, I propose that, if it is false that substances can have other substances as parts, hylomorphism can be shown not only to be a plausible theory but that all consistent accounts of restricted composition can be shown to be hylomorphist. After introducing and summarizing the trajectory of the book, I turn to reviewing and responding to objections from my interlocutors for this symposium.

This paper offers a critical overview of the evolving debate on the accuracy conditions of episodic memory. We argue that the positive proposals articulated in the context of this literature are actually attempts to answer related but ultimately different types of questions. After presenting our overview of the debate, we discuss four lessons that can be drawn from it. While we do not put forward a substantive account of the accuracy conditions of remembering, we believe that these lessons contribute to advancing the debate by providing the grounds for more nuanced and rigorous engagement among philosophers interested in the accuracy conditions of episodic memory.

In The True and the Good: A Strong Virtue Theory of the Value of Truth (2023), Wrenn argues for a strong virtue theory of the value of truth. What makes truth valuable is Truthfulness, a human virtue. We value truth because we ought to be Truthful, and not vice versa (state-given). Therefore, he argues that the truth of a proposition as such does not confer value to states of believing it. I disagree. I argue that Wrenn’s Strong Virtue Theory of the Value of Truth is either too strong or simply false. In any case, my main argument is based on a thought experiment that is supposed to challenge his theory, and pump our intuition that truth as such confers value on states of believing it (object-given). I also point to some issues that concern the compatibility of Aristotelianism and truth’s value, and also the formulation of the Strong Virtue Theory.

What is the truth? Different philosophers have attempted to respond to this question by suggesting various theories such as the correspondence theory of truth and the coherence theory of truth. While theories of truth have a long history dating back to ancient times, philosophers continue to debate the meaning of truth. The paper contributes to the ongoing discussion by offering an account of the Chewa concept of truth and evidence focusing on how people use this concept in everyday language. The paper adopts the ordinary language approach to meaning, a method utilized in both Western and African philosophy. Following the ordinary language approach, we examine (a) dictionary definitions of various truth terms in the Chichewa language, (b) the ordinary meanings of these truth terms in everyday discourse, and (iii) truth as expressed in figurative utterances using the Chichewa language. Based on the analysis, the argument presented in this paper is that the concept of truth derived from the Chichewa language requires two conditions to be met for an utterance to be considered true: (i) the utterance must correspond to the intended facts, and (ii) the utterance must be supported by evidence. We conclude that this concept of truth extends beyond the correspondence theory, which focuses solely on statements and facts by emphasizing the importance of evidence. It is our hope that this discussion will assist philosophers in developing theories of truth that are grounded in everyday experiences of different cultures.

Recently, Hill, Sainsbury, and Block have mounted significant objections to the prevailing doctrine within the philosophy of perception—principally advanced by Burge and Schellenberg—that asserts the primacy of singular representation in perceptual content (a position I refer to as particularism). Hill articulates a novel form of generalism in opposition to particularism, Sainsbury advocates for a relativistic account of perceptual content, while Block contends that the longstanding controversy over the fundamental structure of perceptual content is, in principle, irresolvable. The present paper contends that each of these challenges fails; rather, there exist numerous compelling grounds for upholding the thesis that perceptual content is, at its core, singular in nature.

Hylomorphists claim that material objects are understood best as composites of two principles: matter and form. Contemporary hylomorphists argue that the principle of form is required to secure a restricted account of composition, a moderate view that avoids both nihilism and universalism. Fr. James Dominic Rooney argues, first, that any restricted theory of composition is functionally equivalent to hylomorphism and, second, that any hylomorphism worthy of the name must reject what he calls the “substance-part principle.” I focus on the second claim and show that a fairly revisionary version of hylomorphism—what I call “painless hylomorphism”—can accomplish much of the explanatory work that traditional hylomorphisms do while avoiding their pitfalls.

In his book How to Take Skepticism Seriously, Adam Leite defends the efforts of Moore and Austin to show that the skeptic’s assumptions are at odds with ordinary epistemic practice. In these comments, I want to raise two questions. The first question concerns the extent of what counts as “ordinary epistemic practice.” While various plausible general principles concerning knowledge and justified belief clearly count as part of this practice, do various recondite, or even potentially controversial, empirical claims also count as part of this practice? The second question I want to raise concerns just what it is that Leite can claim to have shown about the truth of skepticism, even granting that he has shown that the case for skepticism cannot be made from within ordinary epistemic practice. If we grant that Leite has shown that much, we can conclude that ordinary epistemic practice does not undermine itself. But should this somehow reassure us of the truth of our ordinary knowledge attributions, or otherwise alter our attitudes concerning those attributions?

While it is uncontroversial that science has been making steady progress, it is controversial what constitutes such progress, among other things, because it is controversial what science’s aims are and what it means for science to have aims in the first place. In this paper, I scrutinize the widespread assumption that scientific progress must be defined in terms of aims. I argue that the notion of progress is not inherently a goal-relative concept. We can define what constitutes progress in science without determining its aims.