Cliffordian Knights of the Razor and the Jamesian Spiritual Sphere: Evidence and an Unseen Realm (IV-F)

Melissa Bergeron, US Military Academy–West Point

William James, contrary to common belief, is not arguing to isolate or protect religious belief from evidential scrutiny; rather, he is arguing that the evidential warrant is nonintellectual, i.e., experiential and so subjective. His talk of each individual needing to risk (or not) for herself is due largely to the fact that only she can evaluate the force of the evidence she has for taking the world religiously. Unfortunately (and ironically), “The Will to Believe” is—of James’s various discussions of the justification of religious belief—the weakest presentation of this view. One must look to his other works to appreciate the force of his will to believe doctrine.

Aristotle on the Order and Direction of Time (VI-D)

John Bowin, University of California–Santa Cruz

I prove, in this paper, that Aristotle has the resources within his philosophy to answer a common criticism of his account of the order and the direction of time. In Book 4 of the Physics, Aristotle argues that the order of time is derived from the order of change by something like a one-one, structure-preserving mapping from the phases of a change to the instants at which they occur. Aristotle claims that the order of time can be derived in this way since time is a property of change, and is ontologically dependent on change. I refute the criticism that this derivation is viciously circular.

Is Divorce Promise-Breaking? (VII-H)

Elizabeth Brake, University of Calgary

Wedding vows seem to be promises. So they go: “I promise to love, honor, and cherish ….” But this poses a problem. Divorce is not widely seen as a serious moral wrong. However, breaking a promise is widely seen as a serious moral wrong. I first consider a “hard-line” response: divorce is indeed prima facie impermissible promise-breaking. I show this has some plausibility when combined with the “hardship” response—that the hardship of failed marriages overrides the prima facie duty to keep promises. However, I reject this, primarily because it would entail that promisors are released in far too many cases. I argue instead for the “hard-headed” response: wedding vows are not promises at all. We cannot promise to do acts the performance of which are outside our control, and the intentions to love, and so on, expressed in wedding vows involve states of mind outside our control.

An Extensional Approach to Quantifier Domain Restriction (VIII-E)

Berit Brogaard, Australian National University

It is widely agreed that the quantifiers of natural language quantify over restricted domains. ‘Every student writes a senior thesis’, for example, is not normally used to assert something that is true iff every student in the universe writes a senior thesis. But, as we will see, one of the most popular accounts of domain restriction due to Stanley and Szabo cannot fully account for such phenomena. Schlenker has recently offered an alternative account which is compatible with minimalism about semantic content: no domain variables are posited in the syntax, and restrictions are stated in the meta-language, ‘the way it is done in modal logic’. But Schlenker’s proposal too is less than fully adequate as a theory of natural language, as it presupposes a first-order approach to quantification. Fortunately, generalized quantifier theory can be extended to account for domain restriction in natural language without rejecting minimalism about semantic content.

A Dilemma for Korsgaard: The Internalism Requirement or the Universal Normativity of Moral Reasons? (VI-E)

Danielle Bromwich, University of Toronto

Korsgaard’s understanding of internalism is in tension with her commitment to the universal normativity of moral reasons. She holds that only rational agents—not all agents—can be moved by understood reasons for action. This version of internalism allows Korsgaard to respond to the practical reason sceptic, but it jars with her commitment to universal normativity of moral reasons for all—not just perfectly rational—agents. After all, while imperfectly rational agents have a duty to be moral, Korsgaard accepts that some agents may be incapable of being moved by moral reasons due to irrationality. I argue that if we accept that there is a duty to develop a moral character, then this tension can be largely removed.

Corporate Environmental Responsibility: A Kantian Approach (V-I)

Keith Bustos, University of Tennessee

While Kantian morality prescribes no direct duties to the natural environment, it is possible to generate environmental duties from the Categorical Imperative (CI), specifically the Formulation of Humanity as an End in Itself (FH). I focus only on three duties that apply directly to corporate managers given their role within society as corporate leaders. So, I argue (by appealing to the views of three contemporary Kant scholars) that the following environmental duties apply to all corporate managers and these duties contribute to a foundation for a Kantian corporate environmental responsibility.
• A duty to obey environmental laws within the U.S. and abroad.
• A duty to abstain from dominating the political process of environmental policy formation.
• A duty to save those aspects of the natural environment that constitute the material basis for all human life, for human production, and for human culture.

The Emergent Component of Trust in “Believing Someone” (VII-G)

Albert Chan, University of Southern California

The notion of “believing someone” remains equivocal unless we differentiate believing “in” someone from believing someone regarding a particular proposition. The former involves aligning ourselves, putting confidence, placing hope, or trusting in another. The latter comprises dependence and reliance. Trust incorporates an emergent open-ended attitude toward a specific person while reliance gravitates toward a chosen specific attitude toward the source of propositional content. Believing the personal object accounts for our relationships among enemies, strangers, and intimates along with multiple influences at any given moment. Believing someone turns on the crucial questions of what “it means” and what do “I mean” in believing another person.

Dispositions and the Value of Virtue (VII-I)

Bradford Cokelet, Northwestern University

Recently, Thomas Hurka has argued that the way people deploy virtue concepts in everyday ethical thought spells trouble for neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists: he claims that everyday thought tells in favor of the occurrent-state conception of virtue, which he advocates, and tells against the dispositional conception embraced by neo-Aristotelians. My primary aim here is to review and rebuff Hurka’s attack on the dispositional conception, but in disputing Hurka’s claim that everyday ethical thought is aligned with the occurrent-state conception of virtue concepts, I also identify a strategy for motivating and developing a form of dispositionalism which evades his criticism and the criticisms mounted by fans of situationist psychology.

“Edible” and Other -ibles: A Case Study in Linguistically Oriented Phenomenology (VIII-E)

Andres Colapinto, Stony Brook University–State University of New York

For Husserl, linguistic structures could serve methodologically to bring into view the structured intentional objectivities our language can express. Departing from Husserl’s analysis of “attribution”—viz. nominal phrases like “the white paper,” derived, in Husserl’s analysis, from judgments like, “The paper is white”—I investigate the syntactic and semantic behavior of a peculiar class of adjectives: “-ible/able” adjectives like “edible,” “navigable,” “portable,” etc. A careful attention to their employment brings to view a unique kind of intentional comportment towards objects and properties—one I label “eventive attribution”—whose analysis helps refine Husserl’s initial contributions, and points the way to further research.

Efficacy in the Book of Master Guigu (VIII-F)

Daniel Coyle, Our Lady of the Lake University

The controversial book that passes under the title “Guiguzi—the Master of Ghost Valley,” transmits an arcane wisdom linked to statesmen, strategists, and certain “Daoist” traditions from Warring States China. Since the Han Dynasty, the orthodox Confucian tradition largely disdains the school and text of Master Guigu, perceiving them as philosophically subversive. The transmitted text attributed to Master Guigu is extremely abstruse and ostensibly countercurrent to mainstream Chinese traditions; it remains somewhat clandestine and resistant to philosophical analysis. The purpose of this paper is to show that The Book of Master Guigu’s dominant and yet little-known contribution to Chinese thought is the development and implementation of yinyang cosmological doctrines into a unique praxiology of efficacy. No other text in the classical Chinese philosophical tradition ventures to discuss efficacy as explicitly as The Book of Master Guigu.

A Phenomenology of Political Apathy: Scheler and Arendt on Mass Violence (IV-E)

Zachary Davis, St. John’s University

My intent in this paper is to add a new fold into the analytic of mass movements, a type of phenomenology of the emotions. Taking Max Scheler and Hannah Arendt as the initial guides, I focus on the feeling of the political apathy, perhaps the most defining feeling accorded to the traditional sense of the masses. An investigation into the feeling of political apathy provides a distinctive form of access that reveals both the moment wherein mass movements become criminal and the means by which to address their criminality more effectively.

Normative Judgments, Personal Traits of the Judge, and the Basing Relationship (VII-G)

John Davis, California State University–Fullerton

Beliefs in ethics and law sometimes correlate with irrelevant personal traits, such that if the subject had a different socioeconomic background, gender, or personality, but had all the same information and epistemic virtues, his or her belief would be different. To have a justified belief, your belief must have the proper basing relationship with whatever evidence justifies it. It may seem that if your belief correlates with such personal traits, it is not really based on the considerations you claim as reasons for believing it. I deny this, and argue that this correlation is compatible with having properly based beliefs.

On Causal Accounts of the Representationality of Cartesian Sensations (V-J)

Raffaella De Rosa, Rutgers University–Newark

Margaret Wilson and Tad Schmaltz have defended a causal account of the representationality of Cartesian sensations. Causal accounts, among other things, allegedly offer a solution to the Cartesian puzzle of sensory misrepresentation. In this paper, I argue, contra Wilson and Schmaltz, that causal accounts fail to provide both a satisfactory account of the representationality of Cartesian sensations and a solution to the above puzzle. I conclude that the failure of causal accounts suggests the presence of an internalist element in Descartes’ account of the representationality of sensations and, hence, that the prospects for explaining the notion of sensory (mis)representation lie in understanding the interaction between internalist and causal elements in Descartes’ views on sensory content.

How Must We Be to Know What Is? Demystifying Heidegger’s Preliminary Question (IV-E)

Chad Engelland, John Carroll University

Heidegger’s goal is to inquire into the reciprocity of Dasein and being, but in Being and Time and related works he poses a preliminary question about Dasein. Early and late, Heidegger acknowledges that his main question becomes intelligible only by way of the preliminary question because it engages the philosophical tradition in a productive way. In particular, it forges together the ancient question about beings and the modern question about knowledge, asking, “How must we be to be open to what we are not and yet nonetheless is?” The paper shows how Heidegger identifies the modern condition for the possibility of cognition with the classical enabling power of essence. We are open to things in our essence and only for this reason can things appear to us as they are. The paper concludes by examining Heidegger’s later critique of the way he formulated the preliminary question about Dasein.

The Order Question: Plato’s Theory of Love in the Symposium (VIII-F)

Richard Foley, University of Missouri–Columbia

Plato’s Symposium has recently occasioned extensive scholarly disagreement on the Order Question, viz. What is the principle governing the order of the seven speeches? I argue that the correct answer to the Order Question requires linking the sequence of speeches to Diotima’s famous description of the ascent in the study of beauty, the “Socratic ladder.” Complications arise with the speeches of Aristophanes and Alcibiades, yet I argue for understanding these complications as elements in an overarching Platonic theory of love that transcends the contributions of any single symposiast, Socrates included.

Structuring Ends (VI-E)

Jonathan Garthoff, Northwestern University

There is disagreement among contemporary theorists regarding the nature of a person’s good. On one hand there are “substantive good” views, according to which the most important elements of a person’s good are due to her nature as a human, rational, and/or sentient being. On the other hand there are “agent-constituted” views, which contend that a person’s good is constituted by her particular aims, desires, and/or preferences. Each approach captures important features of the good, but neither can provide a complete account: agent-constituted theories have difficulty accounting for the normativity of their claims, and substantive good theories have difficulty accounting for how a person’s actually adopted aims shape what he has reason to do. I articulate and defend a hybrid view that equals these approaches in systematicity of explanation yet seeks to surpass them in coherence with ordinary judgments about what a person’s good consists in.

Reading the Mind of God (Without Hebrew Lessons): Alston, Shared Attention, and Mystical Experience (IV-F)

Adam Green, Saint Louis University

In his book Perceiving God, William Alston attempts to exploit structural similarities between sense perception and mystical religious experiences so as both to elucidate the epistemic machinery of mystical practice, and to safeguard its theoretical respectability by linking it with sense perception. He argues that sense perception and mystical practice ought to be regarded as species of the same genus, perception simpliciter. However, this suggestion becomes problematic when one realizes that the sort of predicates which are used of God in reports of mystical experiences are ones that are familiar features of the natural order but are not objects of the type of perception which Alston’s account uses. It is argued in this paper that, for the theist at least, Alston must construe mystical experiences in terms of what developmental psychologists have come to call “shared attention,” if he is to champion the epistemic status of mystical experience.

Resolving a Trilemma for Kant’s Theory of Affection (VIII-G)

Bryan Hall, Indiana University Southeast

Hans Vaihinger, in the late 19th century, posed a trilemma for Kant’s theory of affection requiring affecting objects to be either (1) things-in-themselves, (2) appearances, or (3) both things-in-themselves and appearances (so-called double affection). Each of these three horns has its own problems. Whereas most commentators assume, along with Vaihinger himself, that appearances are particulars when trying to overcome the trilemma, Rae Langton develops a relational view of appearances. After examining Langton’s interpretation as well as the problems that face it, I will develop an alternative interpretation, one that views appearances as intrinsic relations between phenomenal objects and cognitive subjects. My view on appearances dispels Vaihinger’s trilemma since it does not require affection by things-in-themselves nor does it require appearances to be affecting objects. Even so, experience is still wholly phenomenal since objects and subjects are reciprocally necessary and possible only through appearance relations.

A Problem for Tye’s PANIC Theory and a Methodological Concern about the Representational Approach to Phenomenal Consciousness (VI-G)

Jason Hedderman, University of Missouri–Columbia

In this paper I argue that Tye’s PANIC theory has the following consequence: when a normal subject undergoes a non-veridical visual experience the subject of the experience is to some degree or other a visual zombie. This renders the PANIC theory implausible and, I suggest, reveals a general methodological problem facing representationalism, namely, that of making good on how representational contents “fit” into the physical world that avoids what I claim is a consequence of the PANIC theory.

Defending Lewis’s Compatibilism (IV-G)

Charles Hermes, University of Texas–Arlington

David Lewis distinguishes senses in which an agent both can and cannot render a law of nature false. Doing so allows him to distinguish between an agent’s ability to run an eight-minute mile in a deterministic world and the agent’s inability to run faster than the speed of light. Helen Beebee, however, has argued that Lewis’s distinction collapses because it entails that agents possess both of these abilities. Underlying Beebee’s criticism is the claim that laws ought to affect human behavior in the same manner as they affect the behavior of the basic particles of physics. Since Humean laws describe but do not constrain an electron’s behavior, Humean laws should not constrain agent’s abilities. While Beebee’s argument fails, it demonstrates that Lewis’s analysis of counterfactuals is more intimately tied to his analysis of counterfactuals than is typically realized.

Brandom’s Idealist Thesis: What’s the Idea? (VIII-E)

Phillip Honenberger, Temple University

In an essay on Hegel, Robert Brandom presents an idea he calls “the idealist thesis,” which he defines as the thesis that “the unity and structure of the concept is the same as the unity and structure of the self.” Tom Rockmore, however, writes that he “cannot make any sense of the so-called idealist thesis.” What is the meaning of Brandom’s idealist thesis? Does it rely on a merely abstract and structural similarity between concepts and selves, or does it rather establish a deeper, asymmetrical, ontologically-significant connection between the two? This essay recounts the argument for the idealist thesis as given in chapter seven of Brandom’s Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002), and argues that there are good reasons for entertaining the thesis, reasons related to the Kantian distinction between transcendental and empirical selfhood.

Soul and Natural Sublunary Elemental Motion in Aristotle (VI-D)

Errol Katayama, Ohio Northern University

In Physics 8.4, Aristotle identifies the generator of “the light and heavy” or whatever removes the obstacle that blocked their motion as the mover of their natural motion. One of the difficulties is that Aristotle seems to have identified only an accidental, and not an essential, cause of the natural elemental motion; for generating an element and moving it are two different causes, and removing of an obstacle is a blatant example of accidental cause. By critically analyzing “the doctrine of natural places,” and emphasizing the point that, for Aristotle, it is always the case that the soul is a mover and the body is moved, I shall argue that in the case of sublunary elements that are inanimate, it is ultimately the soul that by the very act of generating an element also at the same time imparts and initiates the motion.

Locke’s Protestant State of Nature: Colonialism and the Problem of Jurisdiction (VI-F)

Chad Kautzer, Stony Brook University–State University of New York

It has been argued that Locke’s interest in British colonialism trumped his philosophical integrity insofar as he mischaracterized Amerindian life as a state of nature in the Two Treatises to justify subjugation and dispossession. Rather than a case of political misuse, however, Locke’s most famous description of the state of nature is best understood precisely as a juridical description of the colonial condition—part of a Protestant natural law alternative to jurisdictional claims based on first occupation, racial inferiority, or papal donation. In it, Locke provides us with two mechanisms for establishing nonconsensual jurisdiction, which successfully circumvent the philosophical problems encountered by his neo-Thomist and Protestant predecessors, while also undermining the absolutism of Grotius, Hobbes, Pufendorf, and Filmer. This reading, I argue, is consistent with recent scholarship, has greater historical and textual support than previous interpretations, and counters many, if not all, critiques of Locke’s so-called abstract individualism.

Why Minimalism Fails as a Justification for Democracy (V-H)

Christopher King, Vanderbilt University

Minimalism—the sort of view expressed by Joseph Schumpeter and, more recently, Richard Posner—fails as a justification of democracy, or so the author concludes. Underlying this view are two divergent tendencies: (1) the view typical of liberalism that voting serves as a check on political power, and (2) the view that political participation, even at the level of voting is not of fundamental importance. In the first case, the check on power seems to suppose participation. If (2) were true there could be no check on power. By appealing to Posner’s “theory of natural leadership” the author will show that minimalism as defined by these two tendencies tends towards authoritarianism, or an inadequate concept of political participation.

Rationality and Other Values: A Study in First and Second-Person Moral Necessitation (VII-I)

Edward Kleist, Concordia College

This preliminary study focuses on the first personal necessitating force exercised by values and reasons. While reasons exercise a necessitating force upon action, I argue that values also exert necessitation, insofar as values are subjectively necessary features of moral identity. The force exerted upon us by the value of rationality presents a special case of a subjectively necessitating commitment. I consider how other persons necessitate us with respect to both values and reasons. I conclude that while there can be a second-personal source of necessitating reasons, there is no second-personal source of necessitating values. The necessitating force of values admits only of a first-personal source, which may expand to the first-person plural. The necessitating force of reasons issuing from a second person requires shared values, thus assimilating the second person into a first person plural.

Unrestricted Composition and Restricted Quantification (IV-G)

Daniel Korman, University of Illinois–Urbana-Champaign

Many of those who accept the universalist thesis that mereological composition is unrestricted also maintain that the folk typically restrict their quantifiers in such a way as to exclude strange fusions when they say things that appear to conflict with universalism. Despite its prima facie implausibility, there are powerful arguments for universalism. By contrast, there is remarkably little evidence for the thesis that strange fusions are excluded from the ordinary domain of quantification. There is no linguistic, psychological, or behavioral evidence, nor (I will argue) can the truth of universalism itself serve as evidence for this thesis. Furthermore, this reconciliatory strategy seems hopeless when applied to the more fundamental conflict between universalism and the intuitions that tell against it. Universalists are better advised to accept that the apparent conflict with folk belief is genuine and to try to explain the folk’s mistake rather than explain it away.

Perceptual Presence (VI-G)

Jason Leddington, Centre College

Typically, the experience of seeing a tomato is importantly like the experience of seeing no more than an appropriately positioned tomato-part. At the same time, a typical tomato-sighting is like the experience of seeing a full-blown tomato, not merely a tomato-part. That perceptual experience typically is both of these ways is what Alva Noë calls the “two-dimensionality of perception,” and he calls the puzzle to which it gives rise “the problem of perceptual presence.” I agree with Noë that the two-dimensionality of perception is a genuine phenomenon to which any adequate theory of perception must do justice. However, Noë has recently attempted to account for it in terms of a perceiver’s sensorimotor capacities, and this strategy faces a very serious difficulty. The purpose of this paper is to articulate this difficulty and to recommend an alternative account of perceptual two-dimensionality.

Children, Gratitude, and Respect: Filial Piety as a Vice (VII-H)

Lawrence Lengbeyer, United States Naval Academy

It is commonly thought that children ought to be prompted to attend to their parents’ needs and desires by gratitude for the great and distinctive goods that the parents have sacrificed to provide, and that it is only in exceptional cases of despicably neglectful or abusive parenting that parents forfeit their entitlement to such treatment. I will argue, to the contrary, that some of the conditions bearing upon the appropriateness of gratitude—in particular, defeasibility conditions—have been overlooked, and that a more complete understanding reveals that gratitude is very often not due to parents in our society, due to their failure to accord due respect to their children. Consequently, many, many real-life cases call for little, or no, filial piety from children—in which cases its provision might actually bespeak a character vice on the part of the children, rather than a virtue.

Aquinas on Judging Injustice: Justice in Aquinas’ Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics (VI-E)

Thornton Lockwood, Boston University

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle claims that justice differs from the other ethical virtues since it is not said “simply” (1108b7-9). But such a remark hardly explains why justice requires an entirely separate—and extended—treatment. In his Commentary on Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, Thomas Aquinas accounts for Aristotle’s distinctive treatment of justice on the basis of its relationship to what Aquinas calls the “will.” According to Aquinas, the other ethical virtues of the Nicomachean Ethics are concerned with the passions, but Aristotle “explained justice after the manner of a will, which does not have passions but nevertheless is the principle of external actions” (§889). In my paper I explore Aquinas’ claim and argue that although it is partially based on Aristotelian moral psychology, it is ultimately based on a decidedly un-Aristotelian commitment to the subordination of human law to divine law.

From Being to Givenness and Back: Some Remarks on the Meaning of Transcendental Idealism in Kant and Husserl (VIII-G)

Sebastian Luft, Marquette University

This paper takes a fresh look at a classical theme in modern philosophy. I present Kant’s transcendental idealism as a theory distinguishing between the world as in-itself and as given to the experiencing human being. This reconstruction provides the backdrop for Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology as a brand of transcendental idealism expanding on Kant: Through the phenomenological reduction Husserl universalizes Kant’s transcendental philosophy into an eidetic science of subjectivity. Thereby, Husserl provides a new sense of transcendental philosophy; rephrases the “quid iuris?”; and furnishes a new conception of the thing-in-itself. What needs to be clarified is not the possibility of a priori cognition but, instead, the validity of objects that give themselves in experience. The thing-in-itself is not an unknowable object, but the idea of the object in all possible appearances at once. In all these innovations Husserl remains committed to the basic sense in which Kant conceived the Copernican Turn.

Intrinsic Explanation and Field’s Dispensabilist Strategy (V-G)

Russell Marcus, Hamilton College

Philosophy of mathematics for the last half-century has been dominated in one way or another by Quine’s indispensability argument. The argument alleges that our best scientific theory quantifies over, and thus commits us to, mathematical objects. In this paper, I present new considerations which undermine the most serious challenge to Quine’s argument, Hartry Field’s reformulation of Newtonian Gravitational Theory.

Is Being One Only One?: The Uniqueness of Platonic Forms (VIII-F)

Anna Marmodoro, Oxford University

Each Form is unique in number; no two numerically distinct Forms can share the same nature. Plato argues for this claim in Republic X. I identify the metaphysical principles Plato presupposes in the premises of the argument by examining the reasoning behind them, and offer a reconstruction of the argument showing the principles in use. I argue that the metaphysical significance of the argument’s conclusion is to establish that if a Form F were not unique, if there were many Forms F, their nature would alter along with their number: a Form cannot recur without change in its constitution. This is why there can be only one Form for each character in the world.

Re-Thinking Infinity: Alain Badiou’s Being and Event (VIII-D)

Adam Miller, Collins Community College

What is most immediately striking about Alain Badiou’s Being and Event is its tight recapitulation of nearly fifty years of French philosophy. However, while this is remarkable in itself, it threatens to obscure the more important question: Does this repetition produce something new? Does it produce a genuine philosophical difference? It is my thesis that, in order to read Being and Event correctly, we should read it as an effort to systematically re-inscribe postmodernity within a new conception of infinity for the sake of making theoretically legible a single precarious difference: truth.

Luck, Egalitarianism, Responsibility, and Respect (V-I)

Oran Moked, Columbia University

According to luck egalitarianism (LE), justice requires that we eliminate disadvantages that befall people through no choice of their own. One objection to LE is that it disrespects its beneficiaries—the victims of brute bad luck—whose disadvantage is involuntary. It does so because it singles them out as inherently inferior: it distinguishes between those who truly lack talent, and hence are not responsible for their disadvantage, and those who are talented but have chosen not to take advantage of their talents. I assess—and reject—a series of responses to this objection. None of them shows that luck egalitarian policies can avoid such stigmatizing effects. But does such criticism disqualify LE from constituting an acceptable conception of distributive justice? I argue that it does not. Even if luck egalitarian principles give rise to policies tainted by disrespect, this is no reason for rejecting them as principles of distributive justice.

Reversibility and Ereignis: Being as Kantian Imagination in Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger (VIII-D)

David Morris, Trent University–Canada

This paper aims to clarify to Merleau-Ponty’s difficult concept of “reversibility” by interpreting it as resuming the dialectical critique of the rationalist and empiricist tradition that informs Merleau-Ponty’s earlier work. The focus is on reversibility in “Eye and Mind,” as dismantling the traditional dualism of activity and passivity. This also puts reversibility in continuity with the Phenomenology’s appropriation of Kant, letting us note an affiliation between Merleau-Ponty’s reversibility and Heidegger’s Ereignis: in each case being itself already performs the operation that Kant had located in the imagination. Reversibility discovers this Kantian imagination moving in place, Ereignis discovers it in temporality.

An Evidence Puzzle (VIII-H)

Peter Murphy, University of Indianapolis
and Allen Coates, East Tennessee State University

This paper introduces a puzzle about evidence. A person is told that in the future they will acquire evidence for some proposition, P. After arguing that this puts the person in a position to have a justified belief that P before they have acquired the evidence, we focus on the later time when they acquire the evidence. At the later time, what happens to the earlier justification for believing P? There are only two possibilities: either it no longer contributes to the person’s overall justification for believing P, or it still contributes. We present arguments against each possibility.

The Paradox of Idealization (IV-H)

Julien Murzi, University of Sheffield–United Kingdom
and Salvatore Florio, Ohio State University

In this paper, we present a new Paradox of Knowability to the effect that not all truths are knowable in principle. Our result shows that a plausible interpretation of the thesis that all truths are knowable is in fact inconsistent with some reasonable assumptions about truths that are not feasibly knowable by us. The new proof presents some advantages over the original Knowability Paradox first published by Frederic Fitch. Contrary to this latter one, it is in fact intuitionstically valid and it resists hierarchical treatment. It can therefore be seen as a useful tool for selecting adequate solutions to the Knowability Paradoxes. We end by suggesting a possible way of blocking the Paradoxes.

The Possession Conditions of Arithmetical Concepts (V-G)

Christopher Pincock, Purdue University

On the assumption that there is an informative account of what is involved in the possession of arithmetical concepts, can we draw any metaphysical conclusions about the nature of the numbers themselves? I argue that the answer to this question is “yes,” at least for the influential account of concept possession developed by Christopher Peacocke. But, against Peacocke, I claim that his project supports a structuralist interpretation of arithmetic, as opposed to the more traditional objects-based version of platonism. The discussion turns on the link between numbers and counting, and the apparent circularity that results from including the role of numbers in counting in the possession conditions of the concept of number.

Aristotle on Luck and Chance (VI-D)

Julie Ponesse, University of Western Ontario

In the middle of the 4th century B.C., on his way to mapping out the nature and number of causes in Physics II, Aristotle provided a theory of accidental causation that stands out as anomalously precise in the history of philosophical interest in the problem. Many readers, however, claim that Aristotle’s technical definition of tyche, as “what might have been due to thought and for the sake of something,” is incompatible with what they see as a broader notion of tyche in the ethical texts, as ‘whatever benefits or harms us that is beyond our control’. My aim here is to show that Aristotle’s theory of accidental causation, which runs from Physics II.4-6, not only firmly underpins, but is given practical force by, the discussions of luck in the ethical texts.

Mind-Body Supervenience’s Cardinal Sin (VI-G)

Josh Rasmussen, University of Notre Dame

I offer a new argument against the thesis that distinct mental states necessarily depend for their existence upon distinct physical states by arguing that there are too many thinkable thoughts for each distinct thought to enjoy a distinct physical base.

Against the Goal of True Beliefs (IV-H)

Steven Reynolds, Arizona State University

This paper argues against the popular view that knowledge is best understood in terms of a personal goal of believing only the truth. Instead, I argue that encouraging better testimony is the public goal that motivates our society-wide practice of attributing and denying knowledge. The main idea is that we have voluntary control over our testimony, which could thus be improved in response to being praised as known, while our indirect and partial control over our beliefs and ways of acquiring beliefs does not seem to be a likely target for improvement by praise.

Contextualism and Virtue Perspectivism: How to Preserve Our Intuitions about Knowledge and “Knows” (VIII-H)

Blake Roeber, Northern Illinois University

Contextualism is a linguistic thesis; it is a theory not about knowledge but about the word “knows.” Almost invariably, contextualists defend their position as necessary for preserving our epistemological intuitions in the face of the so-called “skeptical paradox.” In this paper, I undermine the case for contextualism by showing how a properly Chisholmed theory of knowledge might preserve our epistemological intuitions more successfully than the linguistic thesis forwarded by contextualism. My aim is not to demonstrate that contextualism is false. Rather, I aim at orienting the debate away from the preservation of intuitions and toward the linguistic data surrounding the word “knows.”

Heidegger and Frankfurt on the Circularity of the Practical Question (IV-E)

B. Scot Rousse, Northwestern University

Harry Frankfurt has recently argued that the practical question, the question that asks “How should I live?” is irreducibly circular. The same idea is found in the early work of Martin Heidegger, who connects it to his thesis that human self-identity is determined by self-interpretation. For each this circularity gives rise to a post-Kantian notion of autonomy: Frankfurt’s “wholehearted self-identification” and Heidegger’s “authenticity.” I show the relevance of Frankfurt’s treatment of the circularity of the practical question to a debate about Heidegger’s conceptions of anxiety and authenticity. I go on to defend a new interpretation of “authenticity,” focusing on its connection to the concepts “repetition” and “transparency,” and exploring its relevance to a debate about Frankfurt’s conception of identification. I argue that the Heideggerian view is opposed to Frankfurt’s explanation of “identification” in terms of “satisfaction.”

Parthood and Location (IV-G)

Raul Saucedo–Cornell University

I present an argument against both directions of an assumption about how parthood and location might be distributed over some material objects and some regions of space or spacetime; namely, the claim that, necessarily, for any material things x and y, x is part of y iff x is exactly located at a subregion of the region at which y is exactly located. I show that rejecting this claim distinguishes between two apparently equivalent ways in which a plurality of material objects and a single such thing might be related: mereological composition and what I call “minimal-expansion.” I highlight a few consequences this has for various current metaphysical discussions.

The Impossible Virtue (VI-F)

Zachary Silver, University of Oklahoma

According to the traditional, negative conception of toleration, to be tolerant requires that we respect other peoples’ right to hold their beliefs. This understanding of toleration has been challenged by a positive conception of toleration according to which toleration requires that we respect other peoples’ beliefs themselves. I argue that the claim attributed to G.K. Chesterton that “tolerance is the virtue of a man with no convictions” highlights the fatal flaw in the positive conception of toleration, that it is a demand for the impossible.

Reliving British Emergentism (V-J)

Jennifer Susse, Michigan State University

Jaegwon Kim and others have unfavorably compared contemporary Nonreductive Physicalists to the 1920s British Emergentists. I will argue that Nonreductive Physicalists have nothing to fear from this comparison. Both contemporary Nonreductive Physicalists and the British Emergentists argue for the plausible epistemological claim that there are limits on our ability to understand and predict the behavior of macroscopic objects solely from knowledge of the behavior of their microscopic particulars. Furthermore, with respect to the metaphysical assumptions underlying their epistemological claims, emergentism and nonreductive physicalism are more coherent than critics contend. In fact, I will argue that the only alternative to an extremely sparse ontology is to embrace some form of emergentism.

A Farewell to Deweyan Democracy (V-H)

Robert Talisse, Vanderbilt University

The revival of pragmatism has brought renewed enthusiasm for Dewey’s conception of “democracy as a way of life.” The author argues that Dewey’s democratic theory is unworthy of resurrection. Drawing from later Rawlsian concerns, the author first argues that Deweyan democracy cannot accommodate the fact of reasonable pluralism. Then the author argues that this failing is pragmatically consequential. The result is that Deweyan democracy fails on its own terms; pragmatists who want to theorize about democracy must abandon Dewey.

Inscrutable Goods and the Argument from Hiddenness (IV-F)

David Taylor, Franklin and Marshall College
and Michael Murray, Franklin and Marshall College

Replies to The Argument from Hiddenness (for atheism) generally make reference to concrete examples of greater goods for the sake of which God might permit reasonable non-belief, thereby justifying his hiddenness. In this essay we argue that such hiddenness-justifying goods need not be discernable to us as humans; there might very well exist inscrutable goods for the sake of which God permits the reasonable non-belief in the world. If this could be shown to be the case, then The Argument from Hiddenness would surely lose significant force. In developing the argument from inscrutable goods, we respond to three objections that John Schellenberg (a leading proponent of The Argument from Hiddenness) has made to it.

The “Power of Judgment” as Blind Spot: Did Heidegger and Arendt Follow Kant’s Own Blindness? (VIII-D)

Benjamin Tremoulet, Université de Paris IV

Kant’s concept of the “power of judgment” (Urteilskraft) received peculiar treatment from two famous commentators and from Kant himself. Although he based his analysis on the relations between faculties, Martin Heidegger, in his famous interpretation of Kant, completely discarded this power that constitutes one of the three “higher cognitive faculties.” Hannah Arendt, despite the central role she grants to Kant’s “power of judgment,” makes a similar omission from her analysis of his concept of “common sense.” Considering the enormous influence of these authors in their respective fields, a critique of their analyses introduces new approaches to thinking through their main concerns (human finitude and common sense) that have been neglected by later thinkers. Consequently, we will try to understand what makes the “power of judgment” disappear from these central interpretations and determine the philosophical significance of these omissions. Can the reason for it be traced back to Kant’s philosophy itself?

Knowing Moore by Knowing Les: On a Supposed Solution to the Surprise Quiz Paradox (VIII-H)

Michael Veber, East Carolina University

According to the Moorean solution to the surprise quiz paradox, the announcement, “There will be a quiz next week but you don’t know what day” is true and initially known to be true by the students. But, in the event of a last day quiz, it becomes unknowable because it reduces to a Moorean absurdity. Thus a last day surprise quiz is possible. The Moorean solution is rejected because: (1) there are situations in which S can learn that P by hearing an utterance of “P but S doesn’t know that P,” and (2) in the event of a last day quiz, routes are available for students to know that the quiz is coming that don’t involve deducing it from Moorean absurdity. Either the announcement isn’t known to be true when it is made or a last day quiz can be ruled out. In any case, the paradox stands.

Practical Success and the Nature of Truth (IV-H)

Chase Wrenn, University of Alabama

Why do beliefs tend to cause us to act in ways that will succeed if they are true? Philip Kitcher sees this as an important question for a theory of truth to answer. He contends that deflationary theories of truth cannot answer the question, but causal correspondence theories (CCT) can. In this paper, I argue that Kitcher’s preferred CCT explanations are really no better than the deflationary explanations he rejects as “shallow” and “uninformative.” But the inability to answer the question is not a fault in either view because the question does not pertain to the nature of truth. Rather, it pertains to the nature of belief or the nature of mind. Asking a theory of truth to give a satisfactory answer to it is like asking a theory of justice to solve the Gettier Problem.

Race, Reference, and Reality (VI-F)

Jason Wyckoff, University of Colorado–Boulder

Various philosophers and sociologists have adopted a position that we can call “metaphysical eliminativism” about race, which is the view that races are not real, that our race-talk fails to refer to any actual entities or categories, and that we should therefore abandon the use of race terms. Many metaphysical eliminativists about race have made the inference from the nonexistence of natural kind races to the nonexistence of (social kind) races, but, as I will argue, this is a fallacious inference. Drawing upon the insights afforded by semantic externalism, I argue that races do not fail to exist simply because they turn out not to be the sorts of things we may have thought they were. Races may be social kinds, even if most people believe, or have believed, that race-talk refers to biologically defined groups of persons.

Force and Feeling: Kant’s Argument in the Amphiboly (VIII-G)

Melissa Zinkin, Binghamton University–State University of New York

As Kant himself presents it, the “Amphiboly” is an unsuccessful argument against Leibniz’s “intellectualism,” since Leibniz would not object to the “ambiguity” Kant attributes to him. My paper reconstructs and defends Kant’s argument by making explicit its presuppositions. In order for transcendental reflection to make the distinction between sensible and intellectual representations there must be some distinguishing mark that sensible representations have, which cannot be reduced to a concept. This is an intensive magnitude which refers to attractive and repulsive forces. However, there can be no concept, or rule, by which this mark is identified, since this would again make it thinkable by the intellect. Thus transcendental reflection must distinguish between sensible and intellectual representations by non-discursive feeling. In addition to showing the coherence of Kant’s argument in the Amphiboly, my discussion shows the connection between the faculty of transcendental reflection and reflective judgment, the subject of Kant’s third Critique.