Browse

The chapters in this volume aim to advance the discussion of the role of the a priori in philosophy by addressing four sets of issues. The first is whether intuitions provide evidence for philosophical theories, whether that evidence is a priori, and whether the results of experimental philosophy affect the evidential or a priori status of intuitions. The second is whether there are explanations of the a priori and what range of propositions can be justified and known a priori. The third is whether a priori justified beliefs are needed in order to avoid some skeptical worries. The fourth is whether certain recent challenges to the existence or significance of the a priori are successful.

What is time? Traditionally, it has been answered that time is a product of the human mind, or the motion of celestial bodies. In the mid-seventeenth century, a new kind of answer emerged: time or eternal duration is ‘absolute’, in the sense it is independent of human minds and material bodies. This study explores the development of absolute time or eternal duration during one of Britain’s richest and most creative metaphysical periods, from the 1640s to the 1730s. It features an interconnected set of main characters—Henry More, Walter Charleton, Isaac Barrow, Isaac Newton, John Locke, Samuel Clarke, and John Jackson—alongside a large and varied supporting cast, whose metaphysics are all read in their historical context and given a place in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century development of thought on time. In addition to interpreting the metaphysics of these characters, this study advances two general, developmental theses. First, the complexity of positions on time (and space) defended in early modern thought is hugely under-appreciated. Second, distinct kinds of absolutism emerged in British philosophy, helping us to understand why some absolutists considered time to be barely real, whilst others identified it with the most real being of all: God.

Abstract objects such as properties, propositions, numbers, degrees, and expression types are at the centre of many philosophical debates. Philosophers and linguists alike generally hold the view that natural language allows rather generously for reference to abstracts objects of the various sorts. The project of this book is to investigate in a fully systematic way whether and how natural language permits reference to abstract objects. For that purpose, the book will introduce a great range of new linguistic generalizations and make systematic use of recent semantic and syntactic theories. It will arrive at an ontology that differs rather radically from the one that philosophers, but also linguists, generally take natural language to involve. Reference to abstract objects is much more marginal than is generally thought. Instead of making reference to abstract objects, natural language, with its more central terms and constructions, makes reference to (concrete) particulars, especially tropes, as well as pluralities of particulars. Reference to abstract objects is generally reserved for syntactically complex and less central terms of the sort the property of being wise or the number eight.

People rely on reason to think about and navigate the abstract world of human relations in much the same way they rely on maps to study and traverse the physical world. Starting from that simple observation, this book offers a critique of the way human thought and action have become deeply immersed in the rhetoric of cartography and how this cartographic reasoning allows the powerful to map out other people's lives. Comprising a reading of Western philosophy, religion, and mythology that draws on early maps and atlases; Plato, Immanuel Kant, and Ludwig Wittgenstein; and Thomas Pynchon, Gilgamesh, and Marcel Duchamp, the book is itself a minimalist guide to the terrain of Western culture. It roams widely but always returns to the problems inherent in reason, to question the outdated assumptions and fixed ideas that thinking cartographically entails.

This book introduces Immanuel Kant's masterwork, the Critique of Pure Reason, from a ‘relaxed’ problem-oriented perspective which treats Kant as an especially insightful practising philosopher, from whom we still have much to learn, intelligently and creatively responding to significant questions that transcend his work's historical setting. The book's main project is to command a clear view of how Kant understands various perennial problems, how he attempts to resolve them, and to what extent he succeeds. The constructive portions of the First Critique—the Aesthetic and Analytic—are explored in detail; the Paralogisms and Antinomies more briefly. At the same time the book is an introduction to the challenges of reading the text of Kant's work and, to that end, selectively adopts a more rigorous historical and exegetical stance.

This book explores a particular way of justifying the rational principles that govern credences (or degrees of belief). The main principles that the book justifies are the central tenets of Bayesian epistemology, though many other related principles are met along the way. These are: Probabilism, the claims that credences should obey the laws of probability; the Principal Principle, which says how credences in hypotheses about the objective chances should relate to credences in other propositions; the Principle of Indifference, which says that, in the absence of evidence, credences should be distributed equally over all possibilities that are entertained; and Conditionalization, the Bayesian account of how responses are planned when new evidence is received. Ultimately, then, the book is a study in the foundations of Bayesianism. To justify these principles, the book looks to decision theory. An agent’s credences are treated as if they were a choice she makes. The book appeals to the principles of decision theory to show that, when epistemic utility is measured in this way, the credences that violate the principles listed above are ruled out as irrational. The account of epistemic utility given is the veritist’s: the sole fundamental source of epistemic utility for credences is their accuracy. Thus, this is an investigation of the version of epistemic utility theory known as accuracy-first epistemology.

This book pursues some novel and unusual standpoints in the philosophy of action. It rejects, for example, the most widely held view about how to count actions, and argues for what it calls a ‘prolific theory’ of act individuation. It also describes and argues against the two leading theories of the nature of action, the causal theory and the agent causal theory. The causal theory cannot account for skilled activity, nor for mental action. The agent causalist theory unnecessarily reifies causings. The book identifies an assumption that they share, and that most action theorists have assumed to be unproblematic and uncontroversial, that an action is, or entails the existence of, an event. Several different meanings to that claim are disentangled and in the most interesting sense of that claim, the book denies that it is true. The book's own alternative is simple and unpretentious: nothing informative can be said about the nature of action that explicates action in any other terms. The book sketches a theory of causal explanation of action that eschews the requirement for laws or generalizations, and this effectively quashes one argument for the oft-repeated view that no explanations of action can be causal, on the grounds that there are no convincing cases of laws of human action. It addresses a number of questions about the knowledge an agent has of his own actions, looking particularly at examples of pathological cases of action in which, for one reason or another, the agent does not know what he is doing.

Human agency has four irreducibly different dimensions—psychological, ethical, intellectual, and physical—which the traditional idea of a will tended to conflate. Examining them separately yields several significant results. First, the mark of human agency in general, like that of every kind of agent with functionally differentiated parts, is functional integration, not intention. Second, voluntariness is an ethical concept, unlike either intention or agency as such, and it is defined in negative not positive causal terms: an act is voluntary if it is not due to ignorance or compulsion, the connection between these factors being that both are normally exculpations. Third, acting intentionally cannot be defined as acting for a reason because intentional action is a manifestation of desire whereas action done for reasons is a manifestation of knowledge or belief. Furthermore, explanations that simply give agents’ reasons, e.g. ‘He took the left fork because it was the road to Larissa’, differ significantly from ones that refer to belief, e.g. ‘He took the left fork because he believed it was the road to Larissa’. For the first explanation mentions a fact about the traveller’s situation he knew and took into consideration, whereas the second merely mentions his state of mind. Drawing this distinction between these different kinds of explanations leads to a new theory of knowledge as an ability that is exercised in rational thought and behaviour, and thereby a new solution to the puzzle in the Meno about whether knowledge is a better guide to action than true belief.

This volume offers a selection of essays by leading specialists on modality and the metaphysics of modality in the history of modern philosophy, from the seventeenth to the twentieth centuries. It revisits key moments in the history of modern modal doctrines, and illuminates lesser-known moments of that history. With this historical approach, the book aims to contextualize and even to offer alternatives to dominant positions within the contemporary philosophy of modality. Hence the volume contains not only new scholarship on the early-modern doctrines of Baruch Spinoza, G. W. Leibniz, Christian Wolff, and Immanuel Kant, but also work relating to less familiar nineteenth-century thinkers such as Alexius Meinong and Jan Łukasiewicz, together with essays on celebrated nineteenth- and twentieth-century thinkers such as G. W. F. Hegel, Martin Heidegger, and Bertrand Russell, whose modal doctrines have not previously garnered the attention they deserve. The volume thus covers a variety of traditions, and its historical range extends to the end of the twentieth century, since it addresses the legacy of Willard Van Orman Quine’s critique of modality within recent analytic philosophy.

Infinitism is an ancient view in epistemology about the structure of knowledge and epistemic justification. Infinitism has never been popular, and is often associated with skepticism, but after languishing for centuries, it has recently begun a resurgence. This book collects together fourteen chapters of cutting edge research on infinitism. The chapters shed new light on infinitism’s distinctive strengths and weaknesses and address questions, new and old, about infinitism’s account of justification, reasoning, epistemic responsibility, disagreement, and trust, among other important issues. This book clarifies the relationship between infinitism and skepticism, coherentism, foundationalism, and contextualism, and it offers novel perspectives on the metaphysics and epistemology of regresses.

No part of philosophy is as disconnected from its history as is epistemology. After Certainty offers a reconstruction of that history as the story of an epistemic ideal first formulated by Plato and Aristotle, later developed throughout the Middle Ages, and then dramatically reformulated in the seventeenth century. In watching these debates unfold over the centuries, we come to understand why epistemology has traditionally been embedded within a much wider sphere of concerns about human nature and the reality of the world we live in. We also come to see why epistemology has become today a much narrower and specialized field, concerned with the conditions under which it is true to say, in English, that someone knows something. Looking back to earlier days, this study makes its way through the various and changing ideals of inquiry that have been pursued over the centuries, from the expectations of certainty and explanatory depth to the rising concern over evidence and precision, as famously manifested in the new science. At both the sensory and the intellectual levels, the initial expectation of infallibility is seen to give way to mere subjective indubitability, and in the end it is unclear whether anything remains of the epistemic ideals that philosophy has long pursued. All we may ultimately be left with is hope.

According to the popular coherence theory of knowledge and justification, if a person's beliefs are coherent, they are also likely to be true. This book is the most extensive and detailed study of coherence and probability to date. The book takes the reader through much of the history of the subject, from early theorists like A. C. Ewing and C. I. Lewis to contemporary figures like Laurence BonJour and C. A. J. Coady. The arguments presented are general enough to cover coherence between any items of information, including those deriving from belief, memory, or testimony. It is argued that coherence does not play the positive role that it is generally ascribed in the process whereby beliefs are acquired. The opposite of coherence, incoherence, is nonetheless the driving force in the process whereby beliefs are retracted.

Against facts argues that we have no good reason to accept facts in our catalog of the world, at least as they are described by the two major metaphysical theories of facts. Neither of these theories is tenable—neither the theory according to which facts are special structured building blocks of reality nor the theory according to which facts are whatever is named by certain expressions of the form “the fact that such and such.” There is reality, and there are entities in reality that we are able to name, but among these entities there are no facts. Drawing on metaphysics, the philosophy of language, and linguistics, Against facts examines the main arguments in favor of and against facts of the two major sorts, distinguished as compositional and propositional, giving special attention to methodological presuppositions. Compositional facts (facts as special structured building blocks of reality) and the central argument for them, Armstrong’s truthmaker argument are criticized in part I. Propositional facts (facts as whatever is named in “the fact that” statements) and what Against facts calls the argument from nominal reference, which draws on a Quine-like criterion of ontological commitment, are criticized in part II. Against facts argues that metaphysicians should stop worrying about facts, and philosophers in general should stop arguing for or against entities on the basis of how we use language.

Is it ever possible for people to act freely and intentionally against their better judgement? Is it ever possible to act in opposition to one's strongest desire? If either of these questions are answered in the negative, the common-sense distinctions between recklessness, weakness of will and compulsion collapse. This would threaten our ordinary notion of self-control and undermine our practice of holding each other responsible for moral failure. So a clear and plausible account of how weakness of will and self-control are possible is of great practical significance. Taking the problem of weakness of will as her starting point, Jeanette Kennett builds an admirably comprehensive and integrated account of moral agency which gives a central place to the capacity for self-control. Her account of the exercise and limits of self-control vindicates the common-sense distinction between weakness of will and compulsion and so underwrites our ordinary allocations of moral responsibility. She addresses with clarity and insight a range of important topics in moral psychology, such as the nature of valuing and desiring, conceptions of virtue, moral conflict, and the varieties of recklessness (here characterised as culpable bad judgement) — and does so in terms which make their relations to each other and to the challenges of real life obvious. Agency and Responsibility concludes by testing the accounts developed of self-control, moral failure, and moral responsibility against the hard cases provided by acts of extreme evil.

Constitutivism is the view that we can derive substantive normative conclusions from an account of the nature of action. Agency and the Foundations of Ethics explains the constitutivist strategy and argues that the attractions of this view are considerable: constitutivism promises to resolve longstanding philosophical puzzles about the metaphysics, epistemology, and practical grip of normative claims. Yet constitutivism faces a challenge: it must employ a conception of action that is minimal enough to be independently plausible, but substantial enough to yield robust normative results. The current versions of constitutivism fall short on this score. However, we can generate a successful version by employing a more nuanced theory of action. Drawing on recent empirical work on human motivation as well as a model of agency indebted to the work of Nietzsche, the book argues that every episode of action aims jointly at agential activity and power. An agent manifests agential activity if she approves of her action, and further knowledge of the motives figuring in the etiology of her action would not undermine this approval. An agent aims at power if she aims at encountering and overcoming obstacles or resistances in the course of pursuing other, more determinate ends. These structural features of agency both constitute events as actions and generate standards of assessment for action. Using these results, the book shows that we can extract substantive normative claims from facts about the nature of agency.

Philosophers across cultures generally hold I-consciousness to be an indubitable phenomenon. Based on a range of philosophical works derived from Indian and Western conceptual worlds, this book discloses the subtle complexities associated with the topic under investigation. Upon final analysis, the author claims this universally acknowledged phenomenon to be existentially the closest to us nevertheless remains furthest from our understanding. A philosophical review of different explanatory models demonstrates the inherent difficulties due to its ultimate enigmatic character and also why no unanimity is possible among thinkers with regard to its genesis and constitution. Some regard it as homogenous, others as heterogeneous in constitution; some identify it with the self whereas others deny that. Discussions touch upon various facets of I-consciousness—metaphysical, epistemological, phenomenological, and linguistic. Indeed, the author creates a common framework of enquiry where cross-cultural philosophical inputs are dealt in a novel and creative manner that are absent in standard comparative studies. I-consciousness pervades our states of sleep, dream, and wakefulness that encompass what each of us calls ‘my life’—as distinct from the lives of others. As one delves deeper into various layers of subjectivity, not only the ethical but also the religious and even the soteriological dimensions of the phenomenon gradually begin to surface. This book will be of interest to a wide range of readers who wish to go deep into Indian and Western thought, and for especially those who are engaged in consciousness studies.

What is belief? ‘Beliefs aim at truth’ is commonly accepted as the starting point for philosophers who want to give an adequate account of this fundamental state of mind, but it raises as many questions as it answers. Pursuing these questions has proved fertile for our understanding of a wide range of current issues in philosophy of mind and action, epistemology and meta-ethics. This volume brings together eleven new essays by leading authors that further advance these debates. Major questions that are examined in depth from different theoretical perspectives across the chapters include: What does it mean to say that beliefs have an aim? Does it mean that truth is the constitutive norm of belief? How does the aim of truth guide the formation of our beliefs? Does aiming at truth imply that belief cannot be formed at will? In what ways do partial beliefs aim at truth? Are all reasons to believe based on truth? Is truth the aim of epistemic justification? Is it knowledge rather than truth which is the fundamental aim of belief?

This book reconceives alienation as the absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and others, something that manifests itself in feelings of helplessness and the despondent acceptance of ossified social roles and expectations. It draws on the Hegelian philosophical tradition, phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency and recent work in the analytical tradition. It notes that the Hegelian–Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor after the post-metaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views of human nature. It shows how a revived approach to alienation helps critical social theory engage with phenomena such as meaninglessness, isolation, and indifference. By severing alienation's link to a problematic conception of human essence while retaining its social-philosophical content, the book provides resources for a renewed critique of social pathologies, which is a much-neglected concern in contemporary liberal political philosophy. The work revisits the arguments of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Søren Kierkegaard, and Martin Heidegger, placing them in dialogue with Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, and Charles Taylor.

Few topics animate, even polarize, philosophers, more than Naturalism, a doctrine which states that philosophy is continuous with, and perhaps even replaceable by, sciences worthy of the name. On one side, fans of technical progress believe that the sciences can indeed replace philosophy with something that allows us to reason and explain better. On the other, advocates of the humanities herald the insights and methods of disciplines seemingly beyond the reach of science. But these disputes are often more about turf than truth. All Talked Out exemplifies the power of science in a philosopher’s hands and takes a welcome look at the resulting fate of philosophy. Based on Trout’s Phi Beta Kappa Romanell Lectures, each chapter presents a novel and positive view of intellectual advances while addressing traditional topics in philosophy, and each chapter explains why these achievements occurred despite the archaic and often retrograde influence of philosophical doctrine and method. While foundational reflection remains as necessary as ever, philosophy, as it is conceived of in the halls of academia, no longer adds anything distinctively useful. At its best, philosophy is a place to grow new ideas. But many other disciplines can and do provide that incubation. In the end, we don’t have to kill philosophy; but we do have to figure out what it’s good for. Following a spirited Introduction, the first lecture takes stock of the growing field of evidence-based approaches to reasoning and, in light of these scientific developments, criticizes important failures in epistemology as it is currently practiced in the English-speaking world. The second lecture examines the psychological impulse to explain, the resulting sense of understanding, and the natural limits on cognitively appreciating the subject we have explained. The final lecture, on social policy, presents the proper reaction to the idea that scientific evidence matters to responsible governance.

This work of philosophy presents a new picture of concrete reality. The author breaks with what he terms the conservatism of present-day philosophy, and returns to central themes from Descartes, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Russell. He works from the ground up, to formulate a new metaphysic capable of accommodating our distinctly human perspective. The author proposes a world with inherently powerful particulars of two basic sorts: one mental but not physical, the other physical but not mental. Whether of one sort or the other, each individual possesses powers for determining his or her own course, as well as powers for interaction with other individuals. It is only a purely mental particular—an immaterial soul, like yourself—that is ever fit for real choosing, or for conscious experiencing. Reasoning that the only satisfactory metaphysic is one that situates the physical alongside the non-physical, the author explains the genesis of, and continual interaction of, the two sides of our deeply dualistic world. He reveals the need for an entirely novel approach to the nature of physical reality, and shows how this approach can lead to wholly unexpected possibilities, including disembodied human existence for billions of years. The book returns philosophy to its most ambitious roots in its attempt to answer difficult human questions about ourselves and our world.