1. 76177.525764
    Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) holds that the senses, imagination, and passions aim at survival and the satisfaction of the body’s needs, rather than truth or the good of the mind. Each of these faculties makes a distinctive and, indeed, an indispensable contribution to the preservation of life. Commentators have largely focused on how the senses keep us alive. By comparison, the imagination and passions have been neglected. In this paper, I reconstruct Malebranche’s account of how the imagination contributes to the preservation of the body by compensating for the limitations of the senses. First, the imagination represents non-actual states of affairs, such as probable or possible future states. Second, the imagination forges new and often helpful associations based on past experiences. Third, the imagination (mis)represents that objects will cause pleasure and pain, thereby imbuing them with emotional significance they would otherwise lack. Together, these features flesh out Malebranche’s view that the imagination is necessary for the preservation of life.
    Found 21 hours, 9 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  2. 76199.526059
    One day while I was staying at a Buddhist monastery, a monk remarked to me that “without belief in rebirth, Buddhism is nihilism with a happy face.” Writing in a similar vein, Westerho (2017) contends that “the endeavor of naturalizing Buddhism…is fundamentally awed” because, on naturalist assumptions—which rule out rebirth—one can achieve the ultimate goal of Buddhist practice—the cessation of su ering (duḥkha-nirodha)—by killing oneself. The thought behind these and similar worries appears to be the following: Buddhism is—in some sense to be precisi ed—pessimistic about our existence. Moreover, if there is no round of rebirth from which to free anyone (including oneself), then we lack the chief instrumental reason identi ed in the Buddhist tradition to remain alive (not to mention to live virtuously): that doing so is necessary to secure liberation. Things are looking bleak: if life is su ering and we don’t have future rebirths to worry about, why carry on living—let alone perpetuate humanity?
    Found 21 hours, 9 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  3. 76224.526076
    Can the ethical features of a work of art bear on its aesthetic value? Are they ever appropriate bases for aesthetic evaluation? The battle lines of this debate are largely agreed upon by its contemporary disputants. “Autonomists” answer in the negative; while many of them are happy to concede that one can issue ethical evaluations of a work of art—e.g., Triumph of the Will is evil—such an evaluation is totally independent of proper aesthetic evaluation. Such Autonomists evaluate art aesthetically and ethically, but hold the two evaluations apart; Leini Reifinstahl’s paean to Hilter is an aesthetic masterpiece, they might say, and as a separate matter, evil; “Age Ain’t Nothing But a Number,” the hit produced by R. Kelly and sung by Aaliyah, his then-15-year-old secret bride is (aesthetically) groovy and (ethically) disturbing; HBO’s Game of Thrones is epic and entertaining, and (unrelatedly) misogynistic.
    Found 21 hours, 10 minutes ago on PhilPapers
  4. 96485.526089
    Pace libertarian fantasies, you cannot do without politics. Indeed, as I’ve put it, politics might be a necessary evil. One reason this is so is that what we call “politics” refers to the institutional manifestation (i.e., a set of practices and institutions) of an underlying realm of social reality, the “political.” The political is this part of social reality where the possibility of cooperation between individuals is established by the recognition of legitimate forms of authority and the identification of a common good. …
    Found 1 day, 2 hours ago on The Archimedean Point
  5. 201467.526103
    The notion of (moral or other) norms having “categorical” authority over us—whether we endorse them or not—can seem mysterious. This motivates some people to look to hypothetical imperatives (like, “if you’re thirsty, you should drink a glass of water”) as a model for securing “normativity on the cheap”. …
    Found 2 days, 7 hours ago on Good Thoughts
  6. 316838.526117
    For five months, ever since Oct. 7, I’ve read you obsessively. While my current job is supposed to involve protecting humanity from the dangers of AI (with a side of quantum computing theory), I’m ashamed to say that half the days I don’t do any science; instead I just scroll and scroll, reading anti-Israel content and then pro-Israel content and then more anti-Israel content. …
    Found 3 days, 16 hours ago on Scott Aaronson's blog
  7. 374560.526129
    Clarifying the Charge of “Begging the Question” As I wrote last year: Sometimes people assume that an argument they personally find unconvincing is thereby “question-begging” or otherwise worthless. This is a mistake. …
    Found 4 days, 8 hours ago on Good Thoughts
  8. 376816.526148
    Philosophers routinely defend views that are challenging to conventional wisdom or common sense. In certain arenas, such challenges are liable to prompt emotionally charged negative reactions. My work in the philosophy of love has involved discussions of the possibility and the moral permissibility of non-monogamous romantic love, and this has garnered such reactions.
    Found 4 days, 8 hours ago on Carrie Ichikawa Jenkins's site
  9. 407995.526179
    Romanticism was, in Berlin’s account and others’—it’s a cliche—a reaction to Enlightenment Rationalism. Rationalism, sometimes, is just an optimism about the possibility of knowledge, especially in social, moral, and political affairs. …
    Found 4 days, 17 hours ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  10. 422503.526193
    I shall speak today, generally and just within my 15 minutes, about the problems of personalism today—that is, its current position in philosophy and its internal stresses that must be addressed to improve that situation. My comments are the first fruits of my next book, now under way, which will develop a renewed humanism on a personalistic basis by reformulating a foundation for personalism. The book will also apply this personalism to the challenges of the Anthropocene and particularly of transhumanism. For reasons I will explain, no one has yet examined these challenges via frank personalism, though it would seem apt to the task. I do not intend or pretend to solve the difficulties that transhumanist technologies and ideologies present to us. I shall try only this: to give a defensible account of a virtuous self-regard that humankind can maintain in the course of seeking those solutions.
    Found 4 days, 21 hours ago on PhilPapers
  11. 485777.526206
    What is poetry? Emily Dickinson answered, in a letter: If I read a book and it makes my whole body so cold no fire can warm me, I know that is poetry. If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry. …
    Found 5 days, 14 hours ago on Under the Net
  12. 544139.526219
    In a recent essay, Eric Schliesser reflects on the nature of the open society, focusing on Gerald Gaus’s and Chandran Kukathas’s respective views. As usual with Eric, this is very interesting and suggestive, so I can only recommend it. …
    Found 6 days, 7 hours ago on The Archimedean Point
  13. 547594.526232
    Refusing to trust mainstream media is a heavy burden. Even when you think you’re listening with due skepticism, you often end up swallowing simple-minded propaganda as fact. Case in point: the recent IVF battle in Alabama. …
    Found 6 days, 8 hours ago on Bet On It
  14. 595835.526245
    Within contemporary metaethics, it is widely held that there is a “presumption of realism” in moral thought and discourse. Anti-realist views, like error theory and expressivism, may have certain theoretical considerations speaking in their favor, but our pretheoretical stance with respect to morality clearly favors objectivist metaethical views. This article argues against this widely held view. It does so by drawing from recent discussions about so-called “subjective attitude verbs” in linguistics and philosophy of language. Unlike pretheoretically objective predicates (e.g., “is made of wood”, “is 185 cm tall”), moral predicates embed felicitously under subjective attitude verbs like the English “find”. Moreover, it is argued that the widespread notion that moral discourse bears all the marks of fact-stating discourse is rooted in a blinkered focus on examples from English. Cross-linguistic considerations suggest that subjective attitude verbs are actually the default terms by which we ascribe moral views to people. Impressions to the contrary in English have to do with some unfortunate quirks of the term “think”.
    Found 6 days, 21 hours ago on PhilPapers
  15. 605984.526258
    Social sustainability plays a prominent role in the United Nation’s Sustainable Development Goals, but a proper analysis of the concept is still lacking. According to a widespread conception, a system is sustainable when it is preserved or developed in a robust manner. I argue, however, that social sustainability is best understood in explicitly normative terms. Formulating suitable development goals requires a conception of the kind of society that is worth sustaining. I propose that, for a system to be socially sustainable is for it to secure a range of values, including justice. Furthermore, I argue that social sustainability is first and foremost a property of institutions. I go on to ask what it takes for an institution to secure values and why justice is so important for institutions. The answers culminate in a social sustainability framework, which explains why making institutions more sustainable is so challenging.
    Found 1 week ago on Frank Hindriks's site
  16. 637723.526271
    The founder of conservation biology, Michael Soulé, set out a vision for conservation biology that was explicitly value-laden, analogous to cancer-biology. In so doing, he drew on the writings of Aldo Leopold, known among philosophers primarily for his land ethic. Employing and extending the work of Anderson (2004) and Clough (2020), I argue that the Leopoldian views that Soulé was drawing on were the product of the coevolution of descriptive and evaluative beliefs over the course of Leopold’s life, grounded in his experiences, resulting in tested and reliable—albeit defeasible—values underlying conservation biology.
    Found 1 week ago on Roberta Millstein's site
  17. 661877.526291
    There is a growing concern for the proper role of science within democratic societies, which has led to the development of new science policies for the implementation of social responsibility in research. Although the very expression ‘social responsibility of science’ may be interpreted in different ways, many of these emerging policy frameworks define it, at least in part, as a form of anticipative reflection about the potential impacts of research in society. What remains a rather under-discussed issue is the definition of the bearer of the social responsibility of science. In other words, it is not clear who is supposed to engage in such an anticipative reflection, whether individual researchers or research groups. In the past few years, philosophers of science have begun to use qualitative research methods to fill the gaps between normative models of the organisation of ideal scientific communities and the reality of actual scientific practices. In this article, I follow this approach to discuss the issue of the collective dimension of the social responsibility of science. I rely on a qualitative study conducted on an interdisciplinary research group and I describe how group dynamics position individuals and distribute duties and roles, including social responsibility. Qualitative descriptions of the distribution of duties within actual research groups should inform the formulation of general prescriptive theories on the collective responsibility of science.
    Found 1 week ago on PhilSci Archive
  18. 684496.526306
    Rationality and Choice What Is Rationality?
    Found 1 week ago on John Thrasher's site
  19. 715711.526319
    As technology improves, artificial systems are increasingly able to behave in human-like ways: holding a conversation; providing information, advice, and support; or taking on the role of therapist, teacher, or counsellor. This enhanced behavioural complexity, we argue, encourages deeper forms of a5ective engagement on the part of the human user, with the artificial agent helping to stabilise, subdue, prolong, or intensify a person's emotional condition. Here, we defend a fictionalist account of human/AI interaction, according to which these encounters involve an elaborate practise of imaginative pretence: a make-believe in which the artificial agent is attributed a life of its own. We attend, specifically, to the temporal characteristics of these fictions, and to what we imagine artificial agents are doing when we are not looking at them.
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on Joel Krueger's site
  20. 720631.526332
    PEA Soup is pleased to host this discussion on Sophie Gibert’s “The Wrong of Wrongful Manipulation”, recently published in Philosophy & Public Affairs, with a critical précis by Massimo Renzo. You can find the article through open access here: https://doi.org/10.1111/papa.12247. …
    Found 1 week, 1 day ago on PEA Soup
  21. 807994.526357
    I’m not used to commenting too much on French news and politics as the large majority of the subscribers to this newsletter are not French, but I’ll make an exception for once. Yesterday, Le Figaro, one of the major French newspapers published an op-ed by the former French Ministry of Education (under the presidency of François Hollande), Najat Vallaud-Belkacem. …
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on The Archimedean Point
  22. 820694.526371
    By now you may have seen it: the much-hyped Oprah special entitled, “Shame, Blame, and the Weight Loss Revolution,” which aired last night on ABC. So passionately did Oprah feel about making and airing this special that she resigned from the board of Weight Watchers to avoid any perceived conflict of interest, since Weight Watchers is now peddling weight loss drugs, after buying the Telehealth platform Sequence last year. …
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on More to Hate
  23. 834899.526384
    We examine the relationship between scientific knowledge and the legal system with a focus on the exclusion of expert testimony from trial as ruled by the Daubert standard in the US. We introduce a simple framework to understand and assess the role of judges as “gatekeepers”, monitoring the admission of science in the courtroom. We show how judges face a crucial choice, namely, whether to limit Daubert assessment to the abstract reliability of the methods used by the expert witness or also to check whether the application of those methods was correct. Undesirable outcomes result from both choices, thereby giving rise to the “gatekeeper’s dilemma.” We illustrate the dilemma by analyzing in some detail two well-known cases of Daubert challenges to economic experts. Finally, we present reasons for the absence of straightforward solutions to the dilemma and for its likely endurance.
    Found 1 week, 2 days ago on PhilSci Archive
  24. 884368.526399
    Person-affecting views in population ethics state that (in cases where all else is equal) we’re permitted but not required to create people who would enjoy good lives. In this paper, I present an argument against every possible variety of person-affecting view. The argument takes the form of a dilemma. Narrow person-affecting views must embrace at least one of three implausible verdicts in a case that I call ‘Expanded Non- Identity.’ Wide person-affecting views run into trouble in a case that I call ‘Two-Shot Non-Identity.’ One plausible practical upshot of my argument is as follows: we individuals and our governments should be doing more to reduce the risk of human extinction this century.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  25. 884439.526411
    According to a prominent view, discrimination is wrong, when it is, because it makes people worse off. In this paper, I argue that this harm-based account runs into trouble because it cannot point to a harm, without making controversial metaphysical commitments, in cases of discrimination in which the discriminatory act kills the discriminatee. That is, the harm-based account suffers from a problem of death. I then show that the two main alternative accounts of the wrongness of discrimination—the mental-state-based account and the objective-meaning account—do not run into this problem.
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on PhilPapers
  26. 893542.526424
    A large majority of American college students — almost three-quarters — go to public schools. For four-year colleges, it’s about two-thirds. Yet strangely, these “public” schools aren’t equally open to the entire public. …
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Bet On It
  27. 929630.526437
    In Who’s afraid of A. C. Bradley?comes out in favor of “talk[ing] about Shakespeare’s characters as if they were people.” If “character criticism” is abandoned, you’ll miss most of what is good and important in the plays. …
    Found 1 week, 3 days ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  28. 1060441.526449
    Intolerance and polarization are on the up, or so the headlines say. If true, it’s happened before, and been far worse. Thomas Jefferson wrote, it does me no injury for my neighbor to say there are twenty gods, or no god. …
    Found 1 week, 5 days ago on Mostly Aesthetics
  29. 1060465.526462
    Randomized Controlled Trials: Could you be any more scientific? The book I’m now writing, Unbeatable: The Brutally Honest Case for Free Markets, insists that the randomistas of the economics profession actually have a thinly-veiled political agenda. …
    Found 1 week, 5 days ago on Bet On It
  30. 1060524.526474
    This paper investigates the connection between temporal attitudes (attitudes characterised by a concern (or lack thereof) about future and past events), beliefs about temporal ontology (beliefs about the existence of future and past events) and temporal preferences (preferences regarding where in time events are located). Our aim is to probe the connection between these preferences, attitudes, and beliefs, in order to better evaluate the normative status of these preferences. We investigate the hypothesis that there is a three-way association between (a) being present-biased (that is, preferring that positive events are located in the present, and negative events are located in the non-present), (b) believing that past and future events do not exist and (c) tending to have present-focused rather than non-present-focused temporal attitudes. We find no such association. This suggests that insofar as temporal preferences and temporal attitudes are connected to the ways we represent time, they are not connected to the ways we represent temporal ontology; rather, they are more likely connected to the ways we represent relative movement in, or of, time. This has important consequences for, first, explaining why we exhibit these preferences and, second, for their normative evaluation.
    Found 1 week, 5 days ago on Natalja Deng's site