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524886.584286
Given the extreme importance that Wittgenstein attached to the
aesthetic dimension of life, it is in one sense surprising that he
wrote so little on the subject. It is true that we have the notes
assembled from his lectures on aesthetics given to a small group of
students in private rooms in Cambridge in the summer of 1938
(Wittgenstein 1966, henceforth LA) and we have G. E. Moore’s
record of some of Wittgenstein’s lectures in the period
1930–33 (Moore 1972). Of Wittgenstein’s own writings, we
find remarks on literature, poetry, architecture, the visual arts, and
especially music and the philosophy of culture more broadly scattered
throughout his writings on the philosophies of language, mind,
mathematics, and philosophical method, as well as in his more personal
notebooks; a number of these are collected in Culture and
Value (Wittgenstein 1980a).
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582542.584372
[Editor’s Note: The following new entry by Sam Cowling and Daniel Giberman replaces the
former entry
on this topic by the previous author.]
Nominalism is an exclusionary thesis in ontology. It asserts that
there are no entities of certain sorts. Precisely which entities it
excludes depends on the relevant variety of nominalism, but nominalist
theses typically deny the existence of universals or abstract
entities. For those who accept nominalism, a central challenge in
metaphysics is to make sense of phenomena that anti-nominalist
theories explain via universals or abstract entities.
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586545.584394
The desirable gambles framework provides a rigorous foundation for imprecise probability theory but relies heavily on linear utility via its coherence axioms. In our related work, we introduced function-coherent gambles to accommodate nonlinear utility. However, when repeated gambles are played over time—especially in intertemporal choice where rewards compound multiplicatively— the standard additive combination axiom fails to capture the appropriate long-run evaluation. In this paper we extend the framework by relaxing the additive combination axiom and introducing a nonlinear combination operator that effectively aggregates repeated gambles in the log-domain. This operator preserves the time-average (geometric) growth rate and addresses the ergodicity problem. We prove the key algebraic properties of the operator, discuss its impact on coherence, risk assessment, and representation, and provide a series of illustrative examples. Our approach bridges the gap between expectation values and time averages and unifies normative theory with empirically observed non-stationary reward dynamics. Keywords. Desirability, non-linear utility, ergodicity, intertemporal choice, non-additive dynamics, function-coherent gambles, risk measures.
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607591.58441
In my previous two posts I focused on the difficulty of God creating an infinite causal regress of indeterministic causes as part of an argument from theism to causal finitism. In this post, I want to drop the indeterministic assumption. …
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610490.584426
Suppose that a dod is a critter that chancily, with probability 1/2, causes one offspring during its life. The lifespan of a dod is one year. Further, imagine that like Sith, there are only ever one or two dods at a time, because each dod dies not long after reproducing, and if there were two or more mature dods at once, they’d fight to the death. …
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612084.584446
Philosophers interested in medicine and healthcare research should focus on the choice of health concepts. Conceptual choice is akin to conceptual engineering but, in addition to assessing whether a concept suits an objective, or offering a better one, it evaluates objectives, ranks them, and discusses stakeholders’ entitlement. To show the importance of choosing health concepts, I summarize the internal debate in medicine, showcasing definitions, constructs, and scales. To argue it is a philosophical task, I analyze the medical controversy over health as adaptation and self-management. I conclude with a to-do list of conceptual choice tasks, generalizable beyond medicine.
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612104.584461
Since Andrew Jameton first introduced the concept of moral distress, a growing theoretical literature has attempted to identify its distinctive features. This theoretical work has overlooked a central feature of morally distressing situations: disempowerment. My aim is to correct this neglect by arguing for a new test for theories of moral distress. I call this the disempowerment requirement: a theory of moral distress ought to accommodate the disempowerment of morally distressing situations. I argue for the disempowerment requirement and illustrate how to apply it by showing that recent responsibility-based theories of moral distress fail to pass the test.
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616344.584475
I wrote these words about 20 years ago. They seem especially apt these days. Leaders have been known to inspire blind faith. Michels (1962: 93) refers to "the belief so frequent among the people that their leaders belong to a higher order of humanity than themselves" evidenced by "the tone of veneration in which the idol's name is pronounced, the perfect docility with which the least of his signs is obeyed, and the indignation which is aroused by any critical attack on his personality." …
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642985.584489
A firm wishes to persuade a patient to take a drug by making either positive statements like “if you take our drug, you will be cured”, or negative statements like “anyone who was not cured did not take our drug”. Patients are neither Bayesian nor strategic: They use a decision procedure based on sampling past cases. We characterize the firm’s optimal statement, and analyze competition between firms making either positive statements about themselves or negative statements about their rivals. The model highlights that logically equivalent statements can differ in effectiveness and identifies circumstances favoring negative ads over positive ones.
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755555.584502
Chinese Daoism is a Chinese philosophy of natural practice structured
around a normative focus on dào (道 path, way). This naturalist philosophical project treated dào as a
structure of natural possibility for living beings. Unlike similar
Western naturalisms, e.g., pragmatism, Daoism’s foil was
contemporary: the Confucian-Mohist (Ru-Mo) dialectic about
human (人 rén human, social)
dào. Daoism’s critique of Ru-Mo debate
concerns the role of natural (天 tiān
sky-nature) dào vs human dào (socially
constructed guidance). Daoism’s founding
personages[ 1 ]
( Laozi and
Zhuangzi)
did not coin their “-ism.” The two Classical texts,
credited to their titled masters (子 zǐ
son), emerged during the Classical period (5th to
3rd C. BC).
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785060.584516
In this paper, we investigate the treatment of the direction of time in Bohmian mechanics. We show how Bohmian mechanics can account for the direction of time in different ways. In particular, we argue that Bohmian mechanics can be employed to accommodate reductionism, because there always is an asymmetry in the initial conditions when forward and backward evolutions of the configuration of matter are compared. It can also be employed to accommodate primitivism and relationalism due to the fact that Bohmian mechanics is a first order theory that recognizes only position as a primitive physical magnitude. We show how this fact can be employed to support a primitive direction of time by assuming Leibnizian relationalism, which reduces the direction of time to change in the configuration of matter with that change being directed as a primitive matter of fact.
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785087.58453
The capacity for purposeful choice among genuine alternatives—commonly termed free will— presents a profound challenge to a scientific worldview often perceived as deterministic. Understanding how seemingly goal-directed actions, observed across the spectrum of life from bacteria navigating chemical gradients (chemotaxis) to humans deliberating complex decisions, can arise from underlying physical and chemical processes is a central question in both philosophy and science. This paper explores the possibility of naturalizing free will by conceptualizing it as emergent autonomy: a capacity rooted in the unique organization of life itself, an organization that unfolds dynamically in real, lived time (Mascolo & Kallio, 2019; Moore, 2023). Foundational work by thinkers like Kauffman & Clayton (2006) on emergence and organization provides crucial groundwork for such an approach.
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789272.584545
Causal Finitism—the thesis that nothing can have an infinite causal history—implies that there is a first cause, and our best hypothesis for what a first cause would be is God. Thus:
- If Causal Finitism is true, God exists. …
-
813613.584567
Very short summary: This essay reflects on how the state and its bureaucratic machinery can shape social reality. The state is unique among human institutions for its performative power. This power is however not unlimited and its use can have adverse consequences. …
-
820480.584596
A nameless delivery boy in a nameless city, a refugee from a nameless country, fleeing a nameless Strongman, indentured to a nameless Supervisor, dispatched to nameless customers with unmarked packages, not knowing, yet, the rules of the system, and the language, in which he is trapped—a story told, though we do not know it yet, by a nameless narrator in a nameless city, a refugee from a nameless country, fleeing a nameless Strongman. …
-
842812.584645
The nineteenth-century distinction between the nomothetic and the idiographic approach to scientific inquiry can provide valuable insight into the epistemic challenges faced in contemporary earth modelling. However, as it stands, the nomothetic-idiographic dichotomy does not fully encompass the range of modelling commitments and trade-offs that geoscientists need to navigate in their practice. Adopting a historical epistemology perspective, I propose to further spell out this dichotomy as a set of modelling decisions concerning historicity, model complexity, scale, and closure. Then, I suggest that, to address the challenges posed by these decisions, a pluralist stance towards the cognitive aims of earth modelling should be endorsed, especially beyond predictive aims.
-
842832.584675
This is an introduction to a collection of articles on the conceptual history of epigenesis, from Aristotle to Harvey, Cavendish, Kant and Erasmus Darwin, moving into nineteenth-century biology with Wolff, Blumenbach and His, and onto the twentieth century and current issues, with Waddington and epigenetics. The purpose of the topical collection is to emphasize how epigenesis marks the point of intersection of a theory of biological development and a (philosophical) theory of active matter. We also wish to show that the concept of epigenesis existed prior to biological theorization and that it continues to permeate thinking about development in recent biological debates.
-
962212.5847
In his famous “Mathematics is Megethology”, Lewis gives a brilliant reduction of set theory to mereology and plural quantification. A central ingredient of the reduction is a singleton function which assigns to each individual a singleton of which the individual is the only member. …
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1006975.584724
Maribel Barroso suggests exploration of an interesting avenue for inductive inference. The material theory, as I have formulated it, takes as its elements propositions that assert scientific facts. Relations of inductive support among them assess their truth or falsity. She proposes that we should take models as the elements instead of proposition. In favor of this proposal is that models have a pervasive presence in science. We should be able to confront them with evidence in a systematic way. Reconfiguring inductive inference as relations over models faces some interesting questions. Just what is it for models to be supported inductively? Can the material theory be adapted to this new case? In works cited in her review, Barroso has already begun the study of inductive relations among models in science, using insights from Whewell’s work. She is, it seems to me, well placed to seek answers to these questions. I wish her well in her continuing efforts.
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1009197.584748
‘Structural hylemorphism’ holds that the concept of structure should replace the allegedly less explanatory concept of form. Adherents do not, however, give us a precise idea of what structure is meant to be, and on analysis it is difficult to know how to define it as a replacement for form. I compare and contrast classical and structural hylemorphism. I rehearse the ‘content-fixing problem’ for structuralism about form, then set out the ‘qualitative problem’. These seem insurmountable obstacles to a viable version of structural hylemorphism. Exploration of the relation between quantity and quality shows that classical form can never be reduced to/replaced by a quantitative concept of form. In the end, structure does not capture what metaphysics requires. More radically, I suggest that there is no clear concept of what structure is. Classical hylemorphism, by contrast, gives us form in full metaphysical technicolor—adequate both for science and for fundamental metaphysics.
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1015784.584778
The nodes of the ‘geometric trinity’ are: (i) general relativity (in which gravitational effects are a manifestation of spacetime curvature), (ii) the ‘teleparallel equivalent’ of general relativity (which trades spacetime curvature for torsion), and (iii) the ‘symmetric teleparallel equivalent’ of general relativity (which trades spacetime curvature for non-metricity). One popular reformulation of (iii) is ‘coincident general relativity’, but this theory has yet to receive any philosophical attention. This article aims both to introduce philosophers to coincident general relativity, and to undertake a detailed assessment of its features.
-
1015802.584802
How to articulate the common ontological commitments of symmetry-related models of physical theories? This is a central (perhaps the central) question in the philosophical literature on symmetry transformations in physics; recently, Dewar (2019) has proposed a strategy for answering this question which goes by the name of ‘external sophistication’. And yet: this strategy has been accused of being hopelessly obscure by, among others, Martens and Read (2020). In this article, I demonstrate that not all cases of external sophistication are subject to this charge—for reasons which will become clear, the cases for which this is not so give us what I’ll call ‘good VIBES’. Having established this, I then go on to consider good VIBES in the context of the analysis of hidden symmetries, in dialogue with recent work on that topic by Bieli nska and Jacobs (2024).
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1015819.584827
How to make sense of the notion of force-free motion which seems to be presupposed by Newton’s first law? One can identify in the literature various different answers to this question, one among which is to be found in the writings of Torretti (1983). In a wonderful recent article, however, Hoek (2023) has proposed a radical revision to our understanding of Newton’s first law, motivated on both exegetical and philosophical grounds. In light of this, one is left wondering whether this reconceptualisation of the content of Newton’s first law obviates the need to provide a notion of force-free motion with which to undergird it. In this note, I’ll argue that this is not the case: one can (and should!) endorse Hoek’s understanding of the first law, while nevertheless seeking to define force-free motions in one of the various ways which have been proposed in the literature.
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1015837.584846
We consider the distinction between ‘qualified’ and ‘unqualified’ approaches introduced by Read (2020a) in the context of the dynamical/geometrical debate. We show that one fruitful way in which to understand this distinction is in terms of what one takes the kinematically possible models of a given theory to represent; moreover, we show that the qualified/unqualified distinction is applicable not only to the geometrical approach (which is the case considered by Read (2020a)), but also to the dynamical approach. Finally, having made these points, we connect them to other discussions of representation and of explanation in this corner of the literature.
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1067522.58486
Indicative conditional antecedents appear to be remarkably scopeless: they are scopeless with respect to the truth-functional connectives, scopeless with respect to epistemic modals, and scopeless with respect to each other (i.e., commutative). This pervasive scopelessness is a basic explanandum for any theory of indicatives, and the subject of much recent work. In this paper I revisit the theory of McGee [1989], which already comes surprisingly close to delivering a simple and powerful account of all of this scopelessness. I reformulate the theory as information-sensitive in the contemporary sense, and extend it with epistemic modals. On the resulting theory, epistemic modals become in e!ect quantifiers over choice functions, and their scopeless interaction with indicative antecedents drops out naturally. I give McGee’s logic a new axiomatization, and show that if his Import-Export axiom is replaced with a weaker Commutativity axiom stating that indicative antecedents commute, then Import-Export can be derived. I explain how the issue of commutativity interacts with the question how to extend information-sensitive theories of the indicative to modal antecedents. Along the way I add to the collapse results of both McGee [1985] and Mandelkern [2021], showing that under weak assumptions, Commutativity is in tension with Modus Ponens and (more generally) with the principle Mandelkern calls Ad Falsum. I convict Ad Falsum, and refine the case against Modus Ponens.
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1068738.584878
I’m on holidays this week, spending some time in Cracow (Poland) and Slovakia. Today’s post is a bit off-topic compared to what I’m used to publish here, but still I hope you will enjoy it! If not the case already, do not hesitate to subscribe to receive for free essays on economics, philosophy, and liberal politics in your mailbox! …
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1123122.584893
Here’s a metaphysical view I haven’t seen: the fundamental obejcts (priority version) or the only objects (existence version) are universes, but there can be more than one of these. Call this metaphysical universism (as distinguished from Quisling’s philosophy). …
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1129401.584907
Every week, I tell myself I won’t do yet another post about the asteroid striking American academia, and then every week events force my hand otherwise. No one on earth—certainly no one who reads this blog—could call me blasé about the issue of antisemitism at US universities. …
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1131111.584921
In interactions characterized by agential epistemic injustice, the interpreter avoids engaging with the speaker’s perspective and challenges or distorts the speaker’s contribution before taking time to explore it. Where the success of the interaction depends on a genuine knowledge exchange between interpreters and speakers, epistemic injustice compromises the success of the interaction. Building on recent qualitative work on communication in youth mental health, I argue that clinical interactions are less likely to achieve their aims when practitioners fail to engage with the perspective of the person seeking support, and challenge or distort the person’s contribution before taking time to explore it.
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1131129.584935
This paper argues that biostatistical theory (BST) cannot categorically exclude pregnancy from pathology. Common harmful conditions in typical pregnancies are integral to the notion of pregnancy per se. Given this definition, there are two potential ways to classify pregnancy as non-pathological within the BST: (i) most common conditions in pregnancy are not pathological within the appropriate reference class; or (ii) pregnancy’s reproductive value counterbalances its pathological survival harms, rendering it non-pathological. I challenge both views, arguing that non-pregnant women of the same age should be the reference class, making pregnancy a survival pathology that cannot be offset by reproductive value.