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4369.556753
In 1992, Bengt Hägglund (1920–2015) published an article in which he describes a certain codex and ascribes its authorship to Johannes Rudbeckius (1581–1646), who was professor of loci theologici at Uppsala University during the years 1611–1613 The codex has Matthias Hafenreffer’s (1561–1619) Loci as an explicit point of reference Hägglund takes the manuscript to be a transcript of material that Rudbeckius would have authored and used for delivering lectures on dogmatics, but maintains that the manuscript itself was written by others – either by copying a written original or by taking notes of an oral presentation In the following account, I will denote by “C” the codex Hägglund had in his possession, by “W” the work of which C would be a transcript, and by
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154407.556974
Ethics is easy when autonomy and beneficence converge: of course people should be allowed to do good things.1 And I’m enough of a Millian to think that in general, promoting human capacities and individual autonomy may be our most robustly secure route to creating a better future. …
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221035.556983
This paper will investigate justice requirements that a pluralist stance on concepts of mental disorder should meet for use on a global scale. This is important given that different concepts of mental disorder are connected to particular interventions which may be more or less successful in specific contexts. While taking a broadly normative view on mental disorders, I will describe relevant concepts in a more fine grained manner, referring to their connections to particular approaches to biology, the self, or community. Drawing on research on epistemic injustice, I highlight the requirement that the set of multiple concepts be sufficiently flexible to enable the participation of those possessing relevant local knowledge. Using insights from health justice, I point out that the set of concepts should be conducive to distributive and procedural justice with regard to mental health and should support interventions on social determinants of health. These requirements apply to two dimensions of pluralism: regarding what concepts to include and how to relate them to one another. I conclude by explaining how an ontology of partial overlaps connected to a concept of health as metaphysically social can help address the challenges arising particularly regarding the latter dimension.
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221077.55699
A recent dispute in political science raises issues about the objectivity of measures of democracy. Political scientists Little and Meng argue that democracy indices using country experts as coders show a greater degree of democratic backsliding than measures that are objective. They worry that this discrepancy may reflect coder bias. I distinguish three aspects of objectivity and offer a reconceptualization of objectivity as coherence objectivity. I argue that coherence objectivity is better suited for evaluating measures of social science concepts like democracy than the understanding of objectivity implicit in Little and Meng’s discussion.
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394831.556997
In this chapter I review Kuhn’s account of discovery. Kuhn held that a scientific discovery requires both a discovery that an object exists and a discovery what that object is. Accordingly, Kuhn held that there are two kinds of discovery, which may be referred to what-that discovery and that-what discovery. The latter are Kuhn’s focus in SSR but considering both kinds of discovery allow for a fuller understanding of Kuhn’s view. Interestingly, Kuhn implied that one needs a correct conception of what one discovers, even though he failed to say how correct that conception needs to be. I propose a solution to this problem.
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534881.557004
In grand ceremony King Lear parcels out his kingdom, intending afterwards to retire, and “unburdened crawl toward death.” But who shall get what? For this he runs a royal bonus round, and the contestants, his daughters, must answer, “Which of you shall we say doth love us most?” After insincere speeches from Goneril and Regan, Cordelia, his favorite, won’t play—“I love your Majesty according to my bond, no more nor less.” Furious, Lear disowns her: “I disclaim all my parental care...and as a stranger to my heart and me hold thee from this forever.” Soon the elder sisters, newly-empowered, strip Lear of his armed attendants and his dignity, in a delicious Shakespearean phrase:
Be then desired By her that else will take the thing she begs, A little to diquantity your train,
and Lear is left out in a storm, helpless, in the company of fools and madness. …
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612694.557013
I led a session of a workshop, recently, on how to write a “trade book” in philosophy. I don’t love the phrase “trade book,” which I’ve put in protective scare-quotes. And I feel some discomfort, too, in being cast as an authority. …
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693888.557023
Whenever we communicate, we inevitably have to say one thing before another. This means introducing particularly subtle patterns of salience into our language. In this paper, I introduce ‘order-based salience patterns,’ referring to the ordering of syntactic contents where that ordering, pretheoretically, does not appear to be of consequence. For instance, if one is to describe a colourful scarf, it wouldn’t seem to matter if one were to say it is ‘orange and blue’ or ‘blue and orange.’ Despite their apparent triviality, I argue that order-based salience patterns tend to make the content positioned first more salient – in the sense of attention-grabbing – in a way that can have surprising normative implications. Giving relative salience to gender differences over similarities, for instance, can result in the activation of cognitively accessible beliefs about gender differences. Where those beliefs are epistemically and/or ethically flawed, we can critique the salience pattern that led to them, providing an instrumental way of evaluating those patterns. I suggest that order-based salience patterns can also be evaluated on constitutive grounds; talking about gender differences before similarities might constitute a subtle form of bias. Finally, I reflect on how the apparent triviality of order-based salience patterns in language gives them an insidious strength.
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693935.557032
We spend much of our adult lives thinking and reminiscing about particular events of the past, which, by their very nature, can never be repeated. What is involved in a capacity to think thoughts of this kind? In this paper, I propose that such thoughts are essentially connected with a capacity to communicate about past events, and specifically in the special way in which events of the past are valued and shared in our relationships with one another. I motivate this proposal by way of the claim that such thoughts are practically useless: there are no practical, forward-looking tasks that require information which is specific to particular past events. Thus I suggest that thoughts of this specific kind have a home only in the cognitive economy of a creature who finds past events to be of interest for their own sake, and that this interest in the past is a peculiar feature of human social life.
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693959.557042
For several decades, intercultural philosophers have produced an extensive body of scholarly work aimed at mutual intercultural understanding. They have focused on the ideal of intercultural dialogue that is supported by dialogue principles and virtuous attitudes. However, this ideal is challenged by decolonial scholarship as one which neglects power inequalities. Decolonial scholars have emphasized the differences between cultures and worldviews, shifting the focus to colonial history and radical alterity. In return, intercultural philosophers have worried about the very possibility of dialogue and mutual understanding in frameworks that use coloniality as their singular pole of analysis. In this paper, we explore the complex relations between decolonial
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693984.557048
Past philosophical analyses of bullshit have generally presented bullshit as a formidable threat to truth. However, most of these analyses also reduce bullshit to a mere symptom of a greater evil (e.g. indifference towards truth). In this paper, I introduce a new account of bullshit which, I argue, is more suited to understand the threat posed by bullshit. I begin by introducing a few examples of “truth-tracking bullshit”, before arguing that these examples cannot be accommodated by past, process-based accounts of bullshit. I then introduce my new, output-based account of bullshit, according to which a claim is bullshit when it is presented as or appears as interesting at first sight but is revealed not to be that interesting under closer scrutiny. I present several arguments in favor of this account, then argue that it is more promising than past accounts when it comes to explaining how bullshit spreads and why it is a serious threat to truth.
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694163.557054
In this paper I aim to undermine Stoic and Neo-Stoic readings of Benedict de Spinoza by examining the latter’s strong agreements with Epicurus (a notable opponent of the Stoics) on the nature and ethical role of pleasure in living a happy life. Ultimately, I show that Spinoza and Epicurus are committed to three central claims which the Stoics reject: (1) pleasure holds a necessary connection to healthy natural being, (2) pleasure manifests healthy being through positive changes in state and states of healthy being per se, and (3) pleasure is by nature good. The Stoics reject these three claims due to their views on pleasant sensations as preferred moral indifferents and passionate pleasures as diseases of the soul, views which Spinoza (due to the above-mentioned commitments) is strongly opposed to, thereby placing him (at least on the subject of pleasure) outside the realm of merely following or improving on Stoic doctrines. From this comparative analysis we also gain deeper insight into both Spinoza’s engagement with ancient Greek philosophy and the value of Epicureanism and Spinozism in helping us achieve and maintain happiness in the present day, particularly with respect to the benefits and harms of bodily and mental pleasures.
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756635.55706
Last month I was on the wonderful Joe Walker Podcast. You can watch the full video, or read the unabridged transcript. Joe handpicked the following highlights:
What did you learn about Japanese urbanism? …
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778724.557066
This is the summer break and I’m publishing old essays written when the audience of this newsletter was confidential. This post has been originally published March 16, 2022. This morning, I almost fell off from my chair (fortunately, I was in my bed) when I read an op-ed (gated, in French) from Cécile Philippe, head of the libertarian French think tank Molinari Institute. …
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1072446.557072
Poverty has traditionally been conceived of as a state of deprivation. To be poor is to lack something essential to human flourishing. How that something is understood—in terms of welfare, resources, or capabilities—and how it is measured—in absolute terms or relative to a social standard—has been the subject of much debate within the development literature. In this paper, I put forward an account of poverty rooted in the philosophy of action. I argue that poverty essentially involves being in a context in which a reasonable agent’s future-directed agency is systemically undermined. Centering this dimension of poverty allows us to attend to aspects of poverty that are easily overlooked on existing accounts.
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1263908.557079
Imagination is often celebrated for its freedom. Hume, for example, famously claimed that nothing is more free than human imagination. Yet as expansive as imagination might be, its freedom is not entirely without bounds. In fact, even in the course of celebrating the freedom of imagination, Hume himself pointed to one limit: imagination “cannot exceed that original stock of ideas, furnished by the internal and external senses” (Hume 1748/1977: 31). On Hume’s view, the freedom of imagination consists in its “unlimited power of mixing, compounding, separating, and dividing” the ideas of the senses (Hume 1748/1977: 31). But even if Hume is right that imagination operates without limits on the material with which it is provided, when that material itself is impoverished, then so too is imagination.
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1605805.557092
Different species of realism have been proposed in the scientific and philosophical literature. Two of these species are direct realism and causal pattern realism. Direct realism is a form of perceptual realism proposed by ecological psychologists within cognitive science. Causal pattern realism has been proposed within the philosophy of model-based science. Both species are able to accommodate some of the main tenets and motivations of instrumentalism. The main aim of this paper is to explore the conceptual moves that make both direct realism and causal pattern realism tenable realist positions able to accommodate an instrumentalist stance. Such conceptual moves are (i) the rejection of veritism and (ii) the re-structuring of the phenomena of interest. We will then show that these conceptual moves are instances of the ones of a common realist genus we name pragmatist realism.
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1605874.5571
Journalists are often the adult public’s central source of scientific information, which means that their reporting shapes the relationship the public has with science. Yet philosophers of science largely ignore journalistic communication in their inquiries about trust in science. This paper aims to help fill this gap in research by comparing journalistic norm conflicts that arose when reporting on COVID-19 and tobacco, among other policy-relevant scientific topics. I argue that the public’s image of scientists – as depositories of indisputable, value-free facts, trustworthy only when in consensus – makes it particularly difficult for journalists to ethically communicate policy-relevant science rife with disagreement. In doing so, I show how journalists, like scientists, face the problem of inductive risk in such cases. To overcome this problem, I sketch a model of trust in science that is grounded in an alternative image of scientists – what I call the responsiveness model of trust in science. By highlighting the process of science over its product, the responsiveness model requires scientists to respond to empirical evidence and the public’s values to warrant the public’s trust. I then show why this model requires journalists to be the public’s watchdogs by verifying and communicating whether scientists are being properly responsive both epistemically and non-epistemically.
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1665564.557111
Alongside Madhyamaka, Yogācāra is one of the two major
philosophical traditions of Mahāyāna Buddhism that
originated in India. The philosophical and soteriological ideas set
forth in the Yogācāra works had a great impact on the
development of Buddhist thought not only in the Indian subcontinent
but also in other parts of Asia, especially in China, Japan and Tibet. Besides its highly influential exposition of the stages of the
Mahāyāna path to liberation, the tradition developed several
emblematic philosophical doctrines, such as the mind-only
(cittamātra) teaching, the theory of three natures
(trisvabhāva), and the eightfold classification of
consciousness, including the introduction of the so-called defiled
mind (kliṣṭamanas) and the substratum or store
consciousness (ālayavijñāna).
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1721143.557117
It should seem obvious that any purportedly comprehensive account of human 4
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1743939.557124
I’m listening to In a Silent Way, the Miles Davis album that opened his electric period, but I’m not really listening. Also drawing my attention are reviews of all of his other albums, which I’m scanning as I contemplate which to listen to next. …
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1790399.55713
A curious feature of human nature is that we’re very psychologically invested in seeing ourselves as good. Teaching applied ethics, it’s striking how resistant students often are to any hint of moral self-critique. …
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1824811.557135
Two things are common ground in books that purport to teach you how to be a stand-up comic. No-one can be taught to be funny, only how to turn their innate comedic sensibility into art.1
On the received model, the spigot of humour is turned on or off by the time one hits the age of reason. …
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2053542.557141
I want to begin by discussing the Latin word norma. And I will! But first: I am brought up short by the fact that Cavell would not begin in that way. As evidence of this: when Cavell argues with Benson Mates about the use of English “voluntary,” he says nothing about the Latin voluntarius. Long before English was a language, however, voluntarius was used in relevant ways. Cicero, for example, rejects Plato’s assertion that philosophers, loving only truth, must be perfectly just: For [while] they attain one kind of justice, as they harm no one by inflicting injury, they fall into another; for, impeded by their zeal for learning, they desert those who ought to be protected.
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2069810.557147
What is Left of the Invisible Hand? On the Legacy of the Scottish Enlightenment
My wife and I are back from a short trip to Scotland. We arrived at Edinburgh and then went to the North in the region of Glencoe, had a boat ride on the Loch Ness, and ended up at the seaside at Nairn. …
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2120257.557153
In the world of literary non-fiction, John McPhee is a god. Through his New Yorker essays, and prize-winning books McPhee has mastered the art of narrative non-fiction. In fact, he pretty much invented the genre. …
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2121389.557159
This paper explores the connection between the feelings that arise in grief and two kinds of “grief tech” that we use to regulate these feelings: music and AI-driven chatbots. “Grief tech” covers a broad range of practices, rituals, and artefacts that shape how we experience and express our grief. Music and AI might seem to have little in common with one another. However, I argue that both afford something not all forms of grief tech do – collaborative possibilities for world-making – and therefore can help the bereaved reconstruct “habits of intimacy” lost when a loved one dies. This (re)constructive impact is part of their world-making potency. And it is a crucial part of grief work. In this way, both music and AI potentially have a deep effect on our emotions, agency, and self-regulative capacities. This is why both are particularly powerful forms of grief tech.
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2124986.557172
Chapter 12 of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is called “The Resolution of Revolutions”. It deals with the post-revolutionary period in which a rival paradigm has been proposed and now the proponents of the new paradigm must persuade the holdouts supporting the dominant paradigm. Kuhn is frank that the skeptics may never be persuaded. What follows is an interpretation of his account of the resolution of revolutions in Chapter 12. Kuhn’s position begins from the claim that experimental falsification is not the motivation for the proposal of a new paradigm. Instead, novel paradigms are developed to solve new problems in cases where doing so requires a new way of looking at and understanding the phenomena: an interlocked set of non-empirical assumptions (SSR, 147) all change at once. As a result, persuading adherents to the former paradigm is not a matter of presenting evidence, but of changing how they see and understand science. It may even mean persuading them to adopt new ways of doing and understanding science itself.
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2125038.557178
In the Preface to The Structure of Scientific Revolutions Kuhn (1922-1996) provides some useful background to understanding what he sought to accomplish in the book. Kuhn begins by explaining his own starting point for writing the book. He explains that his exposure to the history of science “radically undermined some of [his] basic conceptions about the nature of science” (Kuhn 1962/2012, xxxix). In fact, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions is a presentation of the new conception of science that he developed in light of this experience. Ultimately, as Kuhn makes clear, he is interested in developing a philosophy of science. In his words, in Structure he is addressing “the more philosophical concerns that had initially led [him] to history” (Kuhn 1962/2012, xxxix-xl). Indeed, his principal concerns are epistemological: understanding the relationship between data and theory, understanding how scientific knowledge grows, and understanding the nature of progress in science. The history of science functions as a source of data about science.
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2145005.557187
The news these days feels apocalyptic to me—as if we’re living through, if not the last days of humanity, then surely the last days of liberal democracy on earth. All the more reason to ignore all of that, then, and blog instead about the notorious Busy Beaver function! …