Philosophy Research Collection

Inference to the Best Explanation (IBE) is widely criticized for being an unreliable form of ampliative inference – partly because the explanatory hypotheses we have considered at a given time may all be false, and partly because there is an asymmetry between the comparative judgment on which an IBE is based and the absolute verdict that IBE is meant to license. In this paper, I present a further reason to doubt the epistemic merits of IBE and argue that it motivates moving to an inferential pattern in which IBE emerges as a degenerate limiting case. Since this inferential pattern is structurally similar to an argumentative strategy known as Inferential Robustness Analysis (IRA), it effectively combines the most attractive features of IBE and IRA into a unified approach to non-deductive inference.

Magdalene institutions in Ireland date from the (mid-)eighteenth century, and until the late nineteenth century their history parallels that of asylums for poor and destitute women found all over Europe, run by religious orders or lay-managed philantrophic concerns seeking to provide needy women with refuge. Magdalene asylums often provided training and references of good character for these women so that after their rehabilitation they could go into service and earn a living. The Magdalenes were run according to Protestant or Catholic ethos: most Christian denominations took the life of Mary Magdalene as their inspiration. Christian traditions hold that Mary Magdalene was a prostitute who did penance for her sinful ways by washing the feet of Jesus and drying his feet with her hair. Jesus forgave Mary Magdalene her sins and she became one of his most prominent followers. The rationale for these institutions was that even the prostitute, that most scandalous and sinful of women, could be forgiven for her sins if she was sufficiently remorseful and did penance for her sins. The Christian concept of penance involves actions of humility and labour—the more humble and more onerous the labour, the greater Divine grace and forgiveness might be bestowed. Many Christian traditions have focused on controlling the reproductive and sexual bodies of women on the assumption that female sexuality is replete with causing ‘occasions of sin.’ The nominally celibate, exclusively male Roman Catholic clergy long monitored and admonished monitoring Catholic women’s reproduction and sexuality, promoting a cultural view that women (like their Biblical foremother Eve) tempt men into sexual sin.

I defend a Davidsonian approach to weakness of will against some recent arguments by John McDowell, and adapt the approach to meet other objections. Instead of treating one’s better judgement as a conditional judgement about what is desirable to do given available reasons, it is proposed to treat it as an unconditional judgement about what is desirable to do from a rational perspective that one takes to be the right perspective to have. This makes sense of Aristotle’s claim that desire is for the good or the apparent good: judgements of desirability generally concern the apparent good, whereas judgements of desirability from rational perspectives that are judged to be the ones to have are judgements of the actual good. Weakness of will occurs when one’s actual rational perspective is not the one that one takes to be the one to have - i.e. when one’s judgement of the apparent good does not coincide with one’s judgement of the actual good. One makes two judgements – one from an adopted perspective that one judges to be the one to have and one from one’s actual perspective.

Scholars have examined a commentary on the Book of Causes attributed to Adam of Bocfeld for almost a century. Yet little progress has been made regarding its dating, authenticity, and doctrines. This paper tackles some of these issues arguing that the commentary (1) was most probably written between 1251 and 1263/1265, (2) has striking similarities with some works attributed to Roger Bacon, and (3) contains an interesting discussion of Averroes’ doctrine of the unity of the intellect. The article also indicates the influence of this commentary on fifteenth-century authors and offers a partial edition of its question 1.

An understanding of generosity must be central to an understanding of our moral nature, yet there is no good philosophical account of generosity. This is exemplified in Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, where interesting accounts of liberality (using your wealth well) and magnificence (spending large amounts of money well) are provided in Book IV, but none of generosity. Hutcheson and Hume were interested in benevolence, but benevolence is not the same thing as generosity either. For Hume, benevolence is ‘desire of the happiness of the person belov’d, and an aversion to his misery.’ (Treatise, 2.2.9.3) So, acting benevolently, for Hume, is acting from this sentiment for the sake of someone else’s wellbeing. Picking up litter that somebody else has dropped is not benevolent on this account, but I think it may count as generous behaviour. And conversely, I will argue later that benevolent actions that are presumptuous and intrusive are not generous.

Adorno’s work contains a number of radical criticisms of Hegel that reveal deep philosophical differences between the two philosophers. He represents Hegel’s philosophy as directed, ultimately, against particularity and individual experience. The core motivation of Hegel’s philosophy, Adorno argues, is a concern with system and universality. Conceived in this way it is antagonistic to the idea of non-identity, the very idea that lies at the centre of Adorno’s philosophical project.

This chapter examines how Meillassoux's conception of correlationism in After Finitude relates firstly to Kant's transcendental idealist philosophy, and secondly to the analytic Kantianism of Wilfrid Sellars. I argue that central to the views of both Kant and Sellars is what might be called, with an ambivalent nod to Meillassoux, an objective correlationism. What emerges in the end as the recommended upshot of these analyses is a naturalistic Kantianism that takes the form of an empirical realism in roughly Kant's sense, but one that is happily wed with Sellars' scientific realism, once the latter is disentangled from two implausible commitments that made such a reconciliation seem impossible to Sellars himself.

Aisling Gheár - A Terrible Beauty was a poetic cliche in the Gaelic tradition by the time that Burke was composing his treatise on the Sublime and Beautiful. This article briefly summarises the Gaelic political and cultural background to Burke's life and details how the genre of politcal poetry known as the Aisling Gheár might be seen to have influenced Burke's Enquiry. The article is particularly interested in Burke's focus on the effects of the Sublime and Beautiful on the psyche of the listener and the witness, and it draws on recently developing field of Cognitive Science’s exploration of Affect to discuss this aspect of Burke's work.

Résumé: L’article propose une première approche systématique de la tradition manuscrite du Liber de causis, en étudiant à la fois les variantes manuscrites et les difficultés doctrinales suscitées par la translittération de l’arabe al-‛aql conservée dans la traduction latine. Certains médiévaux (tel Albert le Grand) l’entendent comme un concept sans équivalent en latin, forgé par des philosophes arabes dont on ignore tout. D’autres médiévaux (tels Thomas d’Aquin et Gilles de Rome), qui ont probablement connu une branche différente de la tradition manuscrite du Liber de causis, n’en font aucune mention. En examinant cent dix manuscrits latins du Liber de causis (sur deux cent soixante-cinq actuellement connus), on constate des nombreuses variations tant pour la présence de cette translittération dans les propositions du texte que pour les formes et les graphies (alatyr, alachili, adlahic etc.). Cette analyse permet de comprendre tant la position d’Albert que la grande diversité, jusqu’à présent insoupçonnée, de la transmission du Liber de causis dans le monde latin. Abstract: This article proposes a first systematic approach to the manuscript tradition of the Liber de causis. It studies both the manuscript variants and the doctrinal difficulties raised by the transliteration of the Arabic al-ʿaql preserved in the Latin translation. Some authors (such as Albert the Great) interpreted this transliteration as a concept forged by Arab philosophers without an equivalent in Latin. Other authors (such as Thomas Aquinas and Giles of Rome) do not mention it because they probably knew a different branch of the manuscript tradition. By examining one hundred and ten Latin manuscripts of the Liber de causis (out of two hundred and sixty-five currently known), the article establishes a list of the numerous variations regarding the presence of this transliteration in the text and its forms or spellings (alatyr, alachili, adlahic etc.). This analysis enables a better understanding of both Albert's position and the hitherto unsuspected diversity of the transmission of the Liber de causis in the Latin West.

How we name each other sets in motion how we treat each other, each act of naming both opens up a certain mode of engagement and closes off others. When we tell each other our nationality or our political affiliation, our religion or our ethnicity, our gender or our class, and so on; we reveal an aspect of who we are. Sometimes we do this explicitly, at other times we do so implicitly or unintentionally. We each have many aspects and often these sides of who we are affirm our membership of a group – Republicans or Democrats; Catholics or Hindus; male or trans and so on. This group membership may be an integral part of how we understand ourselves and relate to others, or it may be experienced as merely incidental. As Iris Marrion Young has argued, group membership is part of the contemporary human condition that in itself is relatively neutral but is also not simple or exclusive. Rather, group membership is “multiple, cross-cutting, fluid, and shifting […]. In complex, highly differentiated societies like our own, all persons have multiple group identifications.” (Young, 48)

It is a familiar story that Kant's defense of our synthetic a priori cognition in the Critique of Pure Reason suffered sharp criticism throughout the extended philosophical revolutions that established analytic philosophy, the pragmatist tradition, and the phenomenological tradition as dominant philosophical movements in the fi rst half of the twentieth century. 1 One of the most important positive adaptations of Kant's outlook, however, was the combined analytic and pragmatist conceptions of the a priori that were developed by the American philosophers C. I. Lewis (1883'1964) and Wilfrid Sellars (1912'89), most notably in Lewis's 1929 classic, Mind and the World Order , followed by Sellars's critical reworking of Lewis's outlook in 'Is There a Synthetic A Priori?' ( 1953 ), and other mid-century articles. Both Lewis and Sellars defended central aspects of Kant's analysis of our a priori knowledge of mind-independent physical objects and necessary causal connections. But both also radically transformed Kant's view by defending the idea that there are alternative a priori conceptual frameworks that are subject to an ongoing process of reassessment and replacement on overall pragmatic and explanatory grounds. Furthermore, while Sellars's answer to his question, 'Is There a Synthetic A Priori?' thus represented a partial endorsement of Lewis's pragmatic relativization of the a priori, I argue that Sellars's account of meaning diverged from Lewis in ways that constituted a signifi cant improvement upon the previous 'analytic' defenses of the a priori, not only in Lewis but also in general. This arguably has implications for wider disputes concerning the nature and possibility of a priori knowledge in non-formal domains.

Many philosophers and scientists take perceptual experience, whatever else it involves, to be representational. In ‘The Silence of the Senses’, Charles Travis argues that this view involves a kind of category mistake, and consequently, that perceptual experience is not a representational or intentional phenomenon. The details of Travis’s argument, however, have been widely misinterpreted by his representationalist opponents, many of whom dismiss it out of hand. This chapter offers an interpretation of Travis’s argument from looks that it is argued presents a genuine and important challenge to orthodox representational views of experience. Whilst this challenge may not (pace Travis) be insurmountable, it places a substantial burden upon the representationalist to explain not only how experiences come to have the contents that they do (the individuation question), but how those contents come to feature in our conscious mental lives (the availability question).

Aristotle's use of the phrase τὰ καλούμενα στοιχεῖα is usually taken as evidence that he does not really think that the things to which this phrase refers, namely, fire, air, water, and earth, are genuine elements. In this paper I question the linguistic and textual grounds for taking the phrase τὰ καλούμενα στοιχεῖα in this way. I offer a detailed examination of the significance of the phrase, and in particular I compare Aristotle's general use of the Greek participle καλούμενος (-η, -ον) in other contexts. I conclude that his use of the phrase τὰ καλούμενα στοιχεῖα does not carry ironical or sceptical connotations, and that it ought to be understood as a neutral report of a contemporary opinion that the elements of bodies are fire, air, water, and earth. I leave aside the question as to whether or not Aristotle himself endorses this opinion.  

In this paper I discuss the meaning and significance of Aristotle’s claim that Empedocles “was the first to speak of the four so-called elements of the material kind” (Metaph. I.4, 985a32). I argue that this claim tells us a great deal about the reception of the four elements hypothesis, i.e., the hypothesis that that fire, air, water, and earth are the elements of bodies. Firstly, it indicates that the hypothesis is a familiar one among Aristotle’s contemporaries. Secondly, the fact that Aristotle highlights the priority of Empedocles is evidence that Empedocles’ priority was not well known to his contemporaries. I suggest, moreover, that we should not presume that it was well known to Aristotle’s contemporaries that Empedocles held the four elements hypothesis. Empedocles’ theory is best understood as a version of a view that had become popular already by Plato’s time.

The association of Wittgenstein’s name with the notion of artificial intelligence is bound to cause some surprise both to Wittgensteinians and to people interested in artificial intelligence. After all, Wittgenstein died in 1951 and the term artificial intelligence didn’t come into use until 1956 so that it seems unlikely that one could have anything to do with the other. However, establishing a connection between Wittgenstein and artificial intelligence is not as insuperable a problem as it might appear at first glance. While it is true that artificial intelligence as a quasi-distinct discipline is of recent vintage, some of its concerns, especially those of a philosophical nature, have been around for quite some time. At the birth of modern philosophy we find Descartes wondering whether it would be possible to create a machine that would be phenomenologically indistinguishable from man.

Elizabeth Anscombe argued that a central feature of intentional action is that you know what you are doing without observation. Your knowledge of what you are doing does not come after your action, but is somehow constitutively bound up with it. The doing and the knowing involve either the same or closely related sensitivity; so acting intentionally turns out to be something like exercising your knowledge of what you are doing. She raises a number of problem cases for this principle, including the example of painting a wall yellow. How can you know you are painting a wall yellow without looking to see what colour is emerging on the wall? And those following her have raised further problem cases. Notably, Donald Davidson introduced the example of intentionally making ten legible carbon copies without know that that is what you are doing.

One way to start thinking about agency is to try to distinguish the special way that reasons are involved in action from the way that reasons are involved in inanimate nature. Consider the following pair of explanations: Explanation A. The reason the soufflé collapsed is that the oven door was opened at the wrong time. Explanation B. The reason John collapsed onto the sofa was that he was exhausted after a hard day at work.