It is argued that the concept of observational equivalence can be made coherent, and that observationally equivalent theories can be theoretically incompatible. However, it is also argued that observationally equivalent, theoretically incompatible theories are difficult to generate in a way that leaves even a prima facie epistemological problem, for they will usually involve superfluous expansions. An account, involving a discussion of scientific realism, is given as to why superfluous expansions are not epistemolgically troublesome. Furthermore, a method is given that allows (...) one to solve the epistemological problems of those theories that are observationally equivalent, theoretically incompatible and not superfluously expanded. (shrink)

The book of Mackey is actually a collection of analytical articles framed by a couple of explanatory theoretical essays. He writes with varying degrees of judiciousness about critics like Northrop Frye and I. A. Richards, and writers like Thomas Pynchon and Robert Coover, about science fiction and courtly love. Unfortunately, the foundation of these explorations is less than clear and firm. Mackey is convinced that philosophy at some point supplanted literature by positing a “naturalistic and conceptual” language to the (...) vatic, dissembling, and mythical utterances of traditional narration and subsequently of poetry. He is careful to repeat that he does not aim to “prove” anything but just “converge upon a proof”. Curiously, he emphasizes with equal energy that literature is falsehood, in a kind of vulgarization of Platonic arguments. (shrink)

In this paper I will offer a comprehensive defense of the safety account of knowledge against counterexamples that have been recently put forward. In Sect. 2, I will discuss different versions of safety, arguing that a specific variant of method-relativized safety is the most plausible. I will then use this specific version of safety to respond to counterexamples in the recent literature. In Sect. 3, I will address alleged examples of safe beliefs that still constitute Gettier cases. In Sect. 4, (...) I will discuss alleged examples of unsafe knowledge. In Sect. 5, I will address alleged cases of safe belief that do not constitute knowledge for non-Gettier reasons. My overall goal is to show that there are no successful counterexamples to robust anti-luck epistemology and to highlight some major presuppositions of my reply. (shrink)

This book is a fiftieth anniversary republication of Thomas Nagel's "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?", a classic in the philosophy of mind. Through its argument for the irreducible subjectivity of consciousness, it played an essential role in making the study of consciousness a central part of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. It also spurred the now flourishing scientific attention to the consciousness of non-human creatures: mammals, birds, fish, mollusks, and insects. The book also includes a second essay (...) offering Nagel's more recent thoughts on the most promising positive response to the mind-body problem, as posed in the original essay. (shrink)

Separability is roughly the principle that, in comparing the value of two outcomes, one can ignore any people whose existence and welfare are unaffected. Separability is both antecedently plausible, at least as a principle of beneficence, and surprisingly powerful; it is the key to some of the best positive arguments in population ethics. This chapter surveys the motivations for and consequences of separability. In particular, it presents an ‘additivity theorem’ which explains how separability leads to total utilitarianism and closely related (...) axiological views. It then examines systematically how this family of views can avoid the Repugnant Conclusion by incorporating lexicality, a critical level, or a neutral range. (shrink)

v. 1. Editorial introduction -- v. 2. The English and Latin texts (i) -- v. 3. The English and Latin texts (ii).

Death.--The absurd.--Moral luck.--Sexual perversion.--War and massacre.--Ruthlessness in public life.--The policy of preference.--Equality.--The fragmentation of value.--Ethics without biology.--Brain bisection and the unity of consciousness.--What is it like to be a bat?--Panpsychism.--Subjective and objective.

Thomas Reid, the Scottish natural and moral philosopher, was one of the founding members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid believed that common sense should form the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He criticised the sceptical philosophy propagated by his fellow Scot David Hume and the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world did not exist outside the human mind. Reid was also critical of the theory of ideas (...) propagated by Locke and Descartes, arguing that it was incompatible with physical and experiential facts. For Reid, our senses demonstrate that the external world must exist, and this work is organised in chapters examining each of the senses in turn. The book, based on his lectures, was first published in 1764 when Reid was a regent professor at King's College, Aberdeen, and was reissued in 1818. (shrink)

Reprint of the ed. published by Viking Press, New York.

Issues of reliability are claiming center-stage in the epistemology of machine learning. This paper unifies different branches in the literature and points to promising research directions, whilst also providing an accessible introduction to key concepts in statistics and machine learning – as far as they are concerned with reliability.

Die Musik in den christlichen Gottesdiensten hat die Menschen zu allen Zeiten fasziniert und sie in Tiefen erreicht, die dem gesprochenen Wort verwehrt bleibt. Das II. Vatikanische Konzil hat diese Bedeutung der liturgischen Musik erkannt und ihren hohen Wert beschrieben. In der Fortführung dieser grundsätzlichen Würdigung stellt sich die vorliegende Arbeit den grundlegenden theologischen, spirituellen, und ästhetischen Fragen geeigneter gottesdienstlicher Musik. Im Gespräch mit der Religionsphilosophie Franz Rosenzweigs eröffnet sich nicht nur ein Blick in die Faszination jüdischen Denkens, gleichzeitig werden (...) die gemeinsamen liturgischen Wurzeln von Judentum und Christentum bewusst. Auf diesem Hintergrund können Kriterien entwickelt werden, die der Diskussion um eine angemessene, menschenzugewandte und traditionsverbundene Musik im Gottesdienst wertvolle Hilfe geben. (shrink)

The application of machine-learning technologies to medical practice promises to enhance the capabilities of healthcare professionals in the assessment, diagnosis, and treatment, of medical conditions. However, there is growing concern that algorithmic bias may perpetuate or exacerbate existing health inequalities. Hence, it matters that we make precise the different respects in which algorithmic bias can arise in medicine, and also make clear the normative relevance of these different kinds of algorithmic bias for broader questions about justice and fairness in healthcare. (...) In this paper, we provide the building blocks for an account of algorithmic bias and its normative relevance in medicine. (shrink)

The impassioned democratic voice of the Age of Revolution, Paine possessed a gift for stating complex ideas in concise language. This accessible collection of highlights from the social and political philosopher's best-known works includes lengthy selections from Common Sense , The American Crisis , The Rights of Man , and The Age of Reason.

Since Hilary Putnam offered multiple realization as an empirical hypothesis in the 1960s, philosophical consensus has turned against the idea that mental processes are identifiable with brain processes, and multiple realization has become the keystone of the 'antireductive consensus' across philosophy of science. Thomas W. Polger and Lawrence A. Shapiro offer the first book-length investigation of multiple realization, which serves as a starting point to a series of philosophically sophisticated and empirically informed arguments that cast doubt on the generality (...) of multiple realization in the cognitive sciences. They argue that mind-brain identities have played an important role in the growth and achievements of the cognitive sciences, and suggest that there is little prospect for multiple realization in an empirically-based theory of mind. This leads Polger and Shapiro to offer an alternative framework for understanding explanations in the cognitive sciences, as well as in chemistry, biology, and other non-basic sciences. (shrink)

This volume is a study of the influence of Timaeus on the development of Western cosmology in three axial periods of European culture: Late Antiquity, Middle Ages and Renaissance.

In chapter 5 of Pope Francis’s encyclical Fratelli tutti, the “better” politics is based on community social discernment as an embodied expression of the sensus fidelium. From the point of view of Latin American theology, it is reflected in people and populism; creative work and structural unemployment; party and movements; conflict and social friendship; value and discard. Without a categorization of these words in light of the Gospel, it will not be possible to address the threat posed by the ecological, (...) socio-environmental crisis. (shrink)

En función de reflexionar sobre la influencia del marxismo en la América Latina, se hace un aporte desde el pensamiento teológico y político argentino alineado con las demandas de los sectores populares. A partir de dos autores, el teólogo Juan Carlos Scannone y el filósofo Ernesto Laclau, en diálogo interdisciplinario, se compara la teología del pueblo, como corriente local de la teología de la liberación, con el populismo de corte peronista, como corriente posmarxista argentina. Se verá cómo ambas se distancian (...) del marxismo a partir, primero, de la crítica a la categoría de clase, reemplazada por el concepto de pueblo como “lo concreto”; y segundo, de la crítica al método científico optando en su lugar por el método sapiencial. Ni para la teología del pueblo ni para el peronismo será la lucha de clases el camino de la liberación, sino la cultura popular. De ese modo, la dialéctica deviene en el campo teológico en analéctica, y la lucha armada, en antagonismo discursivo en el campo de lo político. Desde un breve análisis de la recepción de Gramsci y su concepto de hegemonía cultural hasta la descripción del lenguaje simbólico en tanto lugar de manifestación de la demanda popular como un estar afirmado en su negación, se intenta mostrar continuidades y diferencias en la recepción del marxismo en América Latina respecto de otros contextos. (shrink)

Thomas Reid saw the three subjects of logic, rhetoric, and the fine arts as closely cohering aspects of one endeavor that he called the culture of the mind. This was a topic on which Reid lectured for many years in Glasgow, and this volume presents as near a reconstruction of these lectures as is now possible. Though virtually unknown today, this material in fact relates closely to Reid's published works and in particular to the late Essays on the Intellectual (...) Powers of Man and Essays on the Active Powers of Man. When composing these works, Reid drew primarily on his lectures on "pneumatology," which presented a theory of the mental powers, broadly conceived. These lectures were basic to the course on the culture of the mind that explained the cultivation of the mental powers. Although the Essays also included some elements from the material on the culture of the mind, the bulk of the latter was left in manuscript form, and Alexander Broadie's edition restores this important extension of Reid's overall work. In addition, this volume continues the attractive combination of manuscript material and published work, in this case Reid's important and well-known essay on Aristotle's logic. This text was corrupted in earlier editions of Reid's works and is now restored to the state in which Reid left it. This volume underscores Reid's great and growing significance, viewed both as a historical figure and as a philosopher. At the same time, it is of great interdisciplinary importance. While the material emerges directly from the core of Reid's philosophy, as now understood, it will appeal widely to people in literary, cultural, historical, and communications studies. In this regard, the present volume is a true fruit of the Scottish Enlightenment. (shrink)

Thomas Reid is now recognized as one of the towering figures of the Enlightenment. Best known for his published writings on epistemology and moral theory, he was also an accomplished mathematician and natural philosopher, as an earlier volume of his manuscripts edited by Paul Wood for the Edinburgh Reid Edition, Thomas Reid on the Animate Creation, has shown. The Correspondence of Thomas Reid collects all of the known letters to and from Reid in a fully annotated form. (...) Letters already published by Sir William Hamilton and others have been reedited, and roughly half of the letters included appear in print for the first time. Writing in 1802, Reid's disciple and biographer Dugald Stewart doubted that Reid's correspondence &"would be generally interesting.&" This collection proves otherwise, for the letters illuminate virtually every aspect of Reid's life and career and, in some instances, provide us with invaluable evidence about activities otherwise undocumented in his manuscripts or published works. Through his correspondence we can trace Reid's relations with contemporaries such as David Hume and his colleagues at both King's College, Aberdeen, and the University of Glasgow, as well as his engagement with the most controversial philosophical, scientific, and political issues of his day. If anything, the letters assembled here serve as the starting point for understanding Reid and his place in the Enlightenment. (shrink)

This paper gives a first theoretical formulation to a religious phenomenon which has not received much attention in philosophical discourse so far despite appearing in different highly heterogeneous religions. Vicarious religious ordinance refers to cases in which a living or deceased fully mature human being is knowingly or unknowingly assigned a religious affiliation without their consent or the consent of their dependents. I shall first offer three real-world examples of vicarious religious ordinance from Mormonism, Islam, and Shintoism and then raise (...) some normative concerns. I suggest (i) that vicarious religious ordinance does not fit neatly into current debates about religious epistemology, especially the recent debate on religious disagreement. I argue (ii) that normative questions as to why vicarious religious ordinance elicits indignation in its ‘victims’ is not easily explained through adducing similar examples. This paper aims to motivate further coordinated research on this topic. (shrink)

Thomas Reid , the Scottish natural and moral philosopher, was one of the founding members of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society and a significant figure in the Scottish Enlightenment. Reid believed that common sense should form the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He criticised the sceptical philosophy propagated by his fellow Scot David Hume and the Anglo-Irish bishop George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world did not exist outside the human mind. Reid was also critical of the theory of (...) ideas propagated by Locke and Descartes, arguing that it was incompatible with physical and experiential facts. For Reid, our senses demonstrate that the external world must exist, and this work is organised in chapters examining each of the senses in turn. The book, based on his lectures, was first published in 1764 when Reid was a regent professor at King's College, Aberdeen, and was reissued in 1818. (shrink)