Built-in privacy has for too long been neglected by regulators. They have concentrated on reacting to violations of rules. Even imposing severe fines will however not address the basic issue that preventative privacy protection is much more meaningful. The paper discusses this in the context of the International Working Group on Data Protection in Telecommunications (“Berlin Group”) which has published numerous recommendations on privacy-compliant design of technical innovations. Social network services, road pricing schemes, and the distribution of digital media content (...) have figured prominently in the group’s latest working papers. More recently, a judgment of the European Court of Human Rights has thrown light on weaknesses in the protection of patients’ data in hospitals that requires urgent action by designers of IT systems. Built-in privacy is no magic button, no panacea, but it has turned out to be a necessary condition for meaningful privacy protection. (shrink)

À propos de la « pensée 68 » selon Serge AudierComme tous les dix ans, l’anniversaire de Mai 68 a donné lieu à un déluge de publications ; et, comme tous les dix ans, il fallait qu’émerge de la masse une poignée de titres qui dispenseraient de regarder les autres. Celui de Serge Audier fit partie de ceux-là, avec son titre accrocheur et toutes les apparences d’une grosse étude sérieuse sur un pan de l’histoire intellectuelle récen..

Cet ouvrage est consacré à la refondation richirienne de la phénoménologie, à partir du traitement de la question de l'espace/temps phénoménologique archaïque. Par le biais de l'analyse de cette interrogation spatio-temporelle spécifique et de la pertinence qu'elle développe, l'objectif est double : d'une part, arriver à dégager un lieu de compréhensibilité, inédit, commun aux multiples enjeux les plus fondamentaux de la refonte et de la refondation de la phénoménologie transcendantale entreprises par Richir et, d'autre part, dans la foulée, permettre par (...) là même la possibilité de comprendre l'ensemble des textes du corpus. Cette compréhensibilité des mobiles philosophiques les plus importants de la phénoménologie refondue jointe à la possibilité d'une compréhension globale et transversale de la textualité richirienne doit permettre en outre de réfléchir et de fonder la démarche tout entière. En accomplissant cette refondation de manière tout à fait originale, dans une oeuvre commencée en 1968 qui compte en 2012 près de dix mille pages, réparties en vingt ouvrages et près de deux cents articles, Richir poursuit le but et a comme ambition de bouleverser et de changer en profondeur les paramètres essentiels de la phénoménologie. Et, chemin faisant, la philosophie tout entière est à reprendre à nouveaux frais. Le lecteur est convié à pénétrer au coeur de ce nouvel espace/temps richirien, véritable idée directrice de la phénoménologie et d'une philosophie sans précédent. (shrink)

Text visualization is the technique of using graphs and charts to examine text as data. Often, these do not represent a text directly and instead display an output based on word counts, word sequences, and so on. This technique can provide insights into important keywords in a text, provide an overview of textual content, or reveal trends and patterns within one text or across many texts. This paper describes recent development of and experiments with several tools for the Grub Street (...) Project to generate visualizations of eighteenth-century texts, especially in terms of the spatial relationships of words and entities on the pages of the original documents. Two examples are discussed in this article as test cases: Edward Ward’s The London Spy Compleat, in Eighteen Parts (1703) and Alexander Pope’s The Dunciad. With Notes Variorum (1729). (shrink)

Can there be grounding without necessitation? Can a fact obtain wholly in virtue of metaphysically more fundamental facts, even though there are possible worlds at which the latter facts obtain but not the former? It is an orthodoxy in recent literature about the nature of grounding, and in first-order philosophical disputes about what grounds what, that the answer is no. I will argue that the correct answer is yes. I present two novel arguments against grounding necessitarianism, and show that grounding (...) contingentism is fully compatible with the various explanatory roles that grounding is widely thought to play. (shrink)

Discussion of the relevance of grounding to substantiveness, theory-choice, and “location problems” in metaphysics.

This is an expanded and thoroughly revised edition of the widely adopted introduction to the philosophical foundations of the human sciences. Ranging from cultural anthropology to mathematical economics, Alexander Rosenberg leads the reader through behaviorism, naturalism, interpretativism about human action, and macrosocial scientific perspectives, illuminating the motivation and strategy of each.Rewritten throughout to increase accessibility, this new edition retains the remarkable achievement of revealing the social sciences’ enduring relation to the fundamental problems of philosophy. It includes new discussions of (...) positivism, European philosophy of history, causation, statistical laws, quantitative models, and postempiricist social science, along with a completely updated literature guide that keys chapters to widely anthologized papers. (shrink)

Any serious student attempting to better understand the nature, methods, and justification of science will value Alex Rosenberg's and Lee McIntyre's updated and substantially revised Fourth Edition of Philosophy of Science: A Contemporary Introduction. Weaving lucid explanations with clear analyses, the volume is as a much-used, thematically-oriented introduction to the field.

Two sources of possible disagreement in bioethics may be associated with pessimism about what bioethics can achieve. First, pluralism implies that bioethics engages with interlocutors who hold divergent moral beliefs. Pessimists might believe that these disagreements significantly limit the extent to which bioethics can provide normatively robust guidance in relevant areas. Second, the interdisciplinary nature of bioethics suggests that interlocutors may hold divergent views on the nature of bioethics itself—particularly its practicality. Pessimists may suppose that interdisciplinary disagreements could frustrate the (...) goals of bioethics. In this article, I explore how wonder may alleviate the concerns of the first group of pessimists regarding problems associated with pluralism, provided that we are willing to accept some interdisciplinary frustrations. Then, I invite readers of this issue of The Journal of Medicine & Philosophy to test these intuitions by considering the role of wonder in these articles. (shrink)

The origins of choice -- The reproductive rights debate that ignored reproduction -- Putting reproduction back into reproductive freedom -- Reproductive freedom and human evolution -- Enlisting men in support of reproductive freedom -- Defending reproductive freedom from the dangers of reproductive technology -- Ought there be a law? -- Beyond choice.

A new speculative ontology of aesthetics. In Aesthesis and Perceptronium, Alexander Wilson presents a theory of materialist and posthumanist aesthetics founded on an original speculative ontology that addresses the interconnections of experience, cognition, organism, and matter. Entering the active fields of contemporary thought known as the new materialisms and realisms, Wilson argues for a rigorous redefining of the criteria that allow us to discriminate between those materials and objects where aesthesis (perception, cognition) takes place and those where it doesn't. (...) Aesthesis and Perceptronium negotiates between indiscriminately pluralist views that attribute mentation to all things and eliminative views that deny the existence of mentation even in humans. By recasting aesthetic questions within the framework of "epistemaesthetics," which considers cognition and aesthetics as belonging to a single category that can neither be fully disentangled nor fully reduced to either of its terms, Wilson forges a theory of nonhuman experience that avoids this untenable dilemma. Through a novel consideration of the evolutionary origins of cognition and its extension in technological developments, the investigation culminates in a rigorous reevaluation of the status of matter, information, computation, causality, and time in terms of their logical and causal engagement with the activities of human and nonhuman agents. (shrink)

This essay fills in some historical, conceptual, and pedagogical gaps that appear in the most visible and recent professional efforts to “revive” Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL). I present “American Philosophy and Self-Culture” as an advanced undergraduate seminar that broadens who counts in and what counts as philosophy by immersing us in the lives, writings, and practices of seven representative U.S.-American philosophers of self-culture, community-building, and world-changing: Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790), Frederick Douglass (1818–1895), William Ellery Channing (1780–1842), Henry David (...) Thoreau (1817–1862), Margaret Fuller (1810-1850), Henry Bugbee (1915–1999), and Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004). Students enter the class with preconceptions about who philosophers are, what they do, how they write, and the languages in which they write. Students walk out with new senses of self, place, and language that emerge through new ways of seeing, doing, and writing philosophy. (shrink)

There are two families of influential and stubborn puzzles that many theories of aboutness (intentionality) face: underdetermination puzzles and puzzles concerning representations that appear to be about things that do not exist. I propose an approach that elegantly avoids both kinds of puzzle. The central idea is to explain aboutness (the relation supposed to stand between thoughts and terms and their objects) in terms of relations of co-aboutness (the relation of being about the same thing that stands between the thoughts (...) and terms themselves). (shrink)

A collection of essays by Alexander Rosenberg, the distinguished philosopher of science. The essays cover three broad areas related to Darwinian thought and naturalism: the first deals with the solution of philosophical problems such as reductionism, the second with the development of social theories, and the third with the intersection of evolutionary biology with economics, political philosophy, and public policy. Specific papers deal with naturalistic epistemology, the limits of reductionism, the biological justification of ethics, the so-called 'trolley problem' in (...) moral philosophy, the political philosophy of biological endowments, and the Human Genome Project and its implications for policy. Rosenberg's important writings on a variety of issues are here organized into a coherent philosophical framework which promises to be a significant and controversial contribution to scholarship in many areas. (shrink)

I propose an approach to liar and Curry paradoxes inspired by the work of Roger Swyneshed in his treatise on insolubles (1330-1335). The keystone of the account is the idea that liar sentences and their ilk are false (and only false) and that the so-called ''capture'' direction of the T-schema should be restricted. The proposed account retains what I take to be the attractive features of Swyneshed's approach without leading to some worrying consequences Swyneshed accepts. The approach and the resulting (...) logic (called ''Swynish Logic'') are non-classical, but are consistent and compatible with many elements of the classical picture including modus ponens, modus tollens, and double-negation elimination and introduction. It is also compatible with bivalence and contravalence. My approach to these paradoxes is also immune to an important kind of revenge challenge that plagues some of its rivals. (shrink)

This essay examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of two Mexican philosophers in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera: Samuel Ramos and Octavio Paz. We argue that although neither of these authors is cited in her seminal work, Anzaldúa had them both in mind through the writing process and that their ideas are present in the text itself. Through a genealogical reading of Borderlands/La Frontera, and aided by archival research, we demonstrate how Anzaldúa’s philosophical vision of the “new mestiza” is a critical (...) continuation of the broader tradition known as la filosofía de lo mexicano, which flourished during a golden age of Mexican philosophy (1910–1960). Our aim is to open new directions in Latinx and Latin American philosophy by presenting Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/La Frontera as a profound scholarly encounter with two classic works of Mexican philosophy, Ramos’ Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico and Paz’s The Labyrinth of Solitude. (shrink)

It has been customary to see the Muslim theologian Abu Hamid al-Ghazali as a vehement critic of philosophy, who rejected it in favour of Islamic mysticism, a view which has come under increased scrutiny in recent years. This book argues that al-Ghazali was, instead, one of the greatest popularisers of philosophy in medieval Islam. The author supplies new evidence showing that al-Ghazali was indebted to philosophy in his theory of mystical cognition and his eschatology, and that, moreover, in these two (...) areas he accepted even those philosophical teachings which he ostensibly criticized. Through careful translation into English and detailed discussion of more than 80 key passages, the author shows how al-Ghazali’s understanding of "mystical cognition" is patterned after the philosophyof Avicenna. Arguing that despite overt criticism, al-Ghazali never rejected Avicennian philosophy and that his mysticism itself is grounded in Avicenna’s teachings, the book offers a clear and systematic presentation of al-Ghazali’s "philosophical mysticism." Challenging popular assumptions about one of the greatest Muslim theologians of all time, this is an important reference for scholars and laymen interested in Islamic theology and in the relations between philosophy and mysticism. (shrink)

This article examines Gloria Anzaldúa’s critical appropriation of Mexican philosophical sources, especially in the writing of Borderlands/La Frontera. We argue that Anzaldúa effectively contributed to la filosofía de lo mexicano by developing an Inter-American Philosophy of Mexicanness. More specifically, we recover “La Mexicana en la Chicana” by paying careful attention to Anzaldúa’s Mexican sources, both those she explicitly cites and those we have discovered while conducting archival research using the Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa Papers at the Benson Latin American Collection at (...) the University of Texas at Austin. The eight Mexican philosophical sources we examine and discuss here are: José Vasconcelos (1882-1959), Miguel León-Portilla (1926-2019), Juana Armanda Alegría (1938- ), Octavio Paz (1914-1998), Samuel Ramos (1897-1959), Rosario Castellanos (1925-1974), Sor Juana Inés de La Cruz (1648-1695), and Jorge Carrión (1913-2005). (shrink)

Were there interactions between the development of Kant's aesthetics and the development of his moral philosophy? How did Kant view pleasure and displeasure and what role did they play in the formation of his system of the faculties? In this book, Alexander Rueger situates Kant's account of pleasure and displeasure in its eighteenth-century context, with special attention to Leibniz, Wolff, Crusius, and Mendelssohn. He traces the development of Kant's views on pleasure from the 1770s to his Critique of Aesthetic (...) Judgment in 1790, and shows that throughout, Kant understood pleasure as the satisfaction of faculty interests. The significance of this theory for the completion of Kant's critical system in the third Critique is discussed in detail. Rueger's study illuminates both the role of pleasure and displeasure in Kant's thought, and their important connections to the power of judgment. (shrink)

In this paper we discuss how Causal Decision Theory should be modified to handle a class of problematic cases involving deterministic laws. Causal Decision Theory, as it stands, is problematically biased against your endorsing deterministic propositions (for example it tells you to deny Newtonian physics, regardless of how confident you are of its truth). Our response is that this is not a problem for Causal Decision Theory per se, but arises because of the standard method for assessing the truth of (...) certain counterfactuals. The truth of deterministic laws is `modally fragile' on the standard semantics for counterfactuals: if determinism is true and you were to do otherwise, the laws would be different. We provide two ways of avoiding this problem: 1) supplement the standard semantics for counterfactuals with impossible worlds, or 2) introduce rigid designators into the description of problematic decision situations. We argue that both of these approaches are well-motivated and can be readily incorporated into Lewisian Causal Decision Theory. (shrink)

Comment developper une phenomenologie de la connaissance qui, tout en restant fidele aux perspectives fondamentales des deux peres fondateurs de la phenomenologie, tire profit des acquis essentiels des deux generations posterieures de phenomenologues? L'auteur se propose de poursuivre le projet d'une refondation de la phenomenologie qui prend au serieux les critiques du fondationalisme (traditionnel) sans pour autant abandonner une perspective visant a legitimer le bien-fonde de tout discours exhibant le sens de ce qui apparait. La these fondamentale est qu'une telle (...) refondation se doit de mettre en son centre non plus la perception objectivante, mais l'imagination (Einbildungskraft) a la source de toute formation ou configuration du sens (Sinnbildung), laquelle constitue la base de tout apparaissant et de tout evenement. L'imagination est ici comprise a la fois comme devoilant la constitution imageante (imaginaire et imaginal) du reel et comme productrice d' images (ou d' icones ) dont il s'agit de preciser la dimension genetique, voire generative, eu egard a plusieurs concepts determinants de la phenomenologie (tels que la verite, la subjectivite, le reel, l' inconscient, le temps, l' espace, etc.). (shrink)

In _Expressive Arts Education and Therapy_ we see how the creative process in a dance theatre lab evolved into a Creative Process-based Research project that included the director/choreographer and participants in a collaborative sense-making project.

Free Speech in the Balance is the first comprehensive study of proportional analysis in free speech theory. This book challenges the US Supreme Court's categorical approach and explains the importance of understanding the breadth of concerns arising from regulations directly and indirectly impacting expression. The author provides in-depth analysis of some of the important social and political principles governing topics of vital concern, including campaign financing, university speech codes, secondary school rules, incitement, and threats. This book should be read by (...) students and scholars of free speech theory and anyone interested in learning more about the history of existing law, the issues of current importance, and trends in expressive significance. (shrink)

In the paper, a detailed analysis of some new logical aspects of Cantor’s diagonal proof of the uncountability of continuum is presented. For the first time, strict formal, axiomatic, and algorithmic definitions of the notions of potential and actual infinities are presented. It is shown that the actualization of infinite sets and sequences used in Cantor’s proof is a necessary, but hidden, condition of the proof. The explication of the necessary condition and its factual usage within the framework of Cantor’s (...) proof makes, Cantor’s proof invalid. It’s shown that traditional Cantor’s proof has a second necessary, but hidden as well, condition which is teleological by its nature, i.e., is not mathematical. The explication of the second necessary condition makes Cantor’s statement on the uncountability of continuum unprovable from the point of view of classical logic.One of the most dramatic facts in history of science is connected just with the notion of actual infinity and consists in the following. On the one hand, Aristotle, Berkeley, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Gauss, Kant, Cauchy, Kronecker, Hermite, Poincaré, Bair, Borel, Brouwer, Quine, Wittgenstein, Weyl, Luzin, and a lot of other outstanding creators of classical logic and classical mathematics, during millenniums, stated categorically and insistently warned about that the actual infinity is a self-contradictory notion and its usage in mathematics is inadmissible (e.g., according to Poincare, “There is no actual infinity. - Cantorians forgot that and fell into contradictions. Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered”). On the other hand, a lot of outstanding scientists of the XX c.c., such as Hilbert, Church, Turing, Gödel, etc., and modern axiomatic set theory as a whole ignored this (intuitive though) opinion of genii and accepted Cantor’s “transfinite paradise”, based on the actual infinity. In the paper some logical, philosophical, and psychological aspects of this historical “favorable opposition” are analyzed, and the fact that the scientific intuition of genii has won the historical battle against the mytho-’logic’ of Cantor’s transfinite ‘paradise’ is explained and logically justified. (shrink)

In the paper, a detailed analysis of some new logical aspects of Cantor’s diagonal proof of the uncountability of continuum is presented. For the first time, strict formal, axiomatic, and algorithmic definitions of the notions of potential and actual infinities are presented. It is shown that the actualization of infinite sets and sequences used in Cantor’s proof is a necessary, but hidden, condition of the proof. The explication of the necessary condition and its factual usage within the framework of Cantor’s (...) proof makes, Cantor’s proof invalid. It’s shown that traditional Cantor’s proof has a second necessary, but hidden as well, condition which is teleological by its nature, i.e., is not mathematical. The explication of the second necessary condition makes Cantor’s statement on the uncountability of continuum unprovable from the point of view of classical logic.One of the most dramatic facts in history of science is connected just with the notion of actual infinity and consists in the following. On the one hand, Aristotle, Berkeley, Locke, Descartes, Spinoza, Gauss, Kant, Cauchy, Kronecker, Hermite, Poincaré, Bair, Borel, Brouwer, Quine, Wittgenstein, Weyl, Luzin, and a lot of other outstanding creators of classical logic and classical mathematics, during millenniums, stated categorically and insistently warned about that the actual infinity is a self-contradictory notion and its usage in mathematics is inadmissible (e.g., according to Poincare, “There is no actual infinity. - Cantorians forgot that and fell into contradictions. Later generations will regard Mengenlehre (set theory) as a disease from which one has recovered”). On the other hand, a lot of outstanding scientists of the XX c.c., such as Hilbert, Church, Turing, Gödel, etc., and modern axiomatic set theory as a whole ignored this (intuitive though) opinion of genii and accepted Cantor’s “transfinite paradise”, based on the actual infinity. In the paper some logical, philosophical, and psychological aspects of this historical “favorable opposition” are analyzed, and the fact that the scientific intuition of genii has won the historical battle against the mytho-’logic’ of Cantor’s transfinite ‘paradise’ is explained and logically justified. (shrink)

Scientific realism at least in large measure reflects the conviction that physics limns the true nature of reality; that it is the right metaphysical picture of things. This conviction is in turn a product of the failure of positivism's attempt to expunge metaphysics from the corpus of philosophically respectable activities. Since natural science is objective knowledge of the worldpar excellencepost-positivists have embraced it as the ontology which their predecessors had failed to make unnecessary. Scientific realism is metaphysics, shameless or unashamed.

For any putative excuse, why not recast it as a justification rendering one’s wrongful conduct ultimately permissible? This paper confronts the worry that many, perhaps all, excuses might collapse into justifications – either in morality or criminal law. It is an especially pressing problem for normative expectations views, on which excuses speak to a lower standard than justifications. I argue that the prospects for decisively blocking collapse within morality look bleak – at least if we adhere to an important constraint (...) of the present project. I want to see if we can block collapse without appealing to a substantive theory of moral wrongness or taking on robust theoretical commitments about interpersonal morality. This is especially important for criminal law purposes, though I concede that blocking collapse in morality likely requires substantive commitments. Accordingly, I develop a more ecumenical way to block collapse within the criminal law, although not morality. The key is to attend to differences in how the legislature can legitimately assign weight to reasons in determining which actions it deems to be wrong vs. how individuals can fairly be expected to assign weight to reasons, which is key to assessing culpability. Institutional considerations impact the former but not the latter. (shrink)

There are various well-known paradoxes of modal recombination. This paper offers a solution to a variety of such paradoxes in the form of a new conception of metaphysical modality. On the proposed conception, metaphysical modality exhibits a type of indefinite extensibility. Indeed, for any objective modality there will always be some further, broader objective modality; in other terms, modal space will always be open to expansion.

Die Phänomenologie hat mittlerweile eine über einhundertjährige Geschichte. Dieses Buch führt auf drei Wegen in die Vielfalt ihrer unterschiedlichen Ansätze ein. Dabei geht es dem Autor nicht nur um eine Darstellung der Geschichte der Phänomenologie. Er führt ausserdem vor, wie ihr Anspruch, die Sachen selbst zu untersuchen, erfüllt wird und auch eine philosophische Strömung wie der Deutsche Idealismus phänomenologisch fruchtbar gemacht werden kann. Zudem trägt Schnell zur aktuellen Debatte um den Neuen Realismus bei. Diese Einführung referiert nicht, was Phänomenologie ist: (...) Sie ist selbst Phänomenologie. (shrink)

It is often presumed that anti-haecceitists are not committed to the identity of indiscernibles. However, I argue that anti-haecceitism implies a particularly strong thesis about when individuals are indiscernible which motivates the identity of indiscernibles. The argument is first sketched intuitively and then formalized in a system of higher-order modal logic.

Organisation studies based on qualitative methodologies continually seek legitimacy in relation to positivist research formulating nomological knowledge on administrative practices. One of the key features regularly praised in qualitative research is the idea of reflexivity, the ability of the qualitative researcher to critically examine his or her own analysis. This paper argues that the notion of reflexivity is an uncontested area of qualitative organisation research which merits critical study. In contrast to the reflexivity model which assumes an autopoietic double hermeneutic (...) of the examined empirical material, it draws on Kierkegaard’s notion of subjective thinking. For Kierkegaard it is not reflexivity that serves as the primus motor for subjective thinking but doubt, paradox and passion. A critique of the notion of reflexivity opens up alternative accounts of qualitative research which need not assume self-correcting and self-directed analysis. (shrink)

Following Smiley’s influential proposal, it has become standard practice to characterise notions of relative necessity in terms of simple strict conditionals. However, Humberstone and others have highlighted various flaws with Smiley’s now standard account of relative necessity. In their recent article, Hale and Leech propose a novel account of relative necessity designed to overcome the problems facing the standard account. Nevertheless, the current article argues that Hale & Leech’s account suffers from its own defects, some of which Hale & Leech (...) are aware of but underplay. To supplement this criticism, the article offers an alternative account of relative necessity which overcomes these defects. This alternative account is developed in a quantified modal propositional logic and is shown model-theoretically to meet several desiderata of an account of relative necessity. (shrink)

I present a novel argument against the non-contingency of identity. I first argue that the necessity of distinctness is intimately connected with numerous paradoxes of recombination. In particular, I argue that those who reject the necessity of distinctness have natural solutions to various paradoxes of recombination which have plagued the metaphysics of modality. Moreover, I argue that adding the necessity of distinctness to modest, paradox-free assumptions is sufficient to reinstate the paradoxes. Given that identity is non-contingent only if distinctness is (...) necessary, I suggest this constitutes new evidence against the non-contingency of identity. (shrink)

For a novice this book is a mathematically-oriented introduction to modal logic, the discipline within mathematical logic studying mathematical models of reasoning which involve various kinds of modal operators. It starts with very fundamental concepts and gradually proceeds to the front line of current research, introducing in full details the modern semantic and algebraic apparatus and covering practically all classical results in the field. It contains both numerous exercises and open problems, and presupposes only minimal knowledge in mathematics. A specialist (...) can use the book as a source of references. Results and methods of many directions in propositional modal logic, from completeness and duality to algorithmic problems, are collected and systematically presented in one volume. (shrink)

Contingentism is the view that it is contingent which things exist. Despite its plausibility, advocates of contingentism face a well-known ‘challenge’ to demonstrate that they can draw what appear to be intelligible modal distinctions (Williamson Modal Logic as Metaphysics. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013). In this article, I argue that if certain controversial modal principles fail, the challenge contingentists face becomes much more difficult. Whereas extant challenges concern contingentists’ inability to draw quite theoretical second-order modal distinctions, I present a challenge (...) which concerns contingentists’ inability to draw simpler first-order distinctions. This indicates that in certain modal settings there may well be significant first-order barriers to maintaining contingentism. (shrink)

Economics today cannot predict the likely outcome of specific events any better than it could in the time of Adam Smith. This is Alexander Rosenberg's controversial challenge to the scientific status of economics. Rosenberg explains that the defining characteristic of any science is predictive improvability--the capacity to create more precise forecasts by evaluating the success of earlier predictions--and he forcefully argues that because economics has not been able to increase its predictive power for over two centuries, it is not (...) a science. (shrink)

Following David Lewis, Ted Sider has famously argued that unrestricted first-order quantification cannot be vague. His argument was intended as a type of reductio: its strategy was to show that the mere hypothesis of unrestricted quantifier vagueness collapses into the claim that unrestricted quantification is precise. However, this short article considers two natural reconstructions of the argument, and shows that each can be resisted. The theme will be that each reconstruction of the argument involves assumptions which advocates of vague quantification (...) have independent reason to reject. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In this article, I focus on Charles Sanders Peirce's viability for contemporary art history and criticism. I argue that in order to make sense of Peirce's published remarks on photographs they should be read in light of specific nineteenth-century uses of photography in experimental science. I argue that Peirce's comments on photography are consistent with a realist theory of science. It is only when these remarks are contextualized within a broader scientific project that we may begin to mine Peirce (...) for his art historical value. (shrink)