Philosophy

The standard way of thinking about non-repeatable (single-instance) artworks such as paintings, drawings, and non-cast sculpture is that they are concrete things (i.e. material, causally efficacious, located in space and time). For example, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is currently located in Paris, Richard Serra’s Tilted Arc weighs 73 tonnes, Vermeer’s The Concert was stolen in 1990, and Michaelangelo’s David was attacked with a hammer in 1991. By contrast, consider the current location of Melville’s Moby Dick or the weight of Yeats’s ‘Sailing to Byzantium’ or how one might go about stealing Puccini’s La Bohemme. The standard view of repeatable (multiple-instance) artworks such as novels, poems, plays, operas, films, and symphonies is that they must be abstract things (i.e. immaterial, casually inert, outside space-time). Although novels, poems, and symphonies may not appear to be stock abstract objects, most philosophers of art claim that for the basic intuitions, practices, and conventions surrounding such works to be preserved, repeatable artworks must be abstracta. The purpose of this volume is to examine how philosophical enquiry into the nature of art might productively inform or be productively informed by enquiry into the nature of abstracta taking place within other areas of philosophy such as metaphysics, philosophy of mathematics, epistemology, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind and language. The aim is to provide a general methodological blueprint from which those within philosophy of art and those without can begin building responsible, and therefore mutually informative and productive, relationships between their respective fields.

This volume brings together new chapters on assertion by leading epistemologists and philosophers of language. The chapters are arranged into two sections. The chapters in the first section address the question of what an assertion is. MacFarlane surveys and evaluates the various possible theories, leaning towards a commitment view. Kölbel defends a view that combines a commitment approach with Stalnaker's ‘essential effect’ as a necessary condition. At the centre of Pagin's proposal is the notion of an utterance being made ‘prima facie because it is true’. Cappelen promotes a debunking view according to which the category of assertion is superfluous. Robert Stalnaker shows how de se content can be incorporated into his theory of assertion. The chapters in the second section focus on the idea that there is an epistemic norm of assertion. The contributions by Brown and Lackey question sufficiency: knowing that p puts one in a good enough epistemic position to assert that p. Kvanvig questions necessity: one is in a good enough epistemic position to assert that p only if one knows that p. Goldberg argues that if there is a necessary epistemic condition on appropriate assertion then this can explain certain prominent features of testimony. Greenough considers how a relativist should best specify the epistemic norms for assertion. Maitra questions Williamson's suggestion that the intimate connection between the notion of assertion and the epistemic norms governing it can be understood on analogy with the rules of a game.

Probabilistic models have much to offer to epistemology and philosophy of science. Arguably, the coherence theory of justification claims that the more coherent a set of propositions is, the more confident one ought to be in its content, ceteris paribus. An impossibility result shows that there cannot exist a coherence ordering. A coherence quasi-ordering can be constructed that respects this claim and is relevant to scientific-theory choice. Bayesian-Network models of the reliability of information sources are made applicable to Condorcet-style jury voting, Tversky and Kahneman’s Linda puzzle, the variety-of-evidence thesis, the Duhem–Quine thesis, and the informational value of testimony.

The Integration Challenge is the task of reconciling a plausible account of what is involved in the truth of statements of a given kind with a credible account of how we can know those statements, when we do know them. In any domain for which the challenge is difficult, we may revise either our conception of the epistemology of that domain, or our conception of its metaphysics, or both. Successfully meeting the Integration Challenge involves the development of a theory of understanding with both metaphysical and epistemological dimensions. Understanding involves an integrated grasp both of truth conditions, and, via a theory of possession conditions, and of circumstances in which one can come to know that certain of those conditions obtain. Two different models for meeting the Integration Challenge can be developed: the model of constitutive causal sensitivity and the model of implicitly known principles. A model of the first kind is developed for a realistic account of our understanding of past‐tense contents. A model of the second kind is developed for our understanding of contents involving metaphysical necessity; an account that treats modal statements as not mind‐dependent, but not as involving Lewisian modal realism. The Integration Challenge is also addressed for various classical and recent problems of philosophy: the nature of one's knowledge of the contents of one's own mental states; the distinctive nature of first‐person knowledge; and the classical problem of the freedom of the will.

The Beloved Self is about the ‘holy grail’ of moral philosophy: an argument against Egoism, that we all have reasons to be moral. The first part of the book introduces three versions of Egoism, each paralleling a different moral theory, and sheds new light on the concept of self-interest in virtue ethics and especially in Kant's moral theory. Part Two looks at attempts to prove that Egoism is false, and shows that even modest arguments against Egoist appear to fail. Part Three discusses the relationship between knowledge and action and defends a new conception of moral epistemology, centred on the importance of moral understanding, which has wide-ranging implications regarding not only moral testimony and moral disagreement but also the nature of virtue and morally worthy action. This final part of the book culminates in a vindication of morality, an argument that it is not epistemically rational to believe the most plausible versions of Egoism.

This book presents an expanded edition of the author's exploration of the nature and limits of thought. Embracing contradiction and challenging traditional logic, the book engages with issues across philosophical borders, from the historical to the modern, from Eastern to Western, and from the continental to the analytic. This edition of the text includes new chapters on European and Indian philosophy, and reflections on responses to the previous edition of the book.

The book describes virtues of limitation management, intellectual virtues of adapting to the fact that we cannot solve many problems that we can easily describe. How to be profitably stupid. It argues that we do give one another guidance on managing our limitations, but that this has to be in terms of virtues and not of rules, and in terms of success—knowledge and accomplishment—rather than rationality. So there is the beginning of a taxonomy of intellectual virtues. These include ‘paradoxical virtues’, that sound like vices, such as the virtue of ignoring evidence and the virtue of not thinking too hard. There are also virtues of not planning ahead, ‘possibilist virtues’, in that some forms of such planning require present knowledge of one’s future knowledge that is arguably impossible. A person’s best response to many problems depends not on the most rationally promising solution to solving them but on the most likely route to success given the person’s profile of intellectual virtues and failings. This is illustrated with a discussion of several paradoxes and conundra. At the end of the book there is a discussion of intelligence and rationality that argues that both have very limited usefulness as evaluations of who will make progress on which problems.

This volume presents a synoptic history of British Idealism, the philosophical school which dominated British philosophy from the 1860s through to the early years of the following century. Offering detailed examination of the origins, growth, development and decline of this School of thought, providing clear explanation of its characteristic concepts and doctrines, and paying close attention to the published works of its philosophers, the volume restores to its proper place an until now almost wholly forgotten period of our native philosophical history. By covering all major philosophers involved in the movement (not merely the most famous ones like Bradley, Green, McTaggart and Bosanquet but the lesser known figures like the Caird brothers, Henry Jones, A.S. Pringle-Pattison and R.B. Haldane) and by looking at all branches of philosophy (not just the familiar topics of ethics, political thought, and metaphysics but also the less well documented work on logic, religion, aesthetics and the history of philosophy) the book brings out the movement's complex living pattern of unity and difference; something which other more limited accounts have tended to obscure.

This book presents a new theory of moral responsibility. Beginning with a discussion of ordinary convictions about responsibility and free will and their implications for a philosophical theory, Vargas argues that no theory can do justice to all the things we want from a theory of free will and moral responsibility. He goes on to show how we can nevertheless justify our responsibility practices and provide a normatively and naturalistically adequate account of responsible agency, blame, and desert. Three ideas are central to Vargas’ account: the agency cultivation model, circumstantialism about powers, and revisionism about responsibility and free will. On Vargas’ account, responsibility norms and practices are justified by their effects. In particular, the agency cultivation model holds that responsibility practices help mold us into creatures that respond to moral considerations. Moreover, the abilities that matter for responsibility and free will are not metaphysically prior features of agents in isolation from social contexts. Instead, they are functions of both agents and their normatively structured contexts. This is the idea of circumstantialism about the powers required for responsibility. Third, Vargas argues that an adequate theory of responsibility will be revisionist, or at odds with important strands of ordinary convictions about free will and moral responsibility. This book provides a compelling and state-of-the-art defense of moral responsibility in the face of growing philosophical and scientific skepticism about free will and moral responsibility.

Contextualism is the view that the epistemic standards that a subject must meet in order for a sentence attributing knowledge to her to be true vary according to the contexts in which those sentences are uttered. This book argues that contextualism is true and is superior to its rival, invariantism, in both of the latter's main forms: classical invariantism and subject-sensitive invariantism. Chapter 2 presents the main argument for contextualism: the argument from the ordinary usage of ‘know(s)’. Chapter 3 utilizes the knowledge account of assertion both to answer the most important objection to Chapter 2's argument and to underwrite a second positive argument for contextualism: the argument from variable conditions of warranted assertability for simple assertions. Chapter 4 explores options for how to handle the semantics of context-sensitive terms in situations of disagreement among speakers, and answers objections to contextualism based on its alleged inability to handle such disagreements. Chapter 5 answers several objections to contextualism that allege that in various ways ‘know(s)’ does not behave like a context-sensitive term. Chapter 6 argues that contextualism has an important advantage over subject-sensitive invariantism in virtue of its ability to respect ‘intellectualism’, the thesis that questions over whether a subject knows turn exclusively on truth-related features of the subject's situation. Chapter 7 explores important connections between knowledge and various evaluations of actions. Against recent claims that important advantages for subject-sensitive invariantism are to be found here, it is argued that contextualism actually handles these connections better than does subject-sensitive invariantism.