Metaphysics/Epistemology

Aristotle's Metaphysics Alpha: Symposium Aristotelicum

Oliver Primavesi

Carlos Steel (ed.)

he volumes of the “Symposium Aristotelicum” have become in the last fifty years the obligatory reference works for all studies on Aristotle. In this 18th volume a distinguished group of ... More

he volumes of the “Symposium Aristotelicum” have become in the last fifty years the obligatory reference works for all studies on Aristotle. In this 18th volume a distinguished group of scholars offers a chapter-by-chapter study of the first book of Aristotle's Metaphysics. Aristotle presents here his philosophical project as a search for wisdom, which is found in the knowledge of the first principles allowing us to explain whatever exists. As he shows, the earlier philosophers all had been seeking such a wisdom, though they had divergent views on what these first principles were. Before Aristotle sets out his own views, he offers a critical examination of his predecessors' views, ending up with a lengthy discussion of Plato's doctrine of the Forms. Book Alpha is not just a fundamental text for reconstructing the early history of Greek philosophy, it sets itself the agenda for Aristotle's own project of wisdom after what he had learned from his predecessors. Besides eleven chapters, each dealing with a different section of the text, the volume also offers a new edition of the Greek text of Metaphysics Alpha by Oliver Primavesi, based on an exhaustive examination of the complex manuscript and indirect tradition. The introduction to the edition offers new insights into the question which has haunted editors of the Metaphysics since Bekker, namely the relation between the two divergent traditions of the text. Less

Art and Abstract Objects

Christy Mag Uidhir (ed.)

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 ... More

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. Less

Bounded Thinking: Intellectual virtues for limited agents

Adam Morton

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 ... More

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. Less

Building Better Beings: A Theory of Moral Responsibility

Manuel Vargas

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 ... More

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. Less

Epistemic Authority: A Theory of Trust, Authority, and Autonomy in Belief

Linda Trinkaus Zagzebski

This book gives an extended argument for epistemic authority from the implications of reflective self-consciousness. Epistemic authority is compatible with autonomy, but epistemic ... More

This book gives an extended argument for epistemic authority from the implications of reflective self-consciousness. Epistemic authority is compatible with autonomy, but epistemic self-reliance is incoherent. The book argues that epistemic and emotional self-trust are rational and inescapable, that consistent self-trust commits us to trust in others, and that among those we are committed to trusting are some whom we ought to treat as epistemic authorities, modelled on the well-known principles of authority of Joseph Raz. Some of these authorities can be in the moral and religious domains. The book investigates the way the problem of disagreement between communities or between the self and others is a conflict within self-trust, and argue against communal self-reliance on the same grounds as the book uses in arguing against individual self-reliance. The book explains how any change in belief is justified—by the conscientious judgment that the change will survive future conscientious self-reflection. The book concludes with an account of autonomy. Less

Epistemological Disjunctivism

Duncan Pritchard

This book offers a defence of epistemological disjunctivism. This is an account of perceptual knowledge which contends that such knowledge is paradigmatically constituted by a true ... More

This book offers a defence of epistemological disjunctivism. This is an account of perceptual knowledge which contends that such knowledge is paradigmatically constituted by a true belief which enjoys rational support which is both factive and reflectively accessible to the agent. In particular, in a case of paradigmatic perceptual knowledge that p, the subject's rational support for believing that p is that she sees that p, where this rational support is both reflectively accessible and factive (i.e., it entails p). This account of perceptual knowledge poses a radical challenge to contemporary epistemology, since by the lights of standard views in epistemology this proposal is simply incoherent. The aim of the book is to show that this proposal is theoretically viable (i.e., that it does not succumb to the problems that it appears to face), and to demonstrate that this is an account of perceptual knowledge which we would want to endorse if it were available on account of its tremendous theoretical potential. In particular, it is argued that epistemological disjunctivism offers a way through the impasse between epistemic externalism and internalism, and also provides the foundation for a distinctive response to the problem of radical scepticism. Less

The Epistemology of Resistance: Gender and Racial Oppression, Epistemic Injustice, and the Social Imagination

José Medina

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences ... More

This book explores the epistemic side of oppression, focusing on racial and sexual oppression and their interconnections. It elucidates how social insensitivities and imposed silences prevent members of different groups from interacting epistemically in fruitful ways—from listening to each other, learning from each other, and mutually enriching each other’s perspectives. Medina’s epistemology of resistance offers a contextualist theory of our complicity with epistemic injustices and a social connection model of shared responsibility for improving epistemic conditions of participation in social practices. Through the articulation of a new interactionism and polyphonic contextualism, the book develops a sustained argument about the role of the imagination in mediating social perceptions and interactions. It concludes that only through the cultivation of practices of resistance can we develop a social imagination that can help us become sensitive to the suffering of excluded and stigmatized subjects. Drawing on Feminist Standpoint Theory and Critical Race Theory, this book makes contributions to social epistemology and to recent discussions of testimonial and hermeneutical injustice, epistemic responsibility, counter-performativity, and solidarity in the fight against racism and sexism. Less

Freedom, God, and Worlds

Michael J. Almeida

It is a principal aim of this book to show that several widely believed and largely undisputed principles in philosophical theology are in fact just philosophical dogmas. The ... More

It is a principal aim of this book to show that several widely believed and largely undisputed principles in philosophical theology are in fact just philosophical dogmas. The well-entrenched principles have served as basic assumptions in some of the most powerful apriori atheological arguments. But most theists also maintain that the principles express apriori necessary truths. The philosophical dogmas include principles that are presumed to follow from the nature of an essentially omnipotent, essentially omniscient, essentially perfectly good and necessarily existing being. Among the atheological arguments that deploy these philosophical dogmas are the Logical Problem of Evil, the Logical Problem of the Best Possible World, the Logical Problem of Good Enough Worlds, the Problem of Divine Freedom, the Problem of No Best World, and the Evidential Problem of Evil. Solutions to several less serious atheological problems are also forthcoming. It is among the principal conclusions of the book that these arguments present no important challenge to the existence of an Anselmian God. Less

From Zeno to Arbitrage: Essays on Quantity, Coherence, and Induction

Brian Skyrms

The essays in the book center on the concept of probability. What is the framework within which probability comfortably lives? What are the coherence principles that must be satisfied ... More

The essays in the book center on the concept of probability. What is the framework within which probability comfortably lives? What are the coherence principles that must be satisfied for degrees of belief to be probabilities, and how do these principles generalize to probability change? What is the relation between coherent degrees of belief, beliefs about chances, and inductive inference? What constraints does coherence put on inductive skepticism? Less

God and Necessity

Brian Leftow

This book offers a theory of the possible and the necessary — modality — in which God plays the chief role, and a new sort of argument for God’s existence. It has become usual to say ... More

This book offers a theory of the possible and the necessary — modality — in which God plays the chief role, and a new sort of argument for God’s existence. It has become usual to say that a proposition is possible just in case it is true in some ‘possible world’ (roughly, some complete history a universe might have) and necessary just if it is true in all. Thus much discussion of possibility and necessity since the 1960s has focussed on the nature and existence (or not) of possible worlds. The book holds that there are no such things, nor any sort of abstract entity. The metaphysical ‘work’ such items usually do it assigns to God and events in His mind. It reduces ‘broadly logical’ to causal modalities and replaces possible worlds in the semantics of modal logic with God and His mental events. The book argues that theists are committed to theist modal theories, and that the merits of a theist modal theory provide an argument for God’s existence.Historically, almost all theist modal theories base all necessary truth on God’s nature. The book disagrees: it argues that necessary truths about possible creatures and kinds of creatures — about essences — are due ultimately to God’s unconstrained imagination and choice. On its theory, it is no sense part of the nature of God that normal zebras have stripes (if that’s a necessary truth). Stripy zebras are simply things God thought up, and they have the nature they do simply because that is how He thought of them. Thus the theory takes a half-step toward Descartes’ view of modal truth. Less