Philosophical Quarterly Research Articles

Symptoms of a Misunderstanding in Contemporary Academic Philosophy

AbstractThis paper challenges a conception of philosophy that is seldom clearly expressed, yet appears to be prevalent in contemporary academic philosophy. On the website of the American Philosophical Quarterly, some sentences appear that articulate well the essentials of that assumption. This article discusses those sentences and assumes that they may be symptomatic of a widespread blindness to a fundamental aspect of the nature of philosophical study. The first part of the article consists of an analysis and criticism of the sentences in question. The second part investigates some possible defences of the sentences and the conception of philosophy they express.

Reconsidering the Donohue-Levitt Hypothesis

Author Posting of a preprint © American Catholic Philosophical Association, 2016. This article is posted here for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 90, Issue 04, Fall 2016, http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/acpq2016915100

The Fake, the Flimsy, and the Fallacious: Demarcating Arguments in Real Life

Philosophers of science have given up on the quest for a silver bullet to put an end to all pseudoscience, as such a neat formal criterion to separate good science from its contenders has proven elusive. In the literature on critical thinking and in some philosophical quarters, however, this search for silver bullets lives on in the taxonomies of fallacies. The attractive idea is to have a handy list of abstract definitions or argumentation schemes, on the basis of which one can identify bad or invalid types of reasoning, abstracting away from the specific content and dialectical context. Such shortcuts for debunking arguments are tempting, but alas, the promise is hardly if ever fulfilled. Different strands of research on the pragmatics of argumentation, probabilistic reasoning and ecological rationality have shown that almost every known type of fallacy is a close neighbor to sound inferences or acceptable moves in a debate. Nonetheless, the kernel idea of a fallacy as an erroneous type of argument is still retained by most authors. We outline a destructive dilemma we refer to as the Fallacy Fork: on the one hand, if fallacies are construed as demonstrably invalid form of reasoning, then they have very limited applicability in real life (few actual instances). On the other hand, if our definitions of fallacies are sophisticated enough to capture real-life complexities, they can no longer be held up as an effective tool for discriminating good and bad forms of reasoning. As we bring our schematic “fallacies” in touch with reality, we seem to lose grip on normative questions. Even approaches that do not rely on argumentation schemes to identify fallacies (e.g., pragma-dialectics) fail to escape the Fallacy Fork, and run up against their own version of it.

Laurie Shannon The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean LocalesThe Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales. Laurie Shannon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+290.

<i>Laurie Shannon</i> The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales<i>The Accommodated Animal: Cosmopolity in Shakespearean Locales</i>. Laurie Shannon. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013. Pp. vii+290.

Divine moral goodness, supererogation and The Euthyphro Dilemma

How can we make sense of God’s moral goodness if God cannot be subject to moral obligations? This question is troubling for divine command theorists, as if we cannot make sense of God’s moral goodness then it seems hard to see how God’s commands could be morally good. Alston (Divine nature and human language, 1989) argues that the concept of supererogation solves this problem. If we accept the existence of acts that are morally good but not morally required then we should accept that there is no need for an act to fulfill a moral obligation in order for it to be morally good (1989, p. 261). This view has been criticized by both Stump (Philosophical Perspectives 6:475–491, 1992) and Lombardi (American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 79(2):313–326, 2005), who claim that it is impossible for an agent who has no obligations to perform acts of supererogation. Young (International Journal for Philosophy of Religion 73:83–95, 2013) attempts to defend Alston’s solution by offering a new analysis of supererogation. In this paper I will argue first that Young fails to provide an adequate response to Lombardi’s objection. I will then provide my own defence of Alston’s proposal.

Is the Final Chapter of the Metaphysics of Morals also the Final Chapter of the Practical Postulates?

Author Posting of a preprint © American Catholic Philosophical Association, 2016. This article is posted here for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 89, Issue 02, Spring 2015. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/acpq201531750

Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China by Erica Fox Brindley (review)

Reviewed by: Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China by Erica Fox Brindley Pauline C. Lee Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China. By Erica Fox Brindley. Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012. Pp. xi + 225. Hardcover $75.00, isbn 978-1-438-44313-3. Paper $24.95. eBook $24.95. In Music, Cosmology, and the Politics of Harmony in Early China, Erica Fox Brindley further illuminates our scholarly understanding of the spiritual-religious, political, moral, psychological, and medical worlds of early China by carefully tracking the complex and ever-changing relationship between “music” (yue 樂) and conceptions of the cosmos. Her central analytical category is the concept of “harmony” (he 和). She provides evidence that texts (e.g., the Book of Documents, the Zuozhuan, the Analects, and early Mohist writings) preceding the late fourth century b.c.e. on the whole describe harmony as a distinctly human achievement, such as rulers choosing to act virtuously so as to bring harmony to the lives of those they govern or a master chef picking and choosing the right ingredients to create a particularly delicious broth. Harmony is not discovered in the cosmos, but rather is a good created by sages and kings. In contrast, in early Chinese classical writings that can be dated to roughly after 325 b.c.e. (e.g., the Zhuangzi, the Daodejing, the Mengzi, the Lüshi chunqiu, later Mohist writings, the Huainanzi, and the Shiji), a century and a half before the unification of China, Brindley boldly argues that one finds a marked change in descriptions of harmony. Harmony is now described as inherent within the cosmos; countless competing methods are articulated for achieving or discovering harmony, but generally speaking all involve an intimate working with the larger cosmos. Through the course of six chapters, Brindley carefully shows how changes in the role and status of music parallel transformations in views of the cosmos—a cosmos that is in close dialectical relationship with human beings, who affect and are being affected by this transcendent force. Developing themes that were introduced in her first monograph, Individualism in Early China: Human Agency and the Self in Thought and Politics (University of Hawai’i Press, 2010), Brindley concludes: The common saying “Heaven and human come together to form one 天人和一” … is often understood in terms of how humans should alter their behavior to conform to Heaven’s natural and inevitable laws. My analysis shows that there is no single narrative or assumption that humans are to “fit in” in such a way. Indeed, in many texts, humans are presented as integral agents who … might add to and change the course of the cosmos itself.” (p. 158; italics mine) [End Page 326] The conception of the cosmos that emerged after the fourth century b.c.e. is “creative” and “engendering,” rather than “passive” and “conforming” (p. 158). Brindley notes that there exists a handful of articles, book chapters, and books in English, Chinese, and Japanese on music in China. Her linking of music with sweeping spiritual-religious transformations in particular makes this book a unique and excellent contribution to our understanding of not only early China but also theories of music in general. Brindley’s work is an example of detailed, careful, erudite, creative, and bold scholarship. Both Sinologically sound and theoretically sophisticated, she examines a breadth of texts—including both well-studied classics and newly excavated works. Her translations are clear and lucid. Throughout she argues for her views through careful scholarship and then tests her conclusions regarding early China against common sense. The subject—changing concepts of music and its role and status in our human lives—is fascinating and of significance and interest across a breadth of fields including religious studies, literature, and philosophy, as well as intellectual and sociocultural history. At least two other philosophers have studied the role of music and moral cultivation in early China, notably Philip J. Ivanhoe in “Music in and of Our Lives,” a chapter in his Confucian Reflections: Ancient Wisdom for Modern Times (Routledge, 2013), and Kathleen M. Higgins in “Music in Confucian and Neo-Confucian Philosophy,” a 1980 article for the International Philosophical Quarterly...

Buridan's Solution to the Liar Paradox

Jean Buridan has offered a solution to the Liar Paradox, i.e. to the problem of assigning a truth-value to the sentence ‘What I am saying is false’. It has been argued that either (1) this solution is ad hoc since it would only apply to self-referencing sentences [Read, S. 2002. ‘The Liar Paradox from John Buridan back to Thomas Bradwardine’, Vivarium, 40 (2), 189–218] or else (2) it weakens his theory of truth, making his ‘a logic without truth’ [Klima, G. 2008. ‘Logic without truth: Buridan on the Liar’, in S. Rahman, T. Tulenheimo and E. Genot, Unity, Truth and the Liar: The Modern Relevance of Medieval Solutions to the Liar Paradox, Berlin: Springer, 87–112 (Chapter 5); Dutilh Novaes, C. 2011. ‘Lessons on truth from mediaeval solutions to the Liar Paradox’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 61 (242), 58–78]. Against (1), I will argue that Buridan's solution by means of truth by supposition does not involve new principles. Self-referential sentences force us to handle supposition more carefully, which does not warrant the accusation of adhoccery. I will also argue, against (2), that it is exaggerated to assert that this solution leads to a ‘weakened’ theory of truth, since it is consistent with other passages of the Sophismata, which only gives necessary conditions for the truth of affirmative propositions, but sufficient conditions for falsity.

“A Mysterious Order of Possibles”

Avicenna's distinction between essence and existence was-and sometimes still is-read in the sense of a priority of essence. My analysis will focus on an important example of such a reading: Beatrice Zedler's interpretation of one of the most important texts for Thomas's discussion of Avicenna's philosophy, the Quaestiones de Potentia. Independently of its consistency, Zedler's interpretation gives me the opportunity to discuss Avicenna's supposed (supposed also by Thomas Aquinas). My aim is to show that Avicenna is very well aware of the aporia that an essence existing independently of existence (and therefore it) would represent. If essentialism is a risk of Avicenna's metaphysics, this is not because of the essence-existence distinction. It is because of the ethical dimension that creation perforce implies (creation is good and brings into existence what is good), that Avicenna seems in fact to posit an independent order of possibles before God's creative action. © 2014, American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly.

The Interconnection between Willing and Believing for Kant’s and Kantian Ethics

Author Posting of a preprint © International Philosophical Quarterly, 2014. This article is posted here for personal use, not for redistribution. The article was published in International Philosophical Quarterly, Volume 54, Issue 02, June 2014, http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/ipq20145208

Truthmaking, Evidence Of, and Impossibility Proofs

Beginning with Zagzebski (The Philosophical Quarterly 44:65–73, 1994), some philosophers have argued that there can be no solution to the Gettier counterexamples within the framework of a fallibilist theory of knowledge. If true, this would be devastating, since it is believed on good grounds that infallibilism leads to scepticism. But I argue here that these purported proofs are mistaken and that the truthmaker solution to the Gettier problems is both cogent and fallibilist in nature. To show this I develop the notion of evidence of a state of affairs, a crucial concept in the truthmaker theory. I also argue that a common principle of the transmission of evidence through entailment is false, and the cause of much of the trouble.

‘KNOWLEDGE’ ASCRIPTIONS, SOCIAL ROLES AND SEMANTICS

AbstractThe idea that the concept ‘knowledge’ has a distinctive function or social role is increasingly influential within contemporary epistemology. Perhaps the best-known account of the function of ‘knowledge’ is that developed in Edward Craig's Knowledge and the State of Nature (1990, Oxford University Press), on which (roughly) ‘knowledge’ has the function of identifying good informants. Craig's account of the function of ‘knowledge’ has been appealed to in support of a variety of views, and in this paper I'm concerned with the claim that it supports a sort of epistemic contextualism, which is (roughly) the view that the semantic contents and truth-conditions of ‘knowledge’ ascriptions – instances of ‘S knows that p’ – depend on and vary with the context of ascription (see, for instance, John Greco's ‘What's wrong with contextualism’, Philosophical Quarterly [2008]). Prima facie, this claim should strike us as surprising. A number of concepts and linguistic items (words, sentences) serve functions that have little or nothing to do with semantics. However, I argue that, on the best interpretation of talk of the function of a concept such as ‘knowledge’, the function of ‘knowledge’ is relevant to semantics. Along the way I also suggest how to improve on what I call the ‘usual argument’ that Craig's account of the function of ‘knowledge’ supports epistemic contextualism.

Restricting Justice: Political Interventions in the Home and in the Market

Restricting Justice: Political Interventions in the Home and in the Market

“What Can I Do to Get Out of It?”: How Self-Help Readers Make Use of the Language Game of Resilience

Resilience is, as a concept and as a discourse, a cultural resource that has experienced a growing importance over the last two decades, especially in the field of psychology. In September 2013, the most important database for scientific productions in psychology (www.psycinfo.org) contained more than 14,000 references concerning resilience. In French-speaking countries, for example, each new book by Boris Cyrulnik, the famous neuropsychiatrist who imported the notion of resilience into the psychological field, sells like hotcakes, with total sales of several million copies (see Marquis).

The Future of Philosophy

AbstractIn this article the editor of the Philosophical Quarterly briefly outlines the editorial process at that journal; explains why it is foolhardy to attempt to predict the future of philosophy; and, finally, attempts such a prediction. Drawing on his recent book Ethics for a Broken World, he argues that climate change, or some other disaster, may lead to a broken world where the optimistic assumptions underlying contemporary philosophy no longer apply. He argues that the possibility of a broken world has deep and unexpected implications for philosophy.

Metalinguistic negation and metaphysical affirmation

In a series of articles, Fine (Monist 83:357–361, 2000; Mind 112:195–234, 2003; Mind 115:1059–1082, 2006) presents some highly compelling objections to monism, the doctrine that spatially coincident objects are identical. His objections rely on Leibniz’s Law and linguistic environments that appear to be immune to the standard charge of non-transparency and substitution failure. In this paper, I respond to Fine’s objections on behalf of the monist. Following Schnieder (Philosophical Quarterly 56:39–54, 2006), I observe that arguments from Leibniz’s Law are valid only if they involve descriptive, rather than metalinguistic, negation. Then I show that the monist is justified in treating the negation in Fine’s objections as metalinguistic in nature. Along the way I make a few methodological remarks about the interaction between the study of natural language and metaphysics. I also present evidence that some of the linguistic environments which Fine relies on are, contrary to appearances, non-transparent.

The Doomsday Argument and the Simulation Argument

The Doomsday Argument and the Simulation Argument share certain structural features, and hence are often discussed together (Bostrom 2003, Are you living in a computer simulation, Philosophical Quarterly, 53:243–255; Aranyosi 2004, The Doomsday Simulation Argument. Or why isn’t the end nigh, and you’re not living in a simulation, http://philsci-archive.pitt.edu/190/ ; Richmond 2008, Doomsday, Bishop Ussher and simulated worlds, Ratio, 21:201–217; Bostrom and Kulczycki 2011 A patch for the Simulation Argument, Analysis, 71:54–61). Both are cases where reflecting on one’s location among a set of possibilities yields a counter-intuitive conclusion—in the first case that the end of humankind is closer than you initially thought, and in the second case that it is more likely than you initially thought that you are living in a computer simulation. Indeed, the two arguments do have some structural similarities. But there are also significant disanalogies between the two arguments, and I argue that these disanalogies mean that the Simulation Argument succeeds and the Doomsday Argument fails.

Locke (and Hobbes) on “Property” in the State of Nature

Anyone reading the second of Two Treatises of Government after Leviathan must notice how much more civil Locke’s state of nature is in comparison to Hobbes’s. Many readers may also notice how much space the Second Treatise gives the subject of property. While Hobbes has only a few scattered sentences on property, Locke has the famous chapter five, which constitutes about a tenth of the whole Second Treatise (§§25–51). Private property in the state of nature seems to be what protects Locke’s Second Treatise from the absolutist conclusion of Hobbes’s Leviathan. The Second Treatise’s account of private property achieves that without even a minimal theory of property. What Locke offers instead in chapter five is a proof that property of a quite limited sort is possible in the state of nature. He does not—and need not—claim that this possibility was ever realized (as one must do in order to have even a minimal theory of property). Insofar as Locke offers a theory of property, it is the same as what Hobbes offers. ANyoNe ReAdINg THe SeCoNd of the Two Treatises of Government after reading the Leviathan must notice how much more civil Locke’s state of nature is compared with that of Hobbes. There is mention of disputes, crimes, vigilantes, and other common disorders, but nothing like the war of all against all. Many readers also have noticed how much space the Second Treatise gives to the subject of property. While Hobbes has only a few scattered sentences, Locke has the long fifth chapter, about a tenth of the whole Second Treatise (§§25–51). The only chapters approaching chapter five in length are those most important for the Second Treatise’s practical purpose: paternal power (§§52–76), the beginnings of political society (§§95–122), conquest (§§175–96), and dissolution of government (§§211–43). These two features of Locke’s state of nature, civility and property, are, of course, related. The existence of private property explains (or, at least, is intended to explain) why Locke’s view of the state of nature can be so much more civil than that of Hobbes. The civility of Locke’s state of nature explains why Locke can separate To reduce endnotes, I generally give references to the Second Treatise in parentheses in the text, using section numbers rather than page numbers for ease of reference independent of edition. All quotations are from the online, standard, and easily searched version of Locke’s Two Treatises of Government, London, 1764: http://oll.libertyfund.org/index.php?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php&title=222 (accessed August 11, 2012). For more on the practical purposes of Two Treatises, see Michael davis, “Locke on Consent: The Two Treatises as Practical ethics,” Philosophical Quarterly 62 (2012): 464–85, as well as works cited there. While (for simplicity of presentation) I write as if Locke were in direct dialogue with Hobbes, I should point out that Locke never explicitly cites any work of Hobbes in Two Treatises, seems never to have had International Philosophical Quarterly Vol. 53, No. 2, Issue 210 (June 2013) pp. 271–287

Kant's Refutation of Idealism: Once More Unto the Breach

AbstractIn ‘Kant's Refutation of Idealism’ (Noûs, 47), I defend a version of the Refutation, pioneered by Paul Guyer in Kant and the Claims of Knowledge, whose core idea is that the only way that one can know the order of one's own past experiences, except in certain rare cases, is by correlating them with the successive states of perceived external objects that caused the experiences. Andrew Chignell has offered a probing critique of my reconstruction of Kant's argument (Philosophical Quarterly, 60), and I have responded (Philosophical Quarterly, 61). In a rebuttal of my response, Chignell raises three new objections (Philosophical Quarterly, 61). My purpose in this paper is to reply to these.

The Many Faces of Truth: A Response to Some Critics

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 There are a variety of ways one can state these truisms. Here I follow Pedersen’s (2012 Pedersen, N. 2012. True Alethic Functionalism?. International Journal of Philosophical Studies, 20(1): 125–133. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) regimentation of my more informal presentation in TOAM. 2 Early statements of this view can be found in Crispin Wright (1992 Wright, C. 1992. Truth and Objectivity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and in Lynch 2001 Lynch, M. P. 2001. “A Functionalist Theory of Truth”. In The Nature of Truth, Edited by: Lynch, M. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]. 3 2012, p. 106. 4 In order to secure the inference, we’d need to consider substitution instances. But the point remains the same. 5 Of course, Jarvis might say that there is no general answer to the above question – that is, after all, just the deflationist’s point. But then why do we need recourse to Jarvis properties to make it? 6 Why not mention (ES) as one of the core truisms about truth? In TOAM, I argue that it is entailed by Objectivity along with some obvious premises about what bears content (see TOAM: p. 9). 7 Or true sentences. Early versions of the views I’m discussing here are found in Devitt 1997 Devitt, M. 1997. Realism and Truth, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Google Scholar] and Field 1972. 8 A sampling of the literature here includes Williamson, 1994; Tappolet, 1997 Tappolet, C. 1997. Mixed inferences: A Problem for Pluralism about Truth Predicates. Analysis, 57: 209–11. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Tappolet, 2000 Tappolet, C. 2000. Truth, Pluralism and Many-valued Logic: A Reply to Beall. Philosophical Quarterly, 50: 382–5. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Pedersen, 2006 Pedersen, N. 2006. What Can the Problem of Mixed Inferences Teach us about Alethic Pluralism?. The Monist, 89: 103–17. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Edwards, 2008 Edwards, D. 2008. How to Solve the Problem of Mixed Conjunctions. Analysis, 68(2): 143–9. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Edwards, 2009 Edwards, D. 2009. Truth Conditions and Truth: Resolving the Problem of Mixed Conjunctions. Analysis, 69(4): 684–8. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Cotnoir, 2009 Cotnoir, A. 2009. Generic Truth and Mixed Conjunctions: Some Alternatives. Analysis, 69(3): 473–9. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; Lynch, 2001 Lynch, M. P. 2001. “A Functionalist Theory of Truth”. In The Nature of Truth, Edited by: Lynch, M. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. [Google Scholar]; Lynch, 2004 Lynch, M.P. 2004. Truth and Multiple Realizability. Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 82: 384–408. [Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], 2006 Lynch, M.P. 2006. ReWrighting Pluralism. The Monist, 89: 63–84. [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]; C. D. Wright, 2005, 2006. 9 Thanks to my critics, Niall Connolly, Nikolaj Pederesen, Ben Jarvis and Douglas Edwards, from whose papers I’ve learned a great deal, to the philosophy department at University College Dublin, and to Maria Baghramian, for conversations and patience.