Arts and Humanities Commons^™

Practical Reasons, Theoretical Reasons, And Permissive And Prohibitive Balancing, John Brunero

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Philosophers have often noted a contrast between practical and theoretical reasons when it comes to cases involving equally balanced reasons. When there are strong practical reasons for A-ing, and equally strong practical reasons for some incompatible option, B-ing, the agent is permitted to make an arbitrary choice between them, having sufficient reason to A and sufficient reason to B. But when there is strong evidence for P and equally strong evidence for ~P, one isn’t permitted to simply believe one or the other. Instead, one must withhold belief, neither believing that P nor believing that ~P. This paper examines what …

Impossible Worlds And The Safety Of Philosophical Beliefs, Zack Garrett, Zachariah Wrublewski

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Epistemological accounts that make use of a safety condition on knowledge, historically, face serious problems regarding beliefs that are necessarily true. This is because necessary truths are true in all possible worlds, and so such beliefs can be safe even when the bases for the beliefs are epistemically problematic. The existence of such problematically safe beliefs would undermine a major motivation for the condition itself: the ability to evaluate how well a belief tracks the truth. This paper argues that incorporating impossible worlds into the evaluation of beliefs solves this problem, but only if the relevant account of impossible worlds …

Essence And Explanation, Albert Casullo

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

In Necessary Beings, Bob Hale addresses two questions: What is the source of necessity? What is the source of our knowledge of it? He offers novel responses to them in terms of the meta- physical notion of nature or, more familiarly, essence. In this paper, I address Hale’s response to the first question. My assessment is negative. I argue that his essentialist explanation of the source of necessity suffers from three significant shortcomings. First, Hale’s leading example of an essentialist explanation merely asserts that the nature of an entity explains some necessity, but leaves unexplained how it does so. Second, …

On The Transcendental Freedom Of The Intellect, Colin Mclear

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

One well-known point of emphasis in the critical philosophy is that only transcendental idealism can safeguard the possibility of the spontaneity and agent-causal freedom of rational beings. If such freedom were not possible, then in Kant’s estimation there would be no hope for conceiving of rational agents as morally responsible; for if rational agents were totally in the grip of the deterministic causal nexus of the Spatio-temporal world then moral requirements could not apply.

However, as the epigraph above makes clear, Kant also considers the causal nexus of phenomenal nature to threaten the status of human beings not just as …

Idealization And The Wrong Kind Of Reasons*, John Brunero

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

According to a simplistic fitting attitude analysis of admirable, what it is for someone to be admirable just is for admiration to be an appropriate attitude to have toward that person. But this analysis faces the “wrong kind of reasons” or “conflation” problem: it may sometimes be appropriate to admire someone without that person being admirable. For instance, if my admiring an evil dictator would somehow save 100 lives, it would be appropriate for me to admire him. But that doesn’t make him admirable.

The fact that it would somehow save 100 lives is the “wrong kind of reason” for …

Review Of Potentiality: From Dispositions To Modality By Barbara Vetter, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

In recent years, there have been several books written about dispositions. Barbara Vetter’s Potentiality: From Dispositions to Modality is another, but it is not just another. Vetter’s book stands out as an ambitious, original, and systematic attempt to develop a new account of metaphysical modality in terms of dispositional properties she calls ‘potentialities.’ According to Vetter, saying that something has a disposition, like fragility or flammability, is to say something about what it can do, such as break or burn. Dispositional concepts are members of a broader class of modal concepts, which also includes necessity, possibility, causation, laws, and essence. …

Pollock And Sturgeon On Defeaters, Albert Casullo

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Scott Sturgeon has recently challenged Pollock’s account of undercutting defeaters. The challenge involves three primary contentions: (1) the account is both too strong and too weak, (2) undercutting defeaters exercise their power to defeat only in conjunction with higher-order beliefs about the basis of the lower-order beliefs whose justification they target, and (3) since rebutting defeaters exercise their power to defeat in isolation, rebutting and undercutting defeaters work in fundamentally different ways. My goal is to reject each of these contentions. I maintain that (1) Sturgeon fails to show that Pollock’s account of undercutting defeaters is either too strong or …

Real Potential, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

There's a student in my philosophy class who has "real potential." I might express this thought in any of the following ways: "She is potentially a philosopher"; "She is a potential philosopher"; "She has the potential to be a philosopher." The first way uses a cognate of "potential" as an adverb to modify "is." The second ways uses "potential" as an adjective to modify "philosopher." However, the third way uses "potential" as a noun to refer to something that the student has. What kind of thing is this potential? One worry about even asking this question is that this nominalization …

Feminist Metaphysics: Can This Marriage Be Saved?, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Feminist metaphysics is simultaneously feminist theorizing and metaphysics. Part of feminist metaphysics concerns social ontology and considers such questions as, What is the nature of social kinds, such as genders? Feminist metaphysicians also consider whether gendered perspectives influence metaphysical theorizing; for example, have approaches to the nature of the self or free will been conducted from a masculinist perspective, and would a feminist perspective yield different theories? Some feminist metaphysicians develop metaphysical theories with the aim of furthering certain social goals, such as gender equality.

Despite these and other intriguing research projects, feminist metaphysics faces challenges from two flanks: one …

Book Reviews: Feldman, Fred. Distributive Justice: Getting What We Deserve From Our Country., Joseph Mendola

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Fred Feldman is known for the view that consequentialists should admit a fundamental role for desert in moral evaluation. But this book sketches a different desertism. It is a theory of what Feldman calls “political-economic distributive justice,” according to which such justice is a matter of getting what one deserves.

The view, briefly stated in Feldman’s theoretical vocabulary, is this: First, there is perfect political-economic distributive justice in a country if and only if, and in virtue of the fact that, in every case in which a citizen of that country deserves a political-economic desert, he or she receives that …

Indirect Directness, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

In “Teleological Dispositions,” Nick Kroll appeals to teleology to account for the way that dispositions seem to be directed toward their merely possible manifestations. He argues that his teleological account of dispositions (TAD) does a better job of making sense of this directedness than rival approaches that appeal to conditional statements or physical intentionality. In this short critique, I argue that, without satisfactory clarification of a number of issues, TAD does not adequately account for the directedness of dispositions. I focus on two aspects of TAD: the Activation Principle, and the proposed necessary and sufficient conditions for being a dispositional …

Book Review: Brandom, Robert. From Empiricism To Expressivism: Brandom Reads Sellars., Colin Mclear

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

One of the better known of the many bons mots of the Sellarsian corpus concerns his definition of philosophy: it is the attempt to understand “how things in the broadest possible sense of the term hang together in the broadest possible sense of the term.” When applied to Sellars’s philosophy in particular, one might be forgiven for doubting the possible success of such an endeavor. Richard Rorty once quipped of Sellars’s followers that they were either “left-wing” or “right-wing,” emphasizing one line of thought in Sellars’s work to the exclusion of the other. The two lines of thought to which …

A Dispositional Account Of Gender, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

This paper argues that one’s gender is partially constituted by extrinsic factors. In Sect. 2, I very briefly explain my understanding of sex, gender, and transgender. In Sect. 3, a survey recent accounts of gender as a socially constructed or conferred property, ending with Judith Butler’s idea that gender is a pattern of behavior in a social context. In Sect. 4, I suggest a modification of Butler’s idea, according to which gender is a behavioral disposition. In Sect. 5, I develop my dispositional account by responding to a worry that it is too essentialist. In Sect. 6, I defend my …

Book Review: Schroeder, Mark. Explaining The Reasons We Share: Explanation And Expression In Ethics, Vol. 1., John Brunero

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

This volume is a collection of eleven essays by Mark Schroeder, including one previously unpublished paper, divided into four parts. Schroeder’s substantive introduction to the volume explains the unifying argumentative thread running through these essays and will be useful even to those who have read the essays separately. The essays themselves are superb. Schroeder’s work is unmatched in its clarity, incisiveness, originality, creativity, and depth. And this volume will leave the reader with a new appreciation for various ways in which assumptions about the structure of normative explanations—particularly about what Schroeder calls the Standard Model Theory—are important to central debates …

Book Reviews: Broome, John. Rationality Through Reasoning., Andrew Cullison, Aaron Bronfman

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Andrew Cullison

There is one final worry about bringing emotions into a theory of moral perception that might be best drawn out with an analogy to nonmoral perception. Suppose we were beings with a slightly different nonmoral perceptual apparatus. Suppose phenomenal qualia that we typically experience when we observe objects also showed up in our cognitive life when we weren’t experiencing the presence of an object. Basically, we would periodically have apparent perceptions of objects when there were no objects. Furthermore, suppose we could know that this was sometimes the case. I suspect we would feel rational pressure to be …

Book Review: Niederberger, Andreas, And Schink, Philipp, Eds. Republican Democracy: Liberty, Law And Politics., Jeremy Waldron, Christopher Mccammon

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Jeremy Waldron

This is a poorly organized book, and it does not really present any well- structured arguments. In a blurb on the back of the book, Christopher Eisgruber says that “every serious scholar of religious toleration will have to contend with Leiter’s bold claims.” That would have been so if Leiter had proceeded less precipitously to the question that interests him and then focused on it more steadily— if, for example, he had first identified the classic arguments for toleration and criticized them and had then gone on to argue that neither the classic tolerationist arguments ðsuch as they …

Book Review: Brennan, Geoffrey; Eriksson, Lina; Goodin, Robert E.; And Southwood, Nicho- Las. Explaining Norms., David K. Henderson

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Explaining Norms is a work in philosophy of social science aspiring to provide an account of norms, their general character, their kinds ðformal, legal, moral, and socialÞ, what they can explain, and what explains their dynamic ðemergence, persistence, and unravelingÞ. The authors engage with various positions in ethics, political philosophy, and ðto some extentÞ the philosophy of law. The discussion is rewarding and inventive—it provides distinctive and intriguing views on several topics ðe.g., on the distinction between moral and social normsÞ. There are a lot of ideas here. Perhaps this is predictable, given that the work is a product of …

Dispositions And Potentialities, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Dispositions and potentialities seem importantly similar. To talk about what something has the potential or disposition to do is to make a claim about a future possibilitythe "threats and promises" that fill the world (Goodman 1983, 41). In recent years, dispositions have been the subject of much conceptual analysis and metaphysical speculation. The inspiration for this essay is the hope that that work can shed some light on discussions of potentiality. I compare the concepts of disposition and potentiality, consider whether accounts of these concepts are subject to similar difficulties, and whether having a disposition or a potentiality can depend …

Review Of Getting Causes From Powers By Stephen Mumford And Rani Lill Anjum, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Some philosophers have suggested that having powers in one’s ontology has the advantage of providing resources for an account of causation (see Cartwright 1999; Harré 1970; Mill 1843; Whitehead 1929). But what would a theory of causation look like if we assume that powers are real? In Getting Causes from Powers, Mumford and Anjum make what is perhaps the first sustained attempt to answer that question. The basic idea is that, if there are powers, understood as property-like entities that have manifestations which can be merely possible, then causation is a matter of powers manifesting. According to the authors, …

Reconciliation Or Reconstruction? Further Thoughts On Political Forgiveness, Jean Axelrad Cahan

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Over the past decade a substantial literature has emerged on the concept of political forgiveness and the process of restorative justice. This article argues that importing an idea of forgiveness into political affairs is a mistake. It is not necessary for the promotion of peace and security, and it is has been construed in a way that leans heavily toward Christian conceptions of forgiveness, as is evident in the influence of Desmond Tutu. The article also examines the influence of Hegelian recognition theory in current discussions of the political benefits of forgiveness, and reviews the case of postwar German-Jewish relations, …

Kant On Animal Consciousness, Colin Mclear

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Consider two different ways of characterizing the cognitive requirements necessary for perceptual awareness of an objective physical world.¹ On the one hand, objective perceptual awareness may only require the sensory capacity for awareness of particular physical individuals and their features, perhaps along with the minimal kinds of cognitive processing needed to integrate received sensory information with behavior. On the other hand, objective perceptual awareness may require not only these low-level cognitive capacities but also conceptual capacities, or perhaps even specific concepts.² Call these two lines of thought regarding objective perpetual awareness non-conceptualism and conceptualism respectively.

Manifestations As Effects, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

According to a standard characterization of dispositions, when a disposition is activated by a stimulus, a manifestation of that disposition typically occurs. For example, when flammable gasoline encounters a spark in an oxygen-rich environment, the manifestation of flammability—combustion—occurs. In the dispositions/powers literature, it is common to assume that a manifestation is an effect of a disposition being activated. (I use “disposition” and “power” interchangeably). I address two questions in this chapter: Could all manifestations be effects that involve things acquiring only dispositional properties? And, is thinking of manifestations as contributions to effects preferable to thinking of them as effects? I …

Review Of Thomas Reid’S Theory Of Perception By Ryan Nichols, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

In Thomas Reid’s Theory of Perception, Ryan Nichols presents an interpretation and critique of the views of one of the most interesting thinkers of the early modern period, in particular, as the title indicates, those relating to perception. The book covers Reid’s Newtonian method, perception through touch and vision, the intentionality of perceptual states, the role of sensations in perception, perception of primary and secondary qualities, and the unity of perception via a discussion of Molyneux’s question regarding the perceptual abilities of one with recently acquired sight. Nichols’s book is somewhat challenging, more suitable to someone who is familiar …

Gender Identity Disorder, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

According to the DSM IV, a person with GID is a male or female that feels a strong identification with the opposite sex and experiences considerable stress because of their actual sex (Task Force on DSM-IV and American Psychiatric Association, 2000). The way GID is characterized by health professionals, patients, and lay people belies certain assumptions about gender that are strongly held, yet nevertheless questionable. The phenomena of transsexuality and sex-reassignment surgery puts into stark relief the following question: “What does it mean to be male or female?” But while the answer to that question may be informed by contemplation …

Kant On Duties To Animals, Nelson T. Potter Jr.

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

According to Kant we human beings are finite rational beings, who also have an animal nature. Kant occasionally speculates that perhaps on other planets there may be quite different sorts of finite rational animals. But of course we have no specific knowledge of any such. Given that fact, all of our duties are duties to other human beings. We can have no duties to God because he is not an object of possible experience. There are no human beings such that they have only duties and no rights--they would be slaves or serfs. And the apparent duties that we have …

Applying The Categorical Imperative In Kant's Rechtslehre, Nelson T. Potter Jr.

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

During the last forty years there has been considerable discussion of the application of the categorical imperative to derive conclusions concerning particular moral duties and rights in Kant's moral philosophy. Much attention was focused on the four examples of such applications that occur in Chapter Two of the Groundwork, especially the first presentation of those examples, in relation to the "universal law" formulation of the categorical imperative, as opposed to their second run through in the same chapter, in relation to the second formulation of the categorical imperative, on respect for persons. In more recent years the often fuller …

Does Evolutionary Science Rule Out The Theistic God? The Johnson-Pennock Debate, Dan D. Crawford

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Phillip Johnson, in a number of recent writings, most notably in his 1991 book, Darwin on Trial. has called into question the whole of evolutionary science by arguing that it is based on the philosophical system of naturalism which assumes without justification that God plays no part in the process by which living things come to be. The philosopher, Robert Pennock, in his recent book, Tower of Babel: The Evidence against the New Creationism, defends science against Johnson's charge, arguing first that naturalism is not atheistic and so does not deny God, and second, that the principle naturalism uses to …

Reid’S Foundation For The Primary/Secondary Quality Distinction, Jennifer Mckitrick

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

Thomas Reid (1710-1796) offers an under-appreciated account of the primary/secondary quality distinction. He gives sound reasons for rejecting the views of Locke, Boyle, Galileo and others, and presents a better alternative, according to which the distinction is epistemic rather than metaphysical. Primary qualities, for Reid, are qualities whose intrinsic natures can be known through sensation. Secondary qualities, on the other hand, are unknown causes of sensations. Some may object that Reid’s view is internally inconsistent, or unacceptably relativistic. However, a deeper understanding shows that it is consistent, and relative only to normal humans. To acquire this deeper understanding, one must …

Kant And Capital Punishment Today, Nelson T. Potter

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

We will consider alternative ways that Kant’s philosophical views on ethics generally and on punishment more particularly could be brought into harmony with the present near consensus of opposition to the death penalty. We will make use of the notion of the contemporary consensus about certain issues, particularly equality of the sexes and the death penalty, found in widespread agreement, though not unanimity. Of course, it is always possible that some consensuses are wrong, or misguided, or mistaken. We should not put too much philosophical weight on the notion of a consensus here. If there is a consensus for the …

Ultra-Strong Internalism And The Reliabilist Insight, Dan D. Crawford

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

When someone believes something that is justified for her, what part does the subject play in her state of being justified? I will answer this question by developing a strong internalist account of justification according to which the justification of a believing for a subject consists in her having grounds for her belief, and holding the belief in recognition of those grounds. But the internalist theory I defend incorporates key elements of reliabilism into its account. Using perception as a model for justification, I show how ordinary perceivers would appeal to external factors to support their perceptual beliefs, and normally …