philopapers

Joseph C. Pitt’s slim new book argues persuasively that the philosopher’s traditional focus on theories as the essence of science is misplaced. This kind of objection is frequently leveled at philosophers by historians and those in science studies, and for good reason. Pitt’s critique is much broader and more interesting than the typical one since […]

In the introduction to the book, Sarah McGrath explains her key aims. She has an overall working hypothesis: moral knowledge can be acquired in any of the ways in which we acquire ordinary empirical knowledge, and our efforts to acquire and preserve such knowledge are subject to frustration in all of the same ways that our

When you were born into the world, you began with a basic repertoire of sensory-perceptual experiences representing the world around you. On the basis of those experiences, you acquired beliefs and desires about things in your environment. Then you learned a language and became able to think about a great many things far outside of

Roughly sixty years ago, certain interpreters dragged the study of Plato’s dialogues into the modern world by subjecting them to analytic philosophical methods. So goes the prevailing history of Plato scholarship. With this development, specialists could explain their research to their colleagues using familiar modern categories, and — what is perhaps just another way of

Dialetheism (or, more simply, “glut theory” as dual of familiar truth-value “gap theories”) is the view according to which there are true contradictions. Quite a hard view to legitimate, which explains why it seems to have only very few genuine supporters. Yet, it is not, or it is supposed not to be, confused with the

This timely collection of essays explores a bustling area of moral epistemology, namely, how higher-order evidence affects the rationality of moral beliefs. Arguments from disagreement between moral peers and evolutionary debunking arguments both employ higher-order evidence to try to establish that some/many/all of our moral beliefs are unjustified and do not amount to knowledge. Epistemology

Set theory is widely regarded as the foundation for (nearly) all of mathematics. This raises the question of what a set is and what sets there are. According to the famous iterative conception, sets are “formed” in stages: we start at stage zero with some individuals, or nonsets; at stage one, we form all sets of

In this well-argued, engaging book, Peter Carruthers makes a comprehensive case for a global workspace theory of phenomenal consciousness, and considers the upshot for animals: are they phenomenally conscious, and does it matter morally? His answer: there is no fact of the matter about whether animals are phenomenally conscious, but this doesn’t change anything morally,

Early on in my writing courses, I ask students to define their sense of rhetoric. Responses range from “persuasion” to “manipulation,” but they tend to share a negative connotation. Little wonder: In America today, the word is often used to dismiss a political opponent. Whereas a Democrat may find a favorite candidate’s speech inspiring, a Republican

Since the dawn of philosophical knowledge, the existence of truth has been debated. We all talk about the truth. We all ask for the truth. We demand it, even if we sometimes deny its existence. This article will attempt to give another view of what, for now, I believe to be the truth. In journalism,