Already a subscriber? - Login here
Not yet a subscriber? - Subscribe here

Browse by:



Displaying: 1-10 of 10 documents


articles

1. Res Philosophica: Volume > 98 > Issue: 1
Sarah McGrath

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In the first chapter of The Nature of Morality (1977), Gilbert Harman sets out what he takes to be the “basic issue” confronting moral philosophy: whether moral principles can be “tested and confirmed in the way that scientific principles can . . . out in the world” (3–4). Harman argues that they can’t be. In this paper I argue that if we reject the Harmanian view that confirmation is the converse of explanation, then we can agree with the naturalist realist on the basic epistemological issue of whether moral principles can be tested and confirmed in the way that scientific principles can. But I argue that there nevertheless is an important metaphysical way in which moral explanations differ from certain kinds of non-moral explanations. An upshot is that even realists who think that moral facts are necessary, causally inefficacious, and knowable a priori can agree that moral claims are subject to empirical confirmation in the way that scientific claims are.
2. Res Philosophica: Volume > 98 > Issue: 1
Benjamin Winokur

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Alex Byrne (2005; 2011a; 2011b; 2018) has argued that we can gain self-knowledge of our current mental states through the use of a transparency method. A transparency method provides an extrospective rather than introspective route to self-knowledge. For example, one comes to know whether one believes P not by thinking about oneself but by considering the world-directed question of whether P is true. According to Byrne, this psychological process consists in drawing inferences from world-directed propositions to mind-directed conclusions. In this article, I consider whether this ‘Inferential Transparency Method’ can provide us with the self-knowledge that some philosophers have thought we require in order to “critically reason” (Burge 1996), and I conclude that it cannot provide such self-knowledge. The force of this objection depends on how much stock we should place in our status as critical reasoners. However, I conclude by suggesting a more general worry for Byrne’s account.
3. Res Philosophica: Volume > 98 > Issue: 1
Chien-hsing Ho

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
In this article, I first introduce an Indian Madhyamaka Buddhist critique of causality and discuss critically a contemporary Humean interpretation of the critique. After presenting a Chinese Madhyamaka interpretation, I resort to an ontological conception of indeterminacy, termed ontic indeterminacy, which draws on Chinese Madhyamaka thought together with Jessica Wilson’s account of metaphysical indeterminacy, to show that the conception is well equipped to unravel two puzzling issues that arise from the critique. I suggest that a world that consists of things that are indeterminate with respect to certain ways they are is sufficient for it to embody causal phenomena.
4. Res Philosophica: Volume > 98 > Issue: 1
Irem Kurtsal

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
Modal Plenitude—the view that, for every empirically adequate modal profile, there is an object whose modal profile it is—is held to be consistent with each of endurantist and perdurantist (three- and four-dimensionalist) views of persistence. Here I show that, because “endurer” and “perdurer” are two substantially different kinds of entity, compossible with each other and consistent with empirical data, Modal Plenitude actually entails a third view about persistence that I call “Persistence Egalitarianism.” In every non-empty spacetime region there are two persisting objects: one that endures through the temporal dimension of that region, and another that perdures through the region. Additionally, if the argument from anthropocentrism makes a strong case for Modal Plenitude, then an equally strong and parallel case supports Persistence Egalitarianism. I close with the meta-semantic consequences of persistence egalitarianism for ordinary object talk.
5. Res Philosophica: Volume > 98 > Issue: 1
Uriah Kriegel

abstract | view |  rights & permissions | cited by
The idea of “material plenitude” has been gaining traction in recent discussions of the metaphysics of material objects. My main goal here is to show that this idea may have important dialectical implications for the metaphysics of properties—more specifically, that it provides nominalists with new resources in their attempt to reject an ontology of universals. I will recapitulate one of the main arguments against nominalism—due to David Armstrong—and show how plenitude helps the nominalist overcome the argument.

book symposium

6. Res Philosophica: Volume > 98 > Issue: 1
Ben Bramble

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
7. Res Philosophica: Volume > 98 > Issue: 1
Ben Bradley

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
8. Res Philosophica: Volume > 98 > Issue: 1
Connie S. Rosati

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
9. Res Philosophica: Volume > 98 > Issue: 1
Tatjana Visak

view |  rights & permissions | cited by
10. Res Philosophica: Volume > 98 > Issue: 1
Ben Bramble

view |  rights & permissions | cited by