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Multidimensional concepts are everywhere, and they are important. Examples include moral value, welfare, scientific confirmation, democracy, and biodiversity. How, if at all, can we aggregate the underlying dimensions of a multidimensional concept F to yield verdicts about which things are Fer than which overall? Social choice theory can be used to model and investigate this aggregation problem. Here, we focus on a particularly thorny problem made salient by this social choice-theoretic framework: the underlying dimensions of a given concept might be (...) measurable on different types of scales—e.g., some ordinal and some cardinal. An underappreciated impossibility theorem due to Anna Khmelnitskaya shows that seemingly plausible constraints on aggregation across scale types are inconsistent. This impossibility threatens to render the notion of overall Fness incoherent. We attempt to defuse this threat, arguing that the impossibility depends on an overly restrictive conception of measurement and of how measurement constrains aggregation. Adopting a more flexible—and, we think, more perspicuous—conception of measurement opens an array of possibilities for aggregation across disparate scale types. (shrink)

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Volume 24, Issue 7, July 2024, Page 6-12.

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Kant's lectures on anthropology capture him at the height of his intellectual power. They are immensely important for advancing our understanding of Kant's conception of anthropology, its development, and the notoriously difficult relationship between it and the critical philosophy. This 2003 collection of essays by some of the leading commentators on Kant offers a systematic account of the philosophical importance of this material that should nevertheless prove of interest to historians of ideas and political theorists. There are two broad approaches (...) adopted: a number of the essays consider the systematic relations of the anthropology to critical philosophy, especially speculative knowledge and ethics. Other essays focus on the anthropology as a major source for the clarification of both the content and development of Kant's work. The volume also serves as an interpretative complement to the translation of the lectures in the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Immanuel Kant. (shrink)

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Peterson et al. (2023) present a range of ethical issues that arise when considering the use of psychedelic substances within medicine. But psychedelics are, by their nature, boundary-dissolving, a...

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It is a testimony to the enduring importance of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that, 30 years on, its doctrines of normal science and paradigm, incommensurability and revolution continue to challenge metascien tists and stimulate vigorous debate. Critique has mainly come from philosophers and historians; by and large, interested sociologists have embraced Kuhn. Un justifiably so, this article argues, bringing to light a serious difficulty or anom aly in his account of the social side of science. Contrary to (...) what he claims, scientific knowledge is not the achievement of organic communities. It is con structed in trans-epistemic arenas by diverse participants, laypeople, and specialists. Accepting community is a flawed concept in the sociology of science, and in appreciating the major role Kuhn assigned it, the Kuhnian system looks less robust than it did before. (shrink)

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We present the first published ethnographic description of landscape burning by Hadza hunter-gatherers of northern Tanzania and identify environmental, social, and cultural influences on Hadza landscape burning, thereby broadening the ethnographic record of anthropogenic burning practices described for hunter-gatherer communities. We report interview data collected in 2022 and 2023, describing their practices and attitudes regarding the causes and consequences of burning. We provide context by comparing our observations with those recorded for hunting and gathering populations in Africa, Australia, and North (...) America. Hadza landscape burning is generally a solitary and male-dominated activity, contrary to ethnographic accounts of Indigenous landscape burning from North America and Australia. The primary goals stated by Hadza for landscape burning were improved hunting, reduced hazards from dangerous animals, and to reduce the density of livestock. Firsthand observations suggest that landscape burning has decreased over the past 20 years, and this historical trend is supported by interviews. Satellite imagery also suggests an overall decrease in burning activity in the region from 2001 to 2022. Among the Hadza, landscape burning is a culturally influenced and strongly gender-biased activity that is rapidly disappearing. Because burning can radically transform landscapes, these practices often generate or amplify conflicts of interest between groups with different land use strategies. Hadza report serious social conflict with pastoralists over landscape burning, and our study suggests this tension has constrained the practice in the past two decades. (shrink)

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It is a testimony to the enduring importance of Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions that, 30 years on, its doctrines of normal science and paradigm, incommensurability and revolution continue to challenge metascien tists and stimulate vigorous debate. Critique has mainly come from philosophers and historians; by and large, interested sociologists have embraced Kuhn. Un justifiably so, this article argues, bringing to light a serious difficulty or "anom aly" in his account of the social side of science. Contrary to (...) what he claims, scientific knowledge is not the achievement of organic communities. It is con structed in "trans-epistemic arenas" by diverse participants, laypeople, and specialists. Accepting "community" is a flawed concept in the sociology of science, and in appreciating the major role Kuhn assigned it, the Kuhnian system looks less robust than it did before. (shrink)

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It was, until recently, accepted that the two classes of acetylcholine (ACh) receptors are distinct in an important sense: muscarinic ACh receptors signal via heterotrimeric GTP binding proteins (G proteins), whereas nicotinic ACh receptors (nAChRs) open to allow flux of Na+, Ca2+, and K+ ions into the cell after activation. Here we present evidence of direct coupling between G proteins and nAChRs in neurons. Based on proteomic, biophysical, and functional evidence, we hypothesize that binding to G proteins modulates the activity (...) and signaling of nAChRs in cells. It is important to note that while this hypothesis is new for the nAChR, it is consistent with known interactions between G proteins and structurally related ligand‐gated ion channels. Therefore, it underscores an evolutionarily conserved metabotropic mechanism of G protein signaling via nAChR channels.Also watch the Video Abstract. (shrink)

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Bayesians take “definite” or “single-case” probabilities to be basic. Definite probabilities attach to closed formulas or propositions. We write them here using small caps: PROB(P) and PROB(P/Q). Most objective probability theories begin instead with “indefinite” or “general” probabilities (sometimes called “statistical probabilities”). Indefinite probabilities attach to open formulas or propositions. We write indefinite probabilities using lower case “prob” and free variables: prob(Bx/Ax). The indefinite probability of an A being a B is not about any particular A, but rather about the (...) property of being an A. In this respect, its logical form is the same as that of relative frequencies. For instance, we might talk about the probability of a human baby being female. That probability is about human babies in general — not about individuals. If we examine a baby and determine conclusively that she is female, then the definite probability of her being female is 1, but that does not alter the indefinite probability of human babies in general being female. Most objective approaches to probability tie probabilities to relative frequencies in some way, and the resulting probabilities have the same logical form as the relative frequencies. That is, they are indefinite probabilities. The simplest theories identify indefinite probabilities with relative frequencies.3 It is often objected that such “finite frequency theories” are inadequate because our probability judgments often diverge from relative frequencies. For example, we can talk about a coin being fair (and so the indefinite probability of a flip landing heads is 0.5) even when it is flipped only once and then destroyed (in which case the relative frequency is either 1 or 0). For understanding such indefinite probabilities, it has been suggested that we need a notion of probability that talks about possible instances of properties as well as actual instances.. (shrink)

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What are the effects of circumcision on sexual function and experience? And what does sex—in the sense related to gender—have to do with the ethics of circumcision?Jacobs and Arora (2015) give short shrift to the first of these questions; and they do not seem to have considered the second. In this commentary, I explore the relationship between sex (in both senses) and infant male circumcision, and draw some conclusions about the ongoing debate regarding this controversial practice.

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This paper defends the claim that there is a deep tension between the principle of countable additivity and the one-third solution to the Sleeping Beauty problem. The claim that such a tension exists has recently been challenged byBrian Weatherson, who has attempted to provide a countable additivity-friendly argument for the one-third solution. This attempt is shown to be unsuccessful. And it is argued that the failure of this attempt sheds light on the status of the principle of indifference (...) that underlies the tension between countable additivity and the one-third solution. (shrink)

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In two excellent recent papers, Jacob Ross has argued that the standard arguments for the ‘thirder’ answer to the Sleeping Beauty puzzle lead to violations of countable additivity. The problem is that most arguments for that answer generalise in awkward ways when he looks at the whole class of what he calls Sleeping Beauty problems. In this note I develop a new argument for the thirder answer that doesn't generalise in this way.

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Brian Earp’s and Julian Savulescu’s provocatively titled “Love Drugs: The Chemical Future of Relationships” is a philosophically rigorous, scientifically informed, and yet wholly accessible study o...

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We have benefited from conversations with Archon Fung,Brian Jacob, Todd Pittinsky, Peter Schuck, Ani Satz, Andrew Williams, and students in a joint class on statistics and ethics at the John F. Kennedy School of Government in October 2002. We are also grateful to our audience at the conference “The Priority of Practice,” organized by Jonathan Wolff at University College London in September 2003, and to Arthur Applbaum, Miriam Avins, Frances Kamm, Simon Keller, Frederick Schauer, Alan Wertheimer, and the (...) Editors of Phi- losophy & Public Affairs for insightful comments. We have benefited from prepublication reading of Schauer’s work on profiling, Profiles, Probabilities, and Stereotypes (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2003). We thank Avedis Koutoujian for research assistance. (shrink)

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I explore two accounts of properties within a dispositional essentialist (or causal powers) framework, the pure powers view and the powerful qualities view. I first attempt to clarify precisely what the pure powers view is, and then raise objections to it. I then present the powerful qualities view and, in order to avoid a common misconception, offer a restatement of it that I shall call the truthmaker view. I end by briefly defending the truthmaker view against objections.

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D. M. Armstrong famously claims that deterministic laws of nature are contingent relations between universals and that his account can also be straightforwardly extended to irreducibly probabilistic laws of nature. For the most part, philosophers have neglected to scrutinize Armstrong’s account of probabilistic laws. This is surprising precisely because his own claims about probabilistic laws make it unclear just what he takes them to be. We offer three interpretations of what Armstrong-style probabilistic laws are, and argue that all three interpretations (...) are incompatible either with some feature of Armstrong’s broader metaphysics or with essential features of his account of laws (or both). (shrink)

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Early in the 1980s, a new category of crime appeared in the criminal law lexicon. In response to what was said to be an epidemic of prejudice-motivated violence, Congress and many state legislatures passed a wave of 'hate crime' laws that required the collection of statistics and enhanced the punishment of crimes motivated by certain prejudices. This book places in socio-legal perspective both the hate crime problem and society's response to it. From the outset,Jacobs and Potter adopt a (...) skeptical if not critical stance. They argue that hate crime is a hopelessly muddled concept and that legal definitions of the term are riddled with ambiguity and subjectivity. Moreover, no matter how hate crime is defined, the authors find no evidence to support the claim that the US is experiencing a hate crime epidemic—nor that the number or rate of hate crimes is at an historic zenith. (shrink)

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A long tradition of research including classical rhetoric, esthetics and poetics theory, formalism and structuralism, as well as current perspectives in (neuro)cognitive poetics has investigated structural and functional aspects of literature reception. Despite a wealth of literature published in specialized journals like Poetics, however, still little is known about how the brain processes and creates literary and poetic texts. Still, such stimulus material might be suited better than other genres for demonstrating the complexities with which our brain constructs the world (...) in and around us, because it unifies thought and language, music and imagery in a clear, manageable way, most often with play, pleasure, and emotion (Schrott andJacobs, 2011 ). In this paper, I discuss methods and models for investigating the neuronal and cognitive-affective bases of literary reading together with pertinent results from studies on poetics, text processing, emotion, or neuroaesthetics, and outline current challenges and future perspectives. (shrink)

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We use concepts of causal powers and their relatives-dispositions, capacities, and abilities-to describe the world around us, both in everyday life and in scientific practice. This volume presents new work on the nature of causal powers, and their connections with other phenomena within metaphysics, philosophy of science, and philosophy of mind.

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This paper defends a non-reductive realist view of the sensible qualities—roughly, the view that the sensible qualities are really instantiated by the external objects of perception, and not reducible to response-independent physical properties or response-dependent relational properties. I begin by clarifying and motivating the non-reductive realist view. I then consider some familiar difficulties for the view. Addressing these difficulties leads to the development and defence of a general theory, inspired by Russellian Monist theories of consciousness, of how the sensible qualities (...) relate to physical reality. I conclude by showing how this theory, which I call ‘Secondary Quality Russellian Monism’, resolves the most significant difficulties for the non-reductive realist view of the sensible qualities. (shrink)

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Despite advances in feminism, the "law of the father" remains the dominant model of Western psychological and cultural analysis, and the law of the mother continues to exist as an underdeveloped and marginal concept. In her radical rereading of the Greek myth, _Oresteia_, AmberJacobs hopes to rectify the occlusion of the mother and reinforce her role as an active agent in the laws that determine and reinforce our cultural organization. According to Greek myth, Metis, Athena's mother, was Zeus's (...) first wife. Zeus swallowed Metis to prevent her from bearing children who would overthrow him. Nevertheless, Metis bore Zeus a child-Athena-who sprang forth fully formed from his head. In Aeschylus's _Oresteia_, Athena's motherless status functions as a crucial justification for absolving Orestes of the crime of matricide. In his defense of Orestes, Zeus argues that the father is more important than the mother, using Athena's "motherless" birth as an example. Conducting a close reading of critical works on Aeschylus's text,Jacobs reveals that psychoanalytic theorists have unwittingly reproduced the denial of Metis in their own critiques. This repression, which can be found in the work of Sigmund Freud and Melanie Klein as well as in the work of more contemporary theorists such as André Green and Luce Irigaray, has resulted in both an incomplete analysis of Oresteia and an inability to account for the fantasies and unconscious processes that fall outside the oedipal/patricidal paradigm. By bringing the story of Athena's mother, Metis, to the forefront,Jacobs challenges the primacy of the Oedipus myth in Western culture and psychoanalysis and introduces a bold new theory of matricide and maternal law. She finds that the Metis myth exists in cryptic forms within Aeschylus's text, uncovering what she terms the "latent content of the Oresteian myth," and argues that the occlusion of the law of the mother is proof of the patriarchal structures underlying our contemporary social and psychic realities.Jacobs's work not only provides new insight into the Oresteian trilogy but also advances a postpatriarchal model of the symbolic order that has strong ramifications for psychoanalysis, feminism, and theories of representation, as well as for clinical practice and epistemology. (shrink)

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The paper offers a partial, broad-stroke sketch of visual perception, and argues that certain kinds of normal visual misperceptions are systematic and widespread.

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Chris L. Firestone and NathanJacobs integrate and interpret the work of leading Kant scholars to come to a new and deeper understanding of Kant's difficult book, Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. In this text, Kant's vocabulary and language are especially tortured and convoluted. Readers have often lost sight of the thinker's deep ties to Christianity and questioned the viability of the work as serious philosophy of religion. Firestone andJacobs provide strong and cogent grounds for (...) taking Kant's religion seriously and defend him against the charges of incoherence. In their reading, Christian essentials are incorporated into the confines of reason, and they argue that Kant establishes a rational religious faith in accord with religious conviction as it is elaborated in his mature philosophy. For readers at all levels, this book articulates a way to ground religion and theology in a fully fledged defense of Religion which is linked to the larger corpus of Kant's philosophical enterprise. (shrink)

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We present an original emergent individuals view of human persons, on which persons are substantial biological unities that exemplify metaphysically emergent mental states. We argue that this view allows for a coherent model of identity-preserving resurrection from the dead consistent with orthodox Christian doctrine, one that improves upon alternatives accounts recently proposed by a number of authors. Our model is a variant of the “falling elevator” model advanced by Dean Zimmerman that, unlike Zimmerman’s, does not require a closest continuer account (...) of personal identity. We end by raising some remaining theological concerns. (shrink)

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This special issue brings together some of the highlights from the fifty-fifth annual meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. Utah Valley University hosted the conference on October 20–22, 2016, in Salt Lake City, Utah. The title of this issue, "Placing Transcontinental Philosophy," attempts to capture a sense of the expanding diversity and depth of continental philosophy in the new millennium as it is practiced and advanced by SPEP. The neologism transcontinental philosophy signifies not only the growing global (...) reach but also the profound developments of continental philosophy as it has been taken up through other cultural standpoints and linguistic orientations. The articles... (shrink)

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In this article, I develop how the phenomenological understanding of the intentionality of consciousness allows us to formulate a theory of personal identity that can at least account for the continuity of consciousness through time, provide an account of a certain aspect of what it means to be a person, namely to be able to appropriate one’s past as one’s own, and give an original answer to the question of personal identity and state in what the identity of a person (...) through time consists. After having developed the outlines for such a phenomenological theory of personal identity, I conclude that the provided account of the person is the correlate of the phenomenological concept of world. (shrink)

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Freedom and moral responsibility have one foot in the practical realm of human affairs and the other in the esoteric realm of fundamental metaphysics—or so we believe. This has been denied, especially in the metaphysics-bashing era occupying the first two-thirds or so of the twentieth century, traces of which linger in the present day. But the reasons for this denial seem to us quite implausible. Certainly, the argument for the general bankruptcy of metaphysics has been soundly discredited. Arguments from Strawson (...) and others that our moral practices are too deeply embedded in human life to rest on anything as tenuous as a metaphysical doctrine far from the thoughts of ordinary people would seem to prove too much: we can easily imagine fantastic scenarios far from the thoughts of ordinary people—involving, say, alien manipulation or massive deception—that, if true, would clearly undermine claims to freedom and responsibility. For still other philosophers, the separation of the moral life from (some) metaphysical issues is prescriptive, not descriptive: it is a recommendation that we revise ordinary moral thought by severing its allegedly problematic links to metaphysics. (Some philosophers appear to hover undecided between such a prescriptive project and a Strawsonian descriptive claim.) We suspect that the prospects of retaining the binding force of ordinary moral thought, were such a reconceived moral practice widely embraced, are bleak. A transition to something closer to moral nihilism seems at least as likely. In any case, our interest here is in descriptive metaphysics, not revisionary. -/- To say as we do that freedom and moral responsibility have a partly metaphysical character is not to suggest that they can be had only if some highly specific version of a particular metaphysical framework is correct. Instead, we suggest in what follows, it is a broadly neo-Humean metaphysics that is not hospitable to freedom (for reasons distinctive to the metaphysics), while a broadly neo-Aristotelian metaphysics is. But we also think (and it is the main aim of our paper to show) that different versions of the neo- Aristotelian metaphysics lead to rather different metaphysical accounts of free and responsible action. Specifically, we will argue that (1) the most satisfactory account of human freedom within the broadly neo-Aristotelian metaphysics is agent-causal, but that (2) two different versions of the general metaphysics will lead to important differences in the agent-causal account of freedom. Adjust the details of your general metaphysics, and the details of your account of freedom are transformed in significant ways. Action theory cannot properly be pursued in isolation from general metaphysics. (shrink)

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