The Organic Roots of Conatus in Early Greek Thought

The focus of this paper will be on the earliest Greek treatments of impulse, motivation, and self-animation – a cluster of concepts tied to the hormē-conatus concept. I hope to offer a plausible account of how the earliest recorded views on this subject in mythological, pre-Socratic, and Classical writings might have inspired later philosophical developments by establishing the foundations for an organic, wholly naturalized approach to human inquiry. Three pillars of that approach which I wish to emphasize are: practical intelligence (i.e., a continuity between knowing and doing), natural normativity (i.e., a continuity between human norms and the environment), and an ontology of philosophical dialectic (i.e., a continuity between the growth of human understanding and the growth of physis).

Dogmatism and Ampliative Inference

The evidential role of experience in justifying beliefs has been at the center of debate in philosophy in recent years. One view is that experience, or seeming, can confer immediate (defeasible) justification on belief in virtue of its representational phenomenology. Call this view “representational dogmatism.” Another view is that experience confers immediate justification on belief in virtue of its relational phenomenology. Call this view “relational dogmatism.” The goal of this paper is to pit these two versions of dogmatism against each other in terms of their ability to account for ampliative, or non-deductive, inferential justification. I will argue that only the representational view can provide a plausible account of this type of justification.

The Historian

This chapter focuses on the historian of philosophy. There is a certain amount of historical evidence in the case of philosophy, mainly in the form of texts, or rather copies thereof, but also of inscriptions or even of archaeological remains. The historian has to collect this evidence, evaluate it, and reconstruct, on its basis, a history which is sufficiently supported by it to make it difficult, if not impossible, to think of an equally plausible, or even more plausible, account that fits the evidence as well. The difficulty is not only that it has become a matter of considerable controversy whether there actually is one characteristic way in which historians ought to go about their business and which way this may be. It also should give one pause for thought that, in fact, general historians do not write history of philosophy. This suggests that the historiography of philosophy is not just a matter of applying the historical method to a particular history. Clearly, the most important point here is that it takes some special competence to write the history of a discipline. Having the competence of a contemporary philosopher allows one to tell which arguments are acceptable and which are not.

On the Alleged Insufficiency of the Polluter Pays Principle

Several theorists of climate change justice have argued that the polluter-pays principle fails to assign duties that, if fulfilled, would be sufficient to prevent or compensate for all climate change-induced harm to persons. This paper contends that their argument for this claim rests on a faulty account of how the costs of rectifying a collectively-caused harm or threat of harm should be allocated among agents who have incurred duties of corrective justice to bear these costs. Given a more plausible account of how these costs should be allocated, it is likely that the polluter-pays principle does in fact assign duties that, if fulfilled, would be sufficient to prevent or compensate for all climate change-induced harm to persons.

The Ethics of Treaties: A Humean Account

<p>This thesis concerns the reasons that states have to comply with their treaty commitments. It aims to answer two questions. Firstly, what reason does signing a treaty give to a state to act in accordance with the treaty? Secondly, assuming that there is such a reason, how does entering into a treaty generate that reason? One answer to these questions is to say that treaties are kinds of promises between states. To enter into a treaty is to make a promise and promises should be kept. But promises are a puzzling way of generating reasons for action. It is not clear how it is possible to create a reason to do something merely by communicating an intention to create a reason. So, to say that treaties are promises seems merely to transpose this puzzle from the relations between individual persons to international affairs and the relations between states. In this thesis I endorse a view of treaty making that understands treaties as promises as the philosopher David Hume understands them. I argue that this provides a plausible account of treaty making. I suggest that the resulting view, which I label ‘Treaty as Humean Promise,’ provides plausible and appealing answers to the two questions mentioned above. Treaty as Humean Promise claims that states entering treaties create self-interested reasons to comply with those treaties. They do this by invoking an independent social convention of treaty making one of the rules of which is that treaties must be kept. Continued access to this social convention is important to states. They jeopardise this continued access by violating their treaties and giving their treaty partners, and potential treaty partners, reason to withdraw future trust in them. I set this out in chapters 1 and 2. In chapter 3 I claim that Treaty as Humean Promise can make sense of the intuition that there are moral reasons to comply with treaties. In chapter 4 I look at what Treaty as Humean Promise has to say about different types of treaty. In chapters 5 and 6 I discuss Hume’s own views on treaty making. I offer a charitable reading of some puzzling remarks by Hume from a section of A Treatise of Human Nature called ‘Of the laws of nations’. In doing so, I defend Hume against a number of his critics. In the final two chapters I discuss a ‘political realist’ account of treaties. I distinguish between ‘act’ and ‘rule’ variants of political realism. Political realists, I suggest, should be rule realists at least about treaties. This means that they should endorse and follow the rule that treaties should be kept all else being equal.</p>

The Ethics of Treaties: A Humean Account

<p>This thesis concerns the reasons that states have to comply with their treaty commitments. It aims to answer two questions. Firstly, what reason does signing a treaty give to a state to act in accordance with the treaty? Secondly, assuming that there is such a reason, how does entering into a treaty generate that reason? One answer to these questions is to say that treaties are kinds of promises between states. To enter into a treaty is to make a promise and promises should be kept. But promises are a puzzling way of generating reasons for action. It is not clear how it is possible to create a reason to do something merely by communicating an intention to create a reason. So, to say that treaties are promises seems merely to transpose this puzzle from the relations between individual persons to international affairs and the relations between states. In this thesis I endorse a view of treaty making that understands treaties as promises as the philosopher David Hume understands them. I argue that this provides a plausible account of treaty making. I suggest that the resulting view, which I label ‘Treaty as Humean Promise,’ provides plausible and appealing answers to the two questions mentioned above. Treaty as Humean Promise claims that states entering treaties create self-interested reasons to comply with those treaties. They do this by invoking an independent social convention of treaty making one of the rules of which is that treaties must be kept. Continued access to this social convention is important to states. They jeopardise this continued access by violating their treaties and giving their treaty partners, and potential treaty partners, reason to withdraw future trust in them. I set this out in chapters 1 and 2. In chapter 3 I claim that Treaty as Humean Promise can make sense of the intuition that there are moral reasons to comply with treaties. In chapter 4 I look at what Treaty as Humean Promise has to say about different types of treaty. In chapters 5 and 6 I discuss Hume’s own views on treaty making. I offer a charitable reading of some puzzling remarks by Hume from a section of A Treatise of Human Nature called ‘Of the laws of nations’. In doing so, I defend Hume against a number of his critics. In the final two chapters I discuss a ‘political realist’ account of treaties. I distinguish between ‘act’ and ‘rule’ variants of political realism. Political realists, I suggest, should be rule realists at least about treaties. This means that they should endorse and follow the rule that treaties should be kept all else being equal.</p>

The Epistemic Role of Consciousness from a Practical Point of View

This paper concerns the way that phenomenal consciousness helps us to know things about the world. Most discussions of how consciousness contributes to our store of knowledge focus on propositional knowledge. In this paper, I recast the problem in terms of practical knowledge by reconstructing some neglected strands of argument in William James’s analyses of bodily affect and habitual action in The Principles of Psychology (1890/1950). I will argue that my reading of James’s view provides a plausible account of how phenomenally conscious states feed practical knowledge. I will also show that my reconstruction of James view harmonizes well with recent empirical findings.

On the Moral Impact Theory of Law

Mark Greenberg argues that legal obligations are those moral obligations created by the actions of legal institutions in the legally proper way (Moral Impact Theory of Law, MITL). Here I defend three main claims. First, I argue that, although very often misunderstood, Joseph Raz is also a defender of MITL. Secondly, I argue that while both Greenberg and Raz are committed to MITL, they disagree about the conditions under which a moral obligation can be said to be created in the legally proper way. Finally, I argue that Raz’s variant of MITL is better than Greenberg’s. It rests on a more plausible account of authority and it avoids one of the crucial defects threatening Greenberg’s view, namely, its overinclusiveness.

Subjectivism and Degrees of Well-Being

In previous work, I have argued that subjectivists about well-being must turn from a preference-satisfaction to a desire-satisfaction theory of well-being in order to avoid the conceptual problem of interpersonal comparisons of well-being. In a recent paper, Van der Deijl and Brouwer agree, but object that no version of the desire-satisfaction theory can provide a plausible account of how an individual's degree of well-being depends on the satisfaction or frustration of their various desires, at least in cases involving the gain or loss of desires. So subjectivists can avoid the conceptual problem of interpersonal comparisons only by adopting a substantively implausible view. In this reply, I defend subjectivism by arguing that the totalist desire-satisfaction theory avoids Van der Deijl and Brouwer's objections, and briefly suggest that it may also be able to handle the problem of adaptive desires. I conclude that subjectivists should endorse the totalist desire-satisfaction theory.

Verifying Negative Sentences

In the long history of psycholinguistic research on verifying negative sentences, an often-reported finding is that participants take longer to correctly judge negative sentences true than false, while being faster to judge their positive counterparts true (e.g. Clark & Chase, Cogn Psychol 3(3):472−517, 1972; Carpenter & Just, Psychol Rev 82(1):45–73, 1975). While many linguists and psycholinguists have strongly advocated the idea that the costs and complexity of negation can be explained by appeal to context, context-based approaches have not been able to provide a satisfying account of this polarity*truth-value interaction. By contrast, the alternative theory of negation processing, which says that negation is processed by separately representing the positive, does provide a plausible account. Our proposals provide a means for reconciliation between the two views since we argue that negation is a strong cue to a positive context. Here we present our account of why and when negation is often apparently processed via the positive. We review many of the factors that are seen to be at play in sentence verification involving negation. We present evidence that participants’ adoption of the positive-first procedure in sentence-picture verification tasks is conditioned by context.