Death’s Shadow Lightened

This chapter by Daniel Rubio defends Epicurus’ famous argument that death cannot harm us because we no longer exist after we die. Focusing on the deprivationist account of the harm of death, Rubio contends that death is not especially harmful in any candidate ways.

Conclusion

The conclusion of Empire of Ruins recalls the book’s examination of ruin photography as it relates to modernity—the traumas of war and climate change. But it places that narrative within a larger context by relating this theory of American ruins to a historical conjunction between ruins and revolution that has been visible in European history for centuries. Most notably, it is visible in Hubert Robert, who painted ruins during the French Revolution, and in Joseph Gandy, who depicted John Soane’s Bank of England as a future ruin, emerging from the financial crisis of the 1820s. Thomas Jefferson, during the American Revolution, had the same fear of future ruin that Thomas Cole had in his epic series, The Course of Empire, painted in the 1830s. And in the revolutionary moment of the Great Depression, Stephen Vincent Benét imagined—in a classic work of speculative fiction—a future world in which the ruins of the present world would be discovered. That same trope, recalling Doré’s New Zealander, is used by contemporary artist Ellen Harvey in her satiric sculptural installation, The Alien’s Guide to the Ruins of Washington, D.C. The book ends with a reflection on J. B. Jackson’s famous argument for the necessity of ruins and whether our present trajectory will allow us to begin again.

Common ground and grounds of law

A central premise of Ronald Dworkin’s famous Argument from Theoretical Disagreement is that judges regularly disagree about the grounds of law. The occurrence of these so-called ‘theoretical disagreements’, it is argued, cannot be explained by the influential legal positivist theory of HLA Hart according to which the grounds of law are constituted by judicial consensus. However, in his attempt to show that theoretical disagreements actually exist Dworkin primarily relies on the occurrence of judicial disagreements about legal interpretation, as he takes them to be disagreements about the grounds of law. In this article, I will argue that these interpretive disagreements do not pose a problem for Hartian positivism. My argument will rely on standard work from the field of pragmatics which provides sophisticated explanations of how the interpretation of linguistic texts, such as legal documents, works. On the model that I will propose, interpretive disagreements concern the meaning that the legal authorities who enacted the document intended to get across and these disagreements arise from diverging assumptions about the context in which these documents were enacted. I will argue that disagreements about intentions and contextual presumptions do not concern the grounds of law and therefore do not threaten Hartian positivism.

The Very Idea of Truth by Convention

This chapter answers various influential arguments against truth by convention, in general, and logical conventionalism, in particular. The first argument discussed claims that the contingency of our linguistic conventions is incompatible with the necessity of logical truth. The second claims that while conventions can be used to determine the content of a sentence, they cannot possibly make that content be the case (I call this “the master argument” against conventionalism, because of its influence). The third argument discussed is Quine’s famous argument against logical conventionalism. The fourth is a variation on Quinean themes, related to the later Wittgenstein’s radical conventionalism and Dummett’s discussions of Wittgenstein’s views. The fifth and final objection is Williamson’s argument against understanding-assent links. The chapter’s discussion shows that each of these arguments against conventionalism has decisive failings.

The First Riddle of Induction

What, exactly, is puzzling about induction? While the so-called problem of induction is normally introduced through David Hume’s famous argument, this essay shows how Sextus Empiricus gets to the heart of the matter. When properly understood, Sextus’ argument shows how the very power of inductive reasoning—its ability to move from particulars to universals—is at the same time what makes it “totter.” The argument has only been analyzed in any detail by the formal learning theorist Kevin Kelly, who uses the formal tools of computability theory and topology to mount a principled response. It is shown that this response depends on questionable assumptions and thus that they have not resolved Sextus’ riddle of induction.

Ruly and Unruly Passions: Early Modern Perspectives

A survey of theories on the passions and action in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Britain and western Europe reveals that few, if any, of the major writers held the view that reason in any of its functions executes action without a passion. Even rationalists, like Cambridge Platonist Ralph Cudworth and English clergyman Samuel Clarke, recognized the necessity of passion to action. On the other hand, many of these intellectuals also agreed with French philosophers Jean-François Senault, René Descartes, and Nicolas Malebranche that, for passions to be useful or to become virtues, they must be governed by reason. Without the moderation of reason, passions will be unruly, distort our notions of good, and disrupt our rational volitions. In response to these popular early modern perspectives, Enlightenment thinker David Hume offered a now-famous argument that reason without passion cannot motivate, drawing the further conclusion that reason cannot govern the passions, either. Given that no one in Hume's era seemed to defend the claim that reason alone can motivate action, what was Hume's intention?

Knowledge and Belief from Plato to Locke

This essential historical introduction to the main themes of the book starts with a close, sympathetic, and significantly novel analysis (with reference to associated arguments) of a famous argument in Plato’s Republic in which Plato draws a distinction of kind between knowledge and belief, and between their objects. It is then demonstrated that the distinction, broadly so understood, remained a dominant force, in one form or another, in all non-sceptical branches of the European philosophical tradition, including empiricism (not least, Locke’s), until the eighteenth century (the epistemology of the Stoics and of Aquinas being particularly striking examples). It is argued that there is much to learn from this history (so different from the myth of a ‘traditional analysis’ of knowledge as ‘justified true belief’), and specific features of the traditional distinction are identified as deserving the further, sympathetic consideration given, in effect, in later chapters.

Hybrid Dispositionalism and the Law

Dworkin’s famous argument from legal disagreements poses a problem for legal positivism by undermining the idea that the law can be (just) the result of the practice and attitudes of norm-applying officials. In recent work, the chapter author argued that a hybrid contextualist theory paired with a dispositional theory of value—a hybrid dispositionalism, for short—offers the resources to respond to similar disagreement-based arguments in other evaluative and normative domains. This chapter claims that the theory the author advocates can extend to legal statements and disputes, and shares some important features with Toh’s (2011) idea that legal statements express shared acceptance of norms. The chapter proposes that a contextualist semantics for legal statements paired with the pragmatic communication of implicatures that express shared acceptances of norms, achieves the same goal that Toh aims at.

The Managerial Challenge to Liberalism

This chapter considers the “managerial” approach to the corporation by unpacking Berle and Means’s famous argument about the problems of the modern corporation. This approach is important because it has proven influential in its own right; the “separation of ownership from control” that Berle and Means famously observed, and the resulting power and discretion that managers enjoy, has been an important trope for critics of corporate capitalism. It is also important because it represents precisely the kind of analysis that the Chicago school’s theory of the corporation was meant to counter. The chapter concludes by contextualizing Berle and Means’s account within political theory more generally.

Counter-Conceivability Again

This chapter is concerned with the epistemology of metaphysical possibility implicit in the famous argument against physicalism about the mental outlined in the third lecture of Saul Kripke’s Naming and Necessity. Kripke’s argument presupposes that conceivability remains the best possible indicator of possibility, even where it is metaphysical possibilities, rather than conceptual possibilities, that are concerned. The chapter argues that this principle is good only when the concepts which frame the relevant imaginative exercise are adequate to the essential nature of the items for which a putative possibility is being entertained. The result is that metaphysical impossibilities may, in certain circumstances, be perfectly lucidly conceivable; and hence that the conceivability of pain’s coming apart from any particular supposed physical identification of it is no indication of a genuine possibility for pain unless the phenomenal concept of pain is adequate to the nature of pain—which physicalism denies.