In his The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera describes how he was fired from his job and secretly wrote astrology columns. I register a puzzle that various readers should feel about this information, owing to the distinctive style of Kundera: how can this be kept a secret? I also propose solutions.

Will a surprise exam happen in the next school week? The memory skepticism solution says, “The students should expect a rational student on the penultimate evening of that week to open themselves up to the possibility that the exam may have happened already, rather than predicting that the exam will happen tomorrow.”.

Robert Nozick declares that scanning complex wholes is not easy. Presumably few people exhibited the skill before Nozick, but I propose another explanation for why few people exhibit it than difficulty. Focusing specifically on scanning for inconsistencies, papers conveying them won’t look impressive to certain evaluators.

In the 18th century, Guilielmus Piso arrives in Brazil as the archiater in the court of John Maurice of Nassau. Upon his return to Europe, he takes on the task of writing a descriptive treatise of these Western Indies. For this purpose, he makes use of the mental framework bequeathed by his education, setting up therefore the treatise On Airs, Waters and Places about Brazil. In the same manner and by the same means found in the homonymous treatise of the (...) Corpus Hippocraticum, and fortified by the authority of Latin (and Galenic) tradition, Piso undertakes an analysis of the man from this Land and his customs, taking as the axis of the “anthropological” part of his treatise the relation between a conception of nature that is merely an interpretation of the Hippocratic φύσις and the indolent ἦθος, which, by its turn, gave birth to a long-term imaginary lasting until the 21st century. (shrink)

new treatie on human understandi, pursuing Human and Locke.

a romantic solution to the dilemma beteew obscenity and ascetism.

sublime and sublimation, between ascetism en religious practice, social order and cultural feelings.

This paper presents a paradox of the concept of the right wing, because it groups together significantly different political philosophies, in terms of premises and conclusions – ones that recommend a minimal state and ones oriented towards preserving the traditions of a community. It also presents a meta-paradox: everyone has noticed this and yet it is my paradox!

This is a one page handout presenting R.R. Marrett's objections to Frazer from an article reviewing books by Frazer and also one by Malinowski (and others not referred to here).

thinking or not thinking, there is tha question. The institutions say "Don't Think", while philosophers say "Think, please". What attitude we must choose?

The philosopher and builder Ludwig Wittgenstein remarks that architecture is more difficult than philosophy. He suggests an exhaustion criterion for how difficult a discipline is: a field is more difficult the more exhausting it is. I make a case against this claim. There was once a demand to prevent the Greek myths from establishing themselves in the curriculum by means of “our own rival myths.” It is difficult to compete with a renowned Greek myth, but if one does produce a (...) rival, it may well not be exhausting to do so. (shrink)

Truth about matters of fact is objective. This is not just because truth is objective. It is also because facts are objective. An objective fact makes an assertion of that fact true. The objectivity of the fact adds a further element of objectivity to the objective truth of the assertion. True assertions of fact are true because truth is objective and because the facts that make them true are objective. True assertions of fact are objective twice over. Their objectivity is (...) twofold. Or, at least, that is the point I seek to establish here. (shrink)

Suspending the social matter of social anthropology (along with other surprises).

Parts of the Victorian middle class were troubled by how Victorian society was both highly evolved and contained savage parts. I propose a solution to the paradox they faced.

Scientific disagreements are an important catalyst for scientific progress. But what happens when scientists disagree amidst times of crisis, when we need quick yet reliable policy guidance? In this paper we aim to provide a normative account for how scientists facing disagreement in the context of ‘fast science’ should respond, and how policy makers should evaluate such disagreement. Starting from an argumentative, pragma-dialectic account of scientific controversies (Donato Rodríguez and Zamora Bonilla, 2013), we argue for the importance of ‘higher-order evidence (...) (HOE)’, which has received insufficient attention in previous discussions on scientific disagreements and controversies, especially with regard to fast science. Moreover, we specify desiderata for scientifically relevant HOE. We use our account to analyze a recent disagreement on the aerosol transmission of the COVID19 virus and evaluate the standpoints of the parties involved in the dispute. (shrink)

Is art and wrting a pagan manifestation of profane thoughts and feelings? What about the sacred art? Is there a link between the two? In other hand, the social status of the artist and semo processes of artistic creation, his strategy, his willing, his fundamentals.

I consider the place of Saul Kripke and what to make of accusations against him. I raise the problem of evaluating such accusations in an environment of false accusations. I end with a response to a remark by Wittgenstein.

This brief paper raises a puzzle, or half-puzzle, about Flora Nwapa’s ethnic identity in light of sentences in her novel Women are Different and presents two solutions.

This paper responds to Thomas Kelly and Sarah McGrath’s worry that there can be evil reflective equilibrium. I propose that some of John Rawls’s restrictions on moral judgments we can enter into the procedure serve to protect against evil reflective equilibrium.

This paper aims to demonstrate that the ontology of consciousness is consistent with both the modal and the metaphysical versions of Haecceitism. I examine the varieties of Haecceitism, and I specify the intended versions that the arguments will vindicate. I define the property of 'being purely qualitative', and examine its relation to the properties of phenomenal consciousness. I draw, inter alia, on Bayesian perceptual psychology, in order to specify the identity-conditions of phenomenal properties in detail. I provide two, abductive arguments (...) for the claim that the identity-conditions on some individuals are metaphysically haecceitistic, in virtue of the relations that hold between those individuals and the phenomenal properties that they instantiate. The first argument is corroborated by empirical results concerning the phenomenological effects of attention. The second argument is corroborated by empirical results from the study of color in vision science. The arguments vindicate a version of Metaphysical Haecceitism, because the individuals are shown to be typed by the phenomenal properties that they instantiate, although quantification over the individuals is an ineliminable condition on their identity and distinctness. I provide, then, a regimentation of the extant proposals in the ontology of consciousness, using the logic of hyperintensional ground, as augmented by the Bayesian probability calculus. The hyperintensional regimentation vindicates a version of Modal Haecceitism, because the probabilistic ontological dependence of the parts of worlds on other parts thereof provides an ineliminable condition on the identity and distinctness of worlds. (shrink)

This paper presents a Davidsonian perspective on Derek Parfit’s disagreements with Nietzsche. I have actually gone further, too far perhaps, and tried to imitate Davidson’s attractive essayistic style.

A comprehensive history of how induction has been conceived, from Socrates to Karl Popper.

Physical laws are strikingly simple, although there is no a priori reason they must be so. I propose that nomic realists of all types (Humeans and non-Humeans) should accept that simplicity is a fundamental epistemic guide for discovering and evaluating candidate physical laws. This principle of simplicity clarifies and solves several problems of nomic realism and simplicity. A consequence is that the often-cited epistemic advantage of Humeanism over non-Humeanism is exaggerated, undercutting an influential epistemological argument for Humeanism. Moreover, simplicity is (...) shown to be more tightly connected to lawhood than to mere truth. (shrink)

This paper raises a worry that it is difficult to reconcile Adam Smith’s claims about the relationship of specialization to talent and character with his account of the origins of money. Specialization makes one stupid outside of one’s specialism yet money arises by specialists also providing what everyone wants.

I interpret George Eliot as objecting to John Locke in Middlemarch – more specifically, his theory of ideas – by means of her account of Dorothea’s experiences of Edward Casaubon at dinner.

The starting point of this paper is the thought that the phenomenal appearances that accompany mental states are somehow only there, or only real, from the standpoint of the subject of those mental states. The world differs across subjects in terms of which appearances obtain. Not only are subjects standpoints across which the world varies, subjects are standpoints that we can moreover ‘adopt’ in our own theorizing about the world (or stand back from). The picture that is suggested by these (...) claims stands in need of regimentation. This paper explores and motivates a metaphysical account of what it is for subjects to be standpoints, what it is to adopt standpoints in our representations and, most importantly, how these notions might help us better understand the subjective nature of conscious mental states. Some well-known observations by Thomas Nagel serve as starting points and the paper concludes with revisiting Nagel’s argument for the inevitable incompleteness of objective accounts of mental states, which will be reframed in terms of the central commitments of the proposed framework. (shrink)

The all-or-nothing problem, formulated by Joe Horton, presents us with a situation in which you can do nothing or save one child or save two. It is dangerous to save any, making doing nothing morally permissible, but there is no extra danger in saving two, so it seems wrong to just save one. But then doing nothing is morally better than saving one. I present a solution in response to this problematic result, which is that doing nothing is not an (...) accurate description of a permissible option. (shrink)

We argue that the epistemic functions of replication in science are best understood by their role in assessing kinds of experimental error. Direct replications serve to assess the reliability of an experiment through its precision: the presence and degree of random error. Conceptual replications serve to assess the validity of an experiment through its accuracy: the presence and degree of systematic errors. To illustrate the aptness of this view, we examine the Hubble constant controversy in astronomy, showing how astronomers have (...) responded to the concordances and discordances in their results by carrying out the different kinds of replication that we identify, with the aim of establishing a precise, accurate value for the Hubble constant. We contrast our view with Machery’s “re-sampling” account of replicability, which maintains that replications only assess reliability. (shrink)

In Britain and also in France, arguments have been put forward against the claim that there are or have been paradigms in British social anthropology. But historian of anthropology Henrika Kuklicka supposes that there was a paradigm from the late 1920s to just before the 1960s. I raise an objection to her portrait of this research community and observe that her text implies two quite different replies.

My aim in this paper is fairly modest. I obviously do not claim that there has never been or could never be an instance of irrational or fallacious appeals to quotations from canonical sources in the marxist tradition. Instead, I claim that the practice of using quotations from canonical sources is not, as such, irrational. If we understand the epistemological infrastructure of the practice -- the rational underpinnings of it -- we can grasp how these citations appeal to the presumptive (...) authoritativeness of formulations that condense or concisely convey the core of insights that emerged from learning processes that the intellectual tradition of marxism has already traversed. The rational underpinnings of the practice include, first, the neo-Hegelian idea that we can justify a view we now hold by rationally reconstructing the insight-motivated learning process from which it emerged, and second, the convention that these rational reconstructions do not have to be elaborated in each insistence, but can be invoked in a short-form way, such as by citing the name of a decision or a concise statement of it (like a short quotation), as is common in the epistemologically similar practice of precedential reasoning in common law juridical justification. No claim is true just because of who made it; but a claim might be presumptively authoritative in cases where it was made at the end of a learning process, which has not been overtaken by a change in the circumstances or further learning. (shrink)

A logic path between moral principles of social organization of religious rules and the economiy of belief in industrial societies. I argue that some lifes may be like currency, a Good and a Bad Side, due to the dilema betwee profit and spiritual reasons.

Solitude. Is being with other without the other, is being with other, among the masses. Has de integrality of personhood something to loss with social contact? We believe not, we need war words and deeds.

The social and personal utility of mental and physical suffering, exploration of the ideia that pain can be tolerated if we belive and so on euthanasia is not mandatory to several cases.

Are John Rawls’s most noticeable methodological contributions, reflective equilibrium and the original position, consistent with each other? I draw attention to a worry that they stand in inconsistent relationships to the claim that ought implies can: it can only be the case that we ought to do something if we can do it.

I show that the theory of definition in Definition by Proxy can consistently embrace the principles I show to be inconsistent in Definition.

Martha Nussbaum has provided a sustained critique of Cicero’s De officiis (or On Duties), concerning what she claims is Cicero’s incoherent distinction between duties of justice, which are strict, cosmopolitan, and impartial, and duties of material aid, which are elastic, weighted towards those who are near and dear, and partial. No doubt, from Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan perspective, Cicero’s distinction between justice and beneficence seems problematic and lies at the root of modern moral failures to conceptualize adequately our obligations in situations of (...) famine and global inequality. And yet a careful reading of Cicero’s On Duties shows many duties that appear to be partial. It is hard to believe that Cicero’s discussion of these “partial duties” was a mere oversight or omission on his part. Rather, Cicero seemed to have no problem endorsing what I will call the “partial coherence” of duties in the work—namely, the claim that asserting that duties are exhaustively partial or impartial is a false dichotomy. With the help of conceptual analysis by Richard Kraut, my paper aims to establish and defend Cicero’s “partial coherence” against Nussbaum’s criticisms. (shrink)

This paper examines what is said about a craze for essay writing in Rose Macauley’s 1923 essayistic novel Told by an Idiot, comparing the material with Milan Kundera on graphomania. In the appendix, I note a passage on crowds which is reminiscent of the widely read European author.

This is a draft of a talk I have given at several venues. At one point I planned to revise it for inclusion in the Oxford Handbook I co-edited, but for various reasons I decided against that. Since I still think it contains some useful material, I'm uploading it here.

The first (September 2022) draft for the forthcoming Spinoza Cambridge Lexicon. Please do not quote, but comments are welcome.

The first (September 2022) draft for the forthcoming Spinoza Cambridge Lexicon. Please do not quote, but comments are welcome.

This book outlines and criticises the six main contemporary arguments for scepticism about the role of human enhancements in promoting well-being. It also defends important and concrete ways in which enhancement-permissive policies should be embraced with the aim of promoting well-being.