Results for 'Alexander Douglas'

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  1. A Policy of No Interest? The Permanent Zero Interest Rate, and the Evils of Capitalism.Alexander Douglas - manuscript
    In 1937 Joan Robinson proposed that “when capitalism is rightly understood, the rate of interest will be set at zero and the major evils of capitalism will disappear”. A permanent zero rate would abolish capitalist profit except in limited cases, leaving nearly all output to be claimed by labour as wages. It would allow capital to be allocated on the basis of prospective social benefit rather than short-term profitability and a collateral basis that favours the wealthy. It would remove some (...)
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  2. Review of Alexander Douglas’ ‘The Philosophy of Debt’. [REVIEW]Louis Larue - 2017 - Ethical Perspectives 24:397-401.
    Recent financial events, especially the subprime and the sovereign debts crises, have revived debate on debts, the necessity of debt repayment and the eventuality of debt cancellations. A milestone in this debate was reached by David Graeber’s Debt (Brooklyn: Melville House, 2011), but despite the richness of this essay, many normative questions remain unanswered. Should debt always be repaid? Who should repay it? Should government deficits be allowed or even encouraged? Alexander Douglas’ recent book aims to provide an (...)
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  3. Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology, by Alexander X. Douglas[REVIEW]Yitzhak Melamed - 2017 - Mind 126 (504):1244-1251.
    _ Spinoza and Dutch Cartesianism: Philosophy and Theology _, by DouglasAlexander X.. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015. Pp. viii + 184.
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  4. What are Tropes, Fundamentally? A Formal Ontological Account.Jani Hakkarainen - 2018 - Acta Philosophica Fennica 94:129-159.
    In this paper, I elaborate on the Strong Nuclear Theory (SNT) of tropes and substances, which I have defended elsewhere, using my metatheory about formal ontology and especially fundamental ontological form. According to my metatheory, for an entity to have an ontological form is for it to be a relatum of a formal ontological relation or relations jointly in an order. The full fundamental ontological form is generically identical to a simple formal ontological relation or relations jointly in an order. (...)
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  5. Explicit Legg-Hutter intelligence calculations which suggest non-Archimedean intelligence.Samuel Allen Alexander & Arthur Paul Pedersen - forthcoming - Lecture Notes in Computer Science.
    Are the real numbers rich enough to measure intelligence? We generalize a result of Alexander and Hutter about the so-called Legg-Hutter intelligence measures of reinforcement learning agents. Using the generalized result, we exhibit a paradox: in one particular version of the Legg-Hutter intelligence measure, certain agents all have intelligence 0, even though in a certain sense some of them outperform others. We show that this paradox disappears if we vary the Legg-Hutter intelligence measure to be hyperreal-valued rather than real-valued.
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  6. Are knowledge ascriptions sensitive to social context?Alexander Jackson - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3):8579-8610.
    Plausibly, how much is at stake in some salient practical task can affect how generously people ascribe knowledge of task-relevant facts. There is a metaphysical puzzle about this phenomenon, and an empirical puzzle. Metaphysically: there are competing theories about when and how practical stakes affect whether it is correct to ascribe knowledge. Which of these theories is the right one? Empirically: experimental philosophy has struggled to find a stakes-effect on people’s knowledge ascriptions. Is the alleged phenomenon just a philosopher’s fantasy? (...)
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  7.  72
    Temporal Shaping and the Event/Process Distinction.Douglas Wadle, Devansh Bansal & Alexis Wellwood - 2024 - Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society 46.
    Studies of visual event individuation often consider people's representations of activities involving agents performing complex tasks. Concomitantly, theories of event individuation emphasize predictions about agents' intentions. Studies that have examined simple, non-agential occurrences leave open the possiblity that principles of visual object individuation play a role in visual event individuation. Unearthing principles that may be sufficient for event individuation which are distinct both from predictions about agents' intentions and from visual object individuation, we draw on and extend studies that reveal (...)
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  8. (1 other version)Consequentializing.Douglas W. Portmore - forthcoming - Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
    This is an encyclopedia entry on consequentializing. It explains what consequentializing is, what makes it possible, why someone might be motivated to consequentialize, and how to consequentialize a non-consequentialist theory.
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  9. How Should We Understand the Balancing View of Ought?Alexander Arridge - forthcoming - Ethics.
    Thomas Schmidt argues that a widely held combination of views about reasons and ought—the Balancing View of Ought and the claim that reasons against Q are reasons for not-Q—is extensionally adequate only if it is complemented by two principles of reasons transmission. In this paper I present three problems for Schmidt’s package of views and two problems for his transmission principles considered in isolation. I then defend a rival package of views—a version of the Balancing View and the claim that (...)
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  10. Locke on the Molyneux Question: A Sensible Point View.Alexander Wentzell - forthcoming - Canadian Journal of Philosophy.
    The Molyneux question asks: would a blind person, who knows spheres and cubes only from touch, be able to recognize these shapes visually immediately upon becoming sighted, without touching them? Molyneux himself answered no. Locke accepted Molyneux’s negative answer. But Locke’s answer appears inconsistent with the doctrine of common sensibles, according to which some ideas are given in more than one sense modality. Motivated by alleviating this tension, philosophers have put forth several interpretations of Locke’s views on shape perception. Here (...)
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  11. In Defense of (Some) Online Echo Chambers.Douglas R. Campbell - 2023 - Ethics and Information Technology 25 (3):1-11.
    In this article, I argue that online echo chambers are in some cases and in some respects good. I do not attempt to refute arguments that they are harmful, but I argue that they are sometimes beneficial. In the first section, I argue that it is sometimes good to be insulated from views with which one disagrees. In the second section, I argue that the software-design principles that give rise to online echo chambers have a lot to recommend them. Further, (...)
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  12. A Comprehensive Account of Blame: Self-Blame, Non-Moral Blame, and Blame for the Non-Voluntary.Douglas W. Portmore - 2022 - In Andreas Carlsson (ed.), Self-Blame and Moral Responsibility. New York, USA: Cambridge University Press.
    Blame is multifarious. It can be passionate or dispassionate. It can be expressed or kept private. We blame both the living and the dead. And we blame ourselves as well as others. What’s more, we blame ourselves, not only for our moral failings, but also for our non-moral failings: for our aesthetic bad taste, gustatory self-indulgence, or poor athletic performance. And we blame ourselves both for things over which we exerted agential control (e.g., our voluntary acts) and for things over (...)
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  13. Consequentializing agent‐centered restrictions: A Kantsequentialist approach.Douglas W. Portmore - 2023 - Analytic Philosophy 64 (4):443-467.
    There is, on a given moral view, an agent-centered restriction against performing acts of a certain type if that view prohibits agents from performing an instance of that act-type even to prevent two or more others from each performing a morally comparable instance of that act-type. The fact that commonsense morality includes many such agent-centered restrictions has been seen by several philosophers as a decisive objection against consequentialism. Despite this, I argue that agent-centered restrictions are more plausibly accommodated within a (...)
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  14. Organized Sound, Sounds Heard, and Silence.Douglas C. Wadle - 2023 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10.
    In this paper I argue that composer John Cage’s so-called ‘silent piece’, 4’33”, is music. I first defend it against the charge that it does not involve the organization of sound, which has been taken to be a necessary feature of music. I then argue that 4’33” satisfies the only other condition that must be met for it to be music: it bears the right socio-historical connections to its predecessors within its tradition (Western art music). I argue further that one (...)
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  15. Self‐Motion and Cognition: Plato's Theory of the Soul.Douglas R. Campbell - 2021 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 59 (4):523-544.
    I argue that Plato believes that the soul must be both the principle of motion and the subject of cognition because it moves things specifically by means of its thoughts. I begin by arguing that the soul moves things by means of such acts as examination and deliberation, and that this view is developed in response to Anaxagoras. I then argue that every kind of soul enjoys a kind of cognition, with even plant souls having a form of Aristotelian discrimination (...)
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  16. Nudging and Social Media: The Choice Architecture of Online Life.Douglas R. Campbell - 2022 - Giornale Critico di Storia Delle Idee 2:93-114.
    This article is featured in a special issue dedicated to theme, "the human being in the digital era: awareness, critical thinking and political space in the age of the internet and artificial intelligence." In this article, I consider the way that social-media companies nudge us to spend more time on their platforms, and I argue that, in principle, these nudges are morally permissible: they are not manipulative and do not violate any obvious moral rules. The moral problem, I argue, is (...)
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  17. The Soul’s Tomb: Plato on the Body as the Cause of Psychic Disorders.Douglas R. Campbell - 2022 - Apeiron 55 (1):119-139.
    I argue that, according to Plato, the body is the sole cause of psychic disorders. This view is expressed at Timaeus 86b in an ambiguous sentence that has been widely misunderstood by translators and commentators. The goal of this article is to offer a new understanding of Plato’s text and view. In the first section, I argue that although the body is the result of the gods’ best efforts, their sub-optimal materials meant that the soul is constantly vulnerable to the (...)
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  18. One more foiled defense of skepticism.Douglas C. Long - 1994 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 54 (2):373-375.
    This paper is a response to Anthony Brueckner's critique of my essay "The Self-Defeating Character of Skepticism," which appeared in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research in 1992. In this reply I contend that the three main avenues by which one might plausibly account for one's self-awareness are unavailable to an individual who is restricted to the skeptic's epistemic ground rules. First, all-encompassing doubt about the world cancels our "external" epistemic access via perception to ourselves as material individuals in the world. Second, (...)
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  19. (1 other version)Agents, mechanisms, and other minds.Douglas C. Long - 1979 - In Agents, Mechanisms, and Other Minds. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel. pp. 129--148.
    One of the goals of physiologists who study the detailed physical, chemical,and neurological mechanisms operating within the human body is to understand the intricate causal processes which underlie human abilities and activities. It is doubtless premature to predict that they will eventually be able to explain the behaviour of a particular human being as we might now explain the behaviour of a pendulum clock or even the invisible changes occurring within the hardware of a modern electronic computer. Nonetheless, it seems (...)
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  20. Emergence without limits: The case of phonons.Alexander Franklin & Eleanor Knox - 2018 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part B: Studies in History and Philosophy of Modern Physics 64 (C):68-78.
    Recent discussions of emergence in physics have focussed on the use of limiting relations, and often particularly on singular or asymptotic limits. We discuss a putative example of emergence that does not fit into this narrative: the case of phonons. These quasi-particles have some claim to be emergent, not least because the way in which they relate to the underlying crystal is almost precisely analogous to the way in which quantum particles relate to the underlying quantum field theory. But there (...)
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  21. Plato's Theory of Reincarnation: Eschatology and Natural Philosophy.Douglas R. Campbell - 2022 - Review of Metaphysics 75 (4):643-665.
    This article concerns the place of Plato’s eschatology in his philosophy. I argue that the theory of reincarnation appeals to Plato due to its power to explain how non-human animals came to be. Further, the outlines of this theory are entailed by other commitments, such as that embodiment disrupts psychic functioning, that virtue is always rewarded and vice punished, and that the soul is immortal. I conclude by arguing that Plato develops a view of reincarnation as the chief tool that (...)
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  22. Maximalism and Moral Harmony.Douglas W. Portmore - 2018 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research (2):318-341.
    Maximalism is the view that an agent is permitted to perform a certain type of action if and only if she is permitted to perform some instance of this type, where φ-ing is an instance of ψ-ing if and only if φ-ing entails ψ-ing but not vice versa. Now, the aim of this paper is not to defend maximalism, but to defend a certain account of our options that when combined with maximalism results in a theory that accommodates the idea (...)
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  23. Statutory Interpretation: Pragmatics and Argumentation.Douglas Walton, Fabrizio Macagno & Giovanni Sartor - 2021 - Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
    Statutory interpretation involves the reconstruction of the meaning of a legal statement when it cannot be considered as accepted or granted. This phenomenon needs to be considered not only from the legal and linguistic perspective, but also from the argumentative one - which focuses on the strategies for defending a controversial or doubtful viewpoint. This book draws upon linguistics, legal theory, computing, and dialectics to present an argumentation-based approach to statutory interpretation. By translating and summarizing the existing legal interpretative canons (...)
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  24. Causation and Its Basis in Fundamental Physics.Douglas Kutach - 2013 - New York: Oxford University Press.
    I provide a comprehensive metaphysics of causation based on the idea that fundamentally things are governed by the laws of physics, and that derivatively difference-making can be assessed in terms of what fundamental laws of physics imply for hypothesized events. Highlights include a general philosophical methodology, the fundamental/derivative distinction, and my mature account of causal asymmetry.
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  25. Calculating qalys: Liberalism and the value of health states.Douglas MacKay - 2017 - Economics and Philosophy 33 (2):259-285.
    The value of health states is often understood to depend on their impact on the goodness of people's lives. As such, prominent health states metrics are grounded in particular conceptions of wellbeing – e.g. hedonism or preference satisfaction. In this paper, I consider how liberals committed to the public justification requirement – the requirement that public officials choose laws and policies that are justifiable to their citizens – should evaluate health states. Since the public justification requirement prohibits public officials from (...)
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  26. Not Just A Tool: Why Social-Media Use Is Bad and Bad For Us, and The Duty to Quit.Douglas R. Campbell - 2024 - Journal of Global Ethics 20 (1):107-112.
    With an eye on the future of global ethics, I argue that social-media technologies are not morally neutral tools but are, for all intents and purposes, a kind of agent. They nudge us to do things that are bad for us. Moreover, I argue that we have a duty to quit using social-media platforms, not just on account of possible duties to preserve our own well-being but because users are akin to test subjects on whom developers are testing new nudges, (...)
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  27. Against Grounding Necessitarianism.Alexander Skiles - 2015 - Erkenntnis 80 (4):717-751.
    Can there be grounding without necessitation? Can a fact obtain wholly in virtue of metaphysically more fundamental facts, even though there are possible worlds at which the latter facts obtain but not the former? It is an orthodoxy in recent literature about the nature of grounding, and in first-order philosophical disputes about what grounds what, that the answer is no. I will argue that the correct answer is yes. I present two novel arguments against grounding necessitarianism, and show that grounding (...)
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  28. Cancel Culture, Then and Now: A Platonic Approach to the Shaming of People and the Exclusion of Ideas.Douglas R. Campbell - 2023 - Journal of Cyberspace Studies 7 (2):147-166.
    In this article, I approach some phenomena seen predominantly on social-media sites that are grouped together as cancel culture with guidance from two major themes in Plato’s thought. In the first section, I argue that shame can play a constructive and valuable role in a person’s improvement, just as we see Socrates throughout Plato’s dialogues use shame to help his interlocutors improve. This insight can help us understand the value of shaming people online for, among other things, their morally reprehensible (...)
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  29. Identity display: another motive for metalinguistic disagreement.Alexander Davies - 2021 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 64 (8):861-882.
    ABSTRACT It has become standard to conceive of metalinguistic disagreement as motivated by a form of negotiation, aimed at reaching consensus because of the practical consequences of using a word with one content rather than another. This paper presents an alternative motive for expressing and pursuing metalinguistic disagreement. In using words with given criteria, we betray our location amongst social categories or groups. Because of this, metalinguistic disagreement can be used as a stage upon which to perform a social identity. (...)
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  30.  93
    If Nudges Treat their Targets as Rational Agents, Nonconsensual Neurointerventions Can Too.Thomas Douglas - 2022 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 25 (2):369-384.
    Andreas Schmidt and Neil Levy have recently defended nudging against the objection that nudges fail to treat nudgees as rational agents. Schmidt rejects two theses that have been taken to support the objection: that nudges harness irrational processes in the nudgee, and that they subvert the nudgee’s rationality. Levy rejects a third thesis that may support the objection: that nudges fail to give reasons. I argue that these defences can be extrapolated from nudges to some nonconsensual neurointerventions; if Schmidt’s and (...)
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  31. What Timaeus Can Teach Us: The Importance of Plato’s Timaeus in the 21st Century.Douglas R. Campbell - 2023 - Athena 18:58-73.
    In this article, I make the case for the continued relevance of Plato’s Timaeus. I begin by sketching Allan Bloom’s picture of the natural sciences today in The Closing of the American Mind, according to which the natural sciences are, objectionably, increasingly specialized and have ejected humans qua humans from their purview. I argue that Plato’s Timaeus, despite the falsity of virtually all of its scientific claims, provides a model for how we can pursue scientific questions in a comprehensive way (...)
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  32.  51
    Das Private ist politisch! Hermeneutische Ungerechtigkeit als Alltagserfahrung.Alexander Brödner - 2024 - Ethik Und Unterricht 2.
    Mithilfe der Theorie zur hermeneutischen Ungerechtigkeit von Miranda Fricker und anhand von Beispielen aus dem Alltag wird die Frage gestellt, inwiefern wir unsere privaten Erfahrungen und damit unser Selbst nicht artikulieren können, weil es dafür keine öffentlich geteilten sprachlichen Deutungsmuster gibt, und was wir daran ändern können.
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  33. Desert, Control, and Moral Responsibility.Douglas W. Portmore - 2019 - Acta Analytica 34 (4):407-426.
    In this paper, I take it for granted both that there are two types of blameworthiness—accountability blameworthiness and attributability blameworthiness—and that avoidability is necessary only for the former. My task, then, is to explain why avoidability is necessary for accountability blameworthiness but not for attributability blameworthiness. I argue that what explains this is both the fact that these two types of blameworthiness make different sorts of reactive attitudes fitting and that only one of these two types of attitudes requires having (...)
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  34. How navigation systems transform epistemic virtues: Knowledge, issues and solutions.Alexander Gillett & Richard Heersmink - 2019 - Cognitive Systems Research 56 (56):36-49.
    In this paper, we analyse how GPS-based navigation systems are transforming some of our intellectual virtues and then suggest two strategies to improve our practices regarding the use of such epistemic tools. We start by outlining the two main approaches in virtue epistemology, namely virtue reliabilism and virtue responsibilism. We then discuss how navigation systems can undermine five epistemic virtues, namely memory, perception, attention, intellectual autonomy, and intellectual carefulness. We end by considering two possible interlinked ways of trying to remedy (...)
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  35. Salience and Epistemic Egocentrism: An Empirical Study.Joshua Alexander, Chad Gonnerman & John Waterman - 2014 - In James R. Beebe (ed.), Advances in Experimental Epistemology. New York: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 97-117.
    Jennifer Nagel (2010) has recently proposed a fascinating account of the decreased tendency to attribute knowledge in conversational contexts in which unrealized possibilities of error have been mentioned. Her account appeals to epistemic egocentrism, or what is sometimes called the curse of knowledge, an egocentric bias to attribute our own mental states to other people (and sometimes our own future and past selves). Our aim in this paper is to investigate the empirical merits of Nagel’s hypothesis about the psychology involved (...)
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  36. Transitivity, Moral Latitude, and Supererogation.Douglas W. Portmore - 2017 - Utilitas 29 (3):286-298.
    On what I take to be the standard account of supererogation, an act is supererogatory if and only if it is morally optional and there is more moral reason to perform it than to perform some permissible alternative. And, on this account, an agent has more moral reason to perform one act than to perform another if and only if she morally ought to prefer how things would be if she were to perform the one to how things would be (...)
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  37. Grounding and metametaphysics.Alexander Skiles & Kelly Trogdon - 2020 - In Ricki Bliss & James Miller (eds.), The Routledge Handbook of Metametaphysics. New York, NY: Routledge.
    Discussion of the relevance of grounding to substantiveness, theory-choice, and “location problems” in metaphysics.
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  38. The Hurricane Notebook: Three Dialogues on the Human Condition.Alexander Jech - 2019 - Wilmington, NC, USA: Wisdom/Works.
    “No lies": The Hurricane Notebook, found on a Wilmington beach after a storm, contains the thoughts, artistic experiments, vignettes, and recorded dialogues of an unknown author calling herself "Elizabeth M." Its entries record the inner life of a soul in crisis, perpetually returning to the moment she learned of her sister's suicide and making an unrelenting attempt to understand herself and the human condition. Whether engaged in introspective soul-searching, or reconstructing her discussions with friends, mentors, and acquaintances, she challenges herself (...)
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  39. The Soul’s Tool: Plato on the Usefulness of the Body.Douglas R. Campbell - 2022 - Elenchos 43 (1):7-27.
    This paper concerns Plato’s characterization of the body as the soul’s tool. I take perception as an example of the body’s usefulness. I explore the Timaeus’ view that perception provides us with models of orderliness. Then, I argue that perception of confusing sensible objects is necessary for our cognitive development too. Lastly, I consider the instrumentality relationship more generally and its place in Plato’s teleological worldview.
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  40.  88
    Tantric Yogācāra.Alexander Yiannopoulos - 2017 - Journal of the International Association of Buddhist Studies 40:239-267.
    The late tenth century siddha and scholar Ratnākaraśānti, also known as the Mahāsiddha Śāntipa, was renowned as the author of both philosophical śāstras and commentaries on tantra. Typically, these are considered separate spheres of activity. However, Ratnākaraśānti’s approach, building on the tradition of scholarship associated with the Mahāvairocanābhisaṃbodhitantra and the Guhyasamājatantra, as well as on Yogācāra analysis and Buddhist pramāṇa theory, is highly syncretic. This paper is a study of Ratnākaraśānti’s commentaries that highlights his synthesis of the exoteric and esoteric (...)
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  41. Nonconsensual Neurocorrectives and Bodily Integrity: a Reply to Shaw and Barn.Thomas Douglas - 2016 - Neuroethics 12 (1):107-118.
    In this issue, Elizabeth Shaw and Gulzaar Barn offer a number of replies to my arguments in ‘Criminal Rehabilitation Through Medical Intervention: Moral Liability and the Right to Bodily Integrity’, Journal of Ethics. In this article I respond to some of their criticisms.
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  42. Punishing Wrongs from the Distant Past.Thomas Douglas - 2019 - Law and Philosophy 38 (4):335-358.
    On a Parfit-inspired account of culpability, as the psychological connections between a person’s younger self and older self weaken, the older self’s culpability for a wrong committed by the younger self diminishes. Suppose we accept this account and also accept a culpability-based upper limit on punishment severity. On this combination of views, we seem forced to conclude that perpetrators of distant past wrongs should either receive discounted punishments or be exempted from punishment entirely. This article develops a strategy for resisting (...)
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  43. State of the Field: Why novel prediction matters.Heather Douglas & P. D. Magnus - 2013 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part A 44 (4):580-589.
    There is considerable disagreement about the epistemic value of novel predictive success, i.e. when a scientist predicts an unexpected phenomenon, experiments are conducted, and the prediction proves to be accurate. We survey the field on this question, noting both fully articulated views such as weak and strong predictivism, and more nascent views, such as pluralist reasons for the instrumental value of prediction. By examining the various reasons offered for the value of prediction across a range of inferential contexts , we (...)
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  44. Compulsory medical intervention versus external constraint in pandemic control.Thomas Douglas, Lisa Forsberg & Jonathan Pugh - 2020 - Journal of Medical Ethics 47 (12).
    Would compulsory treatment or vaccination for Covid-19 be justified? In England, there would be significant legal barriers to it. However, we offer a conditional ethical argument in favour of allowing compulsory treatment and vaccination, drawing on an ethical comparison with external constraints—such as quarantine, isolation and ‘lockdown’—that have already been authorised to control the pandemic. We argue that, if the permissive English approach to external constraints for Covid-19 has been justified, then there is a case for a similarly permissive approach (...)
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  45. The Inconceivable Popularity of Conceivability Arguments.Douglas I. Campbell, Jack Copeland & Zhuo-Ran Deng - 2017 - Philosophical Quarterly 67 (267):223-240.
    Famous examples of conceivability arguments include (i) Descartes’ argument for mind-body dualism, (ii) Kripke's ‘modal argument’ against psychophysical identity theory, (iii) Chalmers’ ‘zombie argument’ against materialism, and (iv) modal versions of the ontological argument for theism. In this paper, we show that for any such conceivability argument, C, there is a corresponding ‘mirror argument’, M. M is deductively valid and has a conclusion that contradicts C's conclusion. Hence, a proponent of C—henceforth, a ‘conceivabilist’—can be warranted in holding that C's premises (...)
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  46.  70
    Automatisierte (Un)Gleichheit durch Künstliche Intelligenz.Alexander Brödner - 2023 - Praxis Philosophie and Ethik 5.
    Unterrichtsreihe inklusive didaktischen Erläuterungen zur Problemfrage: Inwiefern befördert der Einsatz von Algorithmen bei Entscheidungsprozessen Diskriminierung?
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  47. Morality and Practical Reasons.Douglas W. Portmore - 2021 - Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
    As Socrates famously noted, there is no more important question than how we ought to live. The answer to this question depends on how the reasons that we have for living in various different ways combine and compete. To illustrate, suppose that I've just received a substantial raise. What should I do with the extra money? I have most moral reason to donate it to effective charities but most self-interested reason to spend it on luxuries for myself. So, whether I (...)
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  48. Government Policy Experiments and the Ethics of Randomization.Douglas MacKay - 2020 - Philosophy and Public Affairs 48 (4):319-352.
    Governments are increasingly using randomized controlled trials (RCTs) to evaluate policy interventions. RCTs are often understood to provide the highest quality evidence regarding the causal efficacy of an intervention. While randomization plays an essential epistemic role in the context of policy RCTs however, it also plays an important distributive role. By randomly assigning participants to either the intervention or control arm of an RCT, people are subject to different policies and so, often, to different types and levels of benefits. In (...)
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  49. Moral Worth and Our Ultimate Moral Concerns.Douglas W. Portmore - forthcoming - Oxford Studies in Normative Ethics.
    Some right acts have what philosophers call moral worth. A right act has moral worth if and only if its agent deserves credit for having acted rightly in this instance. And I argue that an agent deserves credit for having acted rightly if and only if her act issues from an appropriate set of concerns, where the appropriateness of these concerns is a function what her ultimate moral concerns should be. Two important upshots of the resulting account of moral worth (...)
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  50. Control, Attitudes, and Accountability.Douglas W. Portmore - 2013 - In David Shoemaker (ed.), Oxford studies in agency and responsibility. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
    It seems that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes—e.g., our beliefs, desires, and intentions. Yet, we rarely, if ever, have volitional control over such attitudes, volitional control being the sort of control that we exert over our intentional actions. This presents a trilemma: (Horn 1) deny that we can be directly accountable for our reasons-responsive attitudes, (Horn 2) deny that φ’s being under our control is necessary for our being directly accountable for φ-ing, or (Horn 3) deny (...)
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