Browse

What should we do, think, and feel when artists whom we love do terrible things? Recent years have been punctuated by revelations and reminders that popular artists (musicians, directors, actors, comedians, painters) have committed a range of morally condemnable acts. How should we respond to the immorality of great artists? Does it affect the aesthetic quality of the work these artists have produced? Is it morally permissible for us to engage with or enjoy that work? Should such work even be available for consumption, or should it be “canceled”? In short, can we separate the art from the artist? Drawing the Line argues that it doesn’t matter whether we can separate the art from the artist, because we shouldn’t. Taking both art and morality seriously requires grappling with them together. Recognizing the moral and aesthetic relationships between art and artist is essential to determining when and where we should draw the line when good artists do bad things.

This book is the first of two volumes on belief and counterfactuals. It consists of six of a total of eleven chapters. The first volume is concerned primarily with questions in epistemology and is expository in parts. Among other theories, it provides an accessible introduction to belief revision and ranking theory. Ranking theory specifies how conditional beliefs should behave. It does not tell us why they should do so nor what they are. This book fills these two gaps. The consistency argument tells us why conditional beliefs should obey the laws of ranking theory by showing them to be the means to attaining the end of holding true and informative beliefs. The conditional theory of conditional belief tells us what conditional beliefs are by specifying their nature in terms of non-conditional belief and counterfactuals. In addition, the book contains several novel arguments, accounts, and applications. These include an argument for the thesis that there are only hypothetical imperatives and no categorical imperatives; an account of the instrumentalist understanding of normativity, or rationality, according to which one ought to take the means to one’s ends; as well as solutions to the problems of conceptual belief change, logical learning, and learning conditionals. A distinctive feature of the book is its unifying methodological approach: means-end philosophy. Means-end philosophy takes serious that philosophy is a normative discipline, and that philosophical problems are entangled with each other. It also explains the importance of logic to philosophy, without being a technical theory itself.

This work is designed to introduce some of the more important fruits of Indian Buddhist metaphysical theorizing to philosophers with little or no prior knowledge of classical Indian philosophy. It is widely known among non-specialists that Buddhists deny the existence of a self. Less widely appreciated among philosophers currently working in metaphysics is the fact that the Indian Buddhist tradition contains a wealth of material on a broad assortment of other issues that have also been foci of recent debate. Indian Buddhist philosophers have argued for a variety of interesting claims about the nature of the causal relation, about persistence, about abstract objects, about the consequences of presentism, about the prospects for a viable ontological emergentism. They engaged in a spirited debate over illusionism in the philosophy of consciousness. Some espoused global anti-realism while others called its coherence into question. And so on. This work is meant to introduce the views of such major Buddhist philosophers as Vasubandhu, Dharmakīrti, and Nāgārjuna on these and other issues. And it presents their arguments and analyses in a manner meant to make them accessible to students of philosophy who lack specialist knowledge of the Indian tradition. Analytic metaphysicians who are interested in moving beyond the common strategy of appealing to the intuitions of “the folk” should find much of interest here.

McCain and Moretti develop a new appearance/seemings-based theory of epistemic justification. This theory, Phenomenal Explanationism, takes as a reasonable starting point the idea that how things appear provides evidence about how the world is. However, unlike other appearance-based theories, Phenomenal Explanationism does not rely on an overly simplistic account of evidential support where things appearing a particular way is sufficient for rationally believing they are that way. Instead, Phenomenal Explanationism takes the insight that appearances are evidence and imbeds it into a broader explanationist framework. In this broader framework the world appearing a particular way provides sufficient justification for believing the world is that way just in case the world being the way it appears best explains the total evidence. Although Phenomenal Explanationism draws inspiration from Phenomenal Conservatism and explanationist theories, it is superior to both in that it offers a satisfying, complete theory of epistemic justification.

Some combinations of attitudes—beliefs, credences, intentions, preferences, hopes, fears, and so on—don’t fit together right: they are incoherent. A natural idea is that there is a class of rational requirements—the requirements of structural rationality—that forbid these incoherent states. Yet there are surprisingly deep challenges that arise for this natural idea. First, there are challenges about how these requirements relate to “substantive” rational requirements that require us to have attitudes that are supported by good reasons. Second, there are challenges about what, if anything, unifies the diverse class of instances of incoherence. And third, there are challenges about how, if at all, facts about coherence are normatively significant. These challenges have led many philosophers to deny that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality after all. And even the most prominent philosophers who do believe in requirements of structural rationality have often been reticent to defend the claims that such requirements are unified or normatively significant, or reticent to give accounts of how this could be so. By contrast, this book provides a sustained defense of the view that structural rationality is a genuine kind of rationality—distinct from and irreducible to substantive rationality—and of the view that it is unified and normatively significant. In developing a theory of structural rationality, it also aims to show how such a theory can help to illuminate numerous standing debates in both ethics and epistemology.

This book contributes to two debates and it does so by bringing them together. The first is a debate in metaethics concerning normative reasons, the considerations that serve to justify a person’s actions and attitudes. The second is a debate in epistemology concerning the norms for belief, the standards that govern a person’s beliefs and by reference to which they are assessed. The book starts by developing and defending a new theory of reasons for action, that is, of practical reasons. The theory belongs to a family that analyses reasons by appeal to the normative notion of rightness (fittingness, correctness); it is distinctive in making central appeal to modal notions, specifically, that of a nearby possible world. The result is a comprehensive framework that captures what is common to and distinctive of reasons of various kinds: justifying and demanding; for and against, possessed and unpossessed; objective and subjective. The framework is then generalized to reasons for belief, that is, to epistemic reasons, and combined with a substantive, first-order commitment, namely, that truth is the sole right-maker for belief. The upshot is an account of the various norms governing belief, including knowledge and rationality, and the relations among them. According to it, the standards to which belief is subject are various, but they are unified by an underlying principle.

This book provides an introduction to a scientifically informed approach to epistemological questions. Theories of knowledge are often motivated by the need to respond to skepticism. The skeptic presents an argument which seems to show that knowledge is impossible, and a theory of knowledge is called upon to show, contrary to the skeptic, how knowledge is indeed possible. Traditional epistemologies, however, do not draw on the sciences in providing their response to skepticism. The approach taken here, however, shows how an epistemology which is informed by the sciences offers an especially illuminating understanding of the nature of knowledge and what makes it possible. Along the way, a distinctive methodology for philosophy is defended, as is an approach to understanding how inference is conducive to knowledge which highlights various structural similarities between the workings of our perceptual systems and native inferential mechanisms. A perspective on the human capacity to reflect on our beliefs is defended which highlights its importance in cooperative problem-solving.

Nothing is not. Yet it seems that we invoke absences and nothings often in our philosophical explanations. Negative metaphysics is on the rise. It has been claimed that absences can be causes, there are negative properties, absences can be perceived, there are negative facts, and we can refer to and speak about nothing. Parmenides long ago ruled against such things. Here we consider how much of Parmenides’ view can survive. A soft Parmenidean methodology is adopted in which we aim to reject all supposed negative entities but are prepared to accept them, reluctantly, if they are indispensable and irreducible in our best theories. We then see whether there are any negative entities that survive this test. Some can be dismissed on metaphysical grounds, but other problems are explained only once we reject another strand in Parmenides and show how we can think and talk about nothing. Accounts of perception of absence, empty reference, and denial are gathered. With these, we can show how no truthmakers are required for negative truths since we can have negative beliefs, concerning what-is-not, without what-is-not being part of what is. This supports a soft ontological Parmenideanism, which accepts much though not all of Parmenides’ original position.

This book is about urban spaces, urban dwellers, and how these spaces and people make, shape, and change one another. It is the first systematic philosophical investigation of the nature of city life and city dwellers. It draws on empirical and ethnographic work in geography, anthropology, urban planning, and several other disciplines in order to explore the impact that cities have on their dwellers and that dwellers have on their cities. It begins with a philosophical exploration of spatially embodied agency and of the specific forms of agency and spatiality that are distinctive of city living. It explores how gentrification is enacted and experienced at the level of embodied agency, arguing that gentrifying spaces are contested territories that shape and are shaped by their dwellers. The book then moves to an exploration of repurposed cities, which are cities materially designed to support one sociopolitical order but in which that order collapsed, leaving new dwellers to use the space in new ways. Through a detailed original ethnography of the repurposed cities of Berlin and Johannesburg, the book makes the case that in repurposed cities, we can see vividly how material spaces shape and constrain the agency and experience of dwellers, while dwellers creatively shape the spaces they inhabit in accordance with their needs. The book ends with a reconsideration of the right to the city, asking what would be involved in creating a city that enabled the agency and flourishing of all its diverse inhabitants.

The practice of philanthropy, which generously releases private property for public purposes, represents in many ways the best angels of our nature. But this practice’s noteworthy virtues often blind us to the exercises of private power that it represents. The Tyranny of Generosity argues that this private power threatens foundations of a democratic society. The deployment of private wealth for public ends rivals the authority of communities to determine their own affairs. And, in societies characterized by wide disparities in wealth, philanthropy combines with background inequalities to make public decisions overwhelmingly sensitive to the preferences of the rich. Allowing private wealth to control social outcomes collides with core commitments of a democratic society, a society in which persons are supposed to determine their common affairs together, on equal terms. But why exactly is democracy valuable? How should these values be weighed against the liberty of donors and the many social benefits that philanthropy promises? The Tyranny of Generosity explores these questions by applying tools of political philosophy to various topics in the practice of philanthropy: the respective roles of philanthropy and government, public subsidies for private giving, the use of donations for political speech, instruments of perpetual giving, the proliferation of giving by commercial corporations, and “effective altruism” as a guide for individual giving. These studies build to a surprising conclusion: realizing the democratic ideal may be impossible without philanthropy—but making philanthropy safe for democracy also requires radical changes to policy and practice.