PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW最新文献

{"title":"<i>Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering</i>","authors":"James Foster","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469577","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469577","url":null,"abstract":"In Dark Matters, Mara Van Der Lugt attempts to rehabilitate pessimism as a moral stance. Critical to this task is the distinction between what she calls “future-oriented” and “value-oriented” pessimism (10). The former is what most people presently understand the word pessimism to mean: a gloomy view about the future, an attitude of premature defeat.Although this kind of fatalism can be found alongside value-oriented pessimism, Van Der Lugt is chiefly interested in the latter, which she portrays as a sympathetic appreciation of suffering that, although not without hope, does not attempt to explain—let alone explain away—the existence of evil.To make this case, Dark Matters proceeds in three sections. The first section, comprising the introduction and first two chapters of the book, sets up the contrast between future- and value-oriented pessimism by examining various approaches to the classic problem of evil, as summarized by Epicurus’s classic trilemma among God’s power, God’s goodness, and the existence of evil.Some of these are what she calls “negative” strategies, which deny the premise that there is evil—or, more generously, a problematic amount of evil—in the world (33). And some are “positive” strategies, which accept the premise of evil in the world but attempt to explain the origin of evil by, for example, casting it as the inevitable side effect of free will and/or sin (35). Whatever their views about the future, those who take up these strategies are, in Van Der Lugt’s terms, “optimists.” And they are so by virtue of believing the problem of evil can be satisfactorily answered.On the other hand, those who take the contrasting approach, believing that the problem of evil is so acute that it cannot be rationally resolved, are pessimists. And first among them, for Van Der Lugt’s purposes, is Pierre Bayle, who set the terms of the pessimist/optimist debate in the early modern era by making the problem of evil primarily a problem of suffering.For Bayle, the primary task of addressing Epicurus’s query is not to justify or undermine belief in the existence of a good God. It is, rather, to understand, or at least appreciate, the irrefutable experience of human suffering. This focus on suffering alone does not make Bayle a pessimist. Rather, what makes him a pessimist is his insistence that there is far more suffering than pleasure in life, that we have little power to choose whether we suffer or flourish in any given circumstance, and that most of our pains cannot be explained as just punishment.In opposing Bayle’s diagnosis, Van Der Lugt suggests that most optimists employ a rhetorical strategy that she calls “the optics of optimism.” This strategy first attempts to meet Bayle head-on by denying his first two assertions. That is, optimists hold that there is far more joy in life than suffering and that we have significant capacity to choose happiness over sorrow. In this dispute, disagreement centers around a thought experiment proposed by Ba","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857674","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>The Scope of Consent</i>","authors":"Danielle Bromwich","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469590","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469590","url":null,"abstract":"Consent covers certain actions but not others. If I lend you my new car, you are now free to use it to run errands but not to compete in a demolition derby. This is obvious enough, but determining exactly what I have permitted is much harder. Since you cannot read my mind, you cannot know for sure which uses of the car fall within the contours of my consent. But if you get this wrong, you use my car without my permission, and that is a rights violation. There is a lot riding on determining which actions are permitted by my consent. Fortunately, Tom Dougherty offers us a novel way to determine this in their excellent book The Scope of Consent.It is natural to think that the scope of consent is fixed by what the consent-giver intended to permit. This captures the intuition that the scope of consent is controlled by the person giving consent. This used to be Dougherty’s view. However, this Permissive Intentions View is implausible. Suppose I had no intention of lending you my car—I only said you could borrow it because I falsely believed it would not start. Despite saying you could use it, this view implies that your use would not fall under the scope of my consent since I did not, in fact, intend you to use it. Cases like these lead Dougherty to reject the Permissive Intentions View in parts 1 and 2 of the book. And, since this view is implied by the Mental View of Consent—the view that we consent only if we have a certain mental attitude—they reject that too.Another plausible idea is that the scope of consent is fixed by what the consent-giver successfully communicates to the consent-receiver. This is intuitive in two respects. First, while most people agree that the consent-giver should determine what has been permitted, they also think that the consent-receiver should have epistemic access to whatever falls within the scope of consent. Second, this view implies that consent is a public phenomenon. Dougherty agrees with the second implication, and this provides them with another reason to reject the Mental View in favor of a Behavioral View of Consent. However, they are not persuaded by the Successful Communication Principle itself. Since successful communication requires uptake, the view implies that the consent-giver has not waived their rights until the consent-receiver finds out. So, even if I leave you a note saying that you can borrow my car, I have not succeeded in consenting until you have read the note. Dougherty finds this counterintuitive, and they therefore reject the view.Dougherty agrees that consent requires public behavior, and so the Successful Communication Account is the closest rival to the view they end up defending. And yet, despite engaging with arguments offered in favor of a view that makes consent and its scope a matter of private intention in part 1 of the book, there is no discussion of arguments offered in favor of a view that makes consent and its scope a matter of public performance in part 2. As a result, Dougherty","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857678","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Rational Polarization","authors":"Kevin Dorst","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469499","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469499","url":null,"abstract":"Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious. I show how Bayesians should model such ambiguity and then prove that—assuming rational updates are those which obey the value of evidence—ambiguity is necessary and sufficient for the rationality of predictable polarization. The main theoretical result is that there can be a series of such updates, each of which is individually expected to make you more accurate, but which together will predictably polarize you. Polarization results from asymmetric increases in accuracy. This mechanism is not only theoretically possible, but empirically plausible. I argue that cognitive search—searching a cognitively accessible space for a particular item—often yields asymmetrically ambiguous evidence, I present an experiment supporting its polarizing effects, and I use simulations to show how it can explain two of the core causes of polarization: confirmation bias and the group polarization effect.","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857709","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Shifty Speech and Independent Thought: Epistemic Normativity in Context</i>","authors":"Dorit Ganson","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469564","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469564","url":null,"abstract":"Crafted within a knowledge-first epistemological framework, Mona Simion’s engaging and wide-ranging work ensures that both the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) and Classical Invariantism (CI) can be part of a viable and productive research program.Dissatisfied with current strategies on offer in the literature, she successfully counters objections to the pair sourced in “shiftiness intuitions”—intuitions that seem to indicate that mere changes in practical context can impact the propriety of assertions and knowledge attributions. For example, in Keith DeRose’s famous pair of low stakes versus high stakes bank cases, the consequences of Keith’s acting on The bank is open on Saturday if it were false change from trivial in low stakes to catastrophic in high stakes. We are to suppose that the proposition is true, and that Keith has access to the same quantity and quality of evidence for it in both cases. In low stakes, but not in high stakes, we are inclined to think that Keith can appropriately assert to his inquiring wife “The bank is open on Saturday.” In low stakes, Keith’s knowledge ascription “I know that the bank is open on Saturday” strikes us as aptly asserted and true. In high stakes only a knowledge denial on Keith’s part strikes us as aptly asserted and true.If we want to hang on to KNA, it looks like we will have to abandon CI and concede that ‘knows’ or knowledge is sensitive to changes in practical considerations. If we want to retain CI, we can try to say that, while Keith does still know that the bank is open on Saturday in high stakes, he does not have sufficient warrant to properly assert that it is. But such a move seems to run counter to KNA. We appear to be stuck in the Shiftiness Dilemma.Keen to get us out of the dilemma and to preserve the idea that epistemically good thinking and asserting are independent of practical concerns, Simion suggests a strategy that can also be used to protect other epistemic speech-act norms and notions from similar threats of practical shiftiness. She notes that having an impact on the degree of epistemic warrant required is not enough to make a norm an epistemic one. Fair enough. If I am given strong practical reason (a million dollars, or a gun to the head) not to adopt full belief until I have gathered more evidence, there is potentially some nonepistemic norm at work in the demand for further evidence. So it is a live possibility (indeed, a plausible one, as Simion would say) that our intuitions in the Shiftiness Dilemma are being misdescribed: they are tracking all-things-considered propriety of assertion, not epistemic propriety. In high stakes, practical norms override the epistemic norm KNA. Keith’s asserting “The bank is open on Saturday” would be epistemically proper but all-things-considered improper.Simion backs up her account with an etiological-function origin story and typology for the norms of assertion. Here is her characterization of etiological function for traits, artifacts, ","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857681","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Sustaining Democracy: What We Owe to the Other Side</i>","authors":"Kevin Vallier","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469629","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469629","url":null,"abstract":"Sustaining Democracy is Robert Talisse’s well-argued follow-up to his previous book, Overdoing Democracy. Talisse has argued that American political polarization endangers democracy. The problem occurs when Americans allow their politics to become their identity and, in doing so, lose crosscutting identities, religious, familial, and civic. We not only lose the intrinsic value of those identities; we overdo democracy, and make it worse.In Sustaining Democracy, Talisse explores the political mindset that can sustain a democratic society. How must a citizen regard her opponents? The requisite attitude requires facing up to what Talisse calls the democrat’s dilemma. This is “the tension between the moral requirement to recognize the equality of political opponents and the moral directive to pursue and promote political justice” (4). This state of mind means allowing injustice to win for a time. If citizens do not allow injustice to rule, they must reject the political equality of their opponents. Our opponents see justice differently than we do. They sometimes win elections. If we insist on our own vision of justice, we will want to restrict the political equality of others. So, democratic citizens either allow injustice or violate political equality. What do we do?Talisse argues that sustaining democracy involves honoring political equality. The good citizen must recognize political equality and his biases about justice. Bearing both in mind, the good citizen can allow injustice to prevail for a time. And in doing so, he honors his opponents and sustains democracy with them.Many people fear that we must sometimes suspend democracy to promote justice, but if people are political equals, we cannot do this. Not always.Chapter 1 stresses that democracy involves political equality: politics is how equal persons govern themselves together. So democracy is a moral proposal, not merely a practical one. Citizens have to see others as part of a collective project, which means everyone gets an equal say. Indeed, they are entitled to one. That does not mean one must give in to their opponents’ views, only honor them in the democratic process. There is no complicity in injustice here. Citizens acknowledge a moral burden to discharge their civic duties to promote justice. Nonetheless, chapter 2 explains why democracy requires letting the opposition govern.Chapter 3 shows how belief polarization can exacerbate the democrat’s dilemma. Talisse suggests ways to overcome belief polarization. If Reba resists belief polarization, she can see the values and views she shared with others. Reba’s reflections may reduce her temptation to view political losses as disastrous. So she must scrutinize her own political thinking to locate her biases and correct them where she can (especially biases that lead her to delegitimize electoral victories). The belief that others misunderstand justice does not undermine the legitimacy of an election.Chapter 4 explores strategies to engag","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857676","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Leibniz on Time, Space, and Relativity</i>","authors":"Jeffrey K. McDonough","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469538","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469538","url":null,"abstract":"In his impressive Leibniz on Time, Space, and Relativity, Ric Arthur manages to juggle a daunting array of tasks: tracking the chronological development of Leibniz’s views over more than half a century; explicating Leibniz’s groundbreaking mathematics; assembling texts—primary and secondary—in at least five languages; and, as if in passing, offering original translations and assessments of countless source materials. All this erudition is put to the service of offering detailed interpretations of Leibniz’s challenging theories of time, space, and motion. Arthur’s performance is a lifetime in the making, and his Leibniz on Time, Space, and Relativity is certain to be essential reading for those interested in the topics it covers for many years to come.Leibniz’s subtle theory of time defies easy summary. According to Arthur, Leibniz’s theory of time is ultimately grounded in relations among states of substances. States of substances are representations of a world from a perspective. States that do not contradict one another occur at the same time. States that do contradict one another are successive. Among successive states, some provide reasons for others. A state that provides a reason for another state is temporally prior to that state. One thing exists before, after, or at the same time as another thing not because of the way both things are related to some special, independent third thing—namely, time—but rather because of the relations they bear to one another (and other similar things). A occurs before, after, or at the same time as B because of the relations between A and B. For Arthur’s Leibniz, time itself is an abstract ordering relation that structures not only all actual temporal relations but also all possible temporal relations. It guarantees not only that my fifth birthday must precede my fiftieth but also that my fiftieth must precede my merely possible five hundredth.Is Leibniz eliminating time? Many commentators have thought so. Leibniz was a nominalist, and nominalists typically deny that abstract objects exist. In holding that time is abstract, mustn’t Leibniz also hold that time doesn’t really exist? “No,” says Arthur. Abstract objects, for Leibniz, have a home in the “divine mind” (61). Thus, while the abstract structure that orders all possible existing things can’t itself exist in the concrete world, that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist at all. Furthermore, and perhaps even more importantly, the temporal relations holding between things in the world are not abstract. Even if time itself were not real, Arthur’s Leibniz would still insist that my fifth birthday occurred before my fiftieth birthday and at roughly the same time as my older brother’s seventh birthday. Even if time is abstract, temporal relations are not.But wait, doesn’t Leibniz also hold that relations are ideal? And in holding that temporal relations are ideal, isn’t Leibniz suggesting that temporal relations themselves are not real? Again, Arthur thinks no","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857679","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science</i>","authors":"H. K. Andersen","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469551","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469551","url":null,"abstract":"Questions about idealizations in science are often framed along the lines of, How can science be so effective when it gets so much wrong? Rice’s book, Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science offers a refinement on this framing, where we need not commit to the premise that idealizations are, in fact, wrong, that they need to be contained to the irrelevant parts of a model, or should be explained away as mere appearance. Rice takes a holist approach in which idealization is more like a process by which models as a whole are leveraged into better fit with their targets. Idealizations should not be carved out one by one on this approach; they make sense in the context of the models in which they figure, and they distort in ways that illuminate features like universal behavior in the systems being modeled. This is a refreshing approach to how idealizations work, one that does not require the common presupposition that idealizations are simply false.By universality, Rice means “the stability of certain patterns or behaviors across systems that are heterogeneous in their features. Universality classes are, then, just the group of systems that will display those universal patterns or behaviors” (155). Universality enables a more abstract description of systems than what scientists may have started with, and this process of making the description of the behavior more universal serves to identify common causal structures implemented in very different physical mediums. Different descriptions of causal relata facilitate identification of more unifying patterns of behavior. Given how often philosophers think of abstraction as somehow eliminating causation, by identifying causation too strongly with microphysical details, universality is a helpful way to bring the process of abstracting description back into contact with the way in which models inevitably involve causal structure, and how that causal structure itself can be better understood by connecting classes of systems with heterogeneous physical media and similar behavior, by showing how the more abstract descriptions of causal structure are deployed in each.There are two specific features of his view that set Rice’s book apart from most other contemporary views on idealizations. The first is the explicit emphasis on holism. Often, idealizations are isolated from models and then assessed on their own after extraction from the modeling context in which they were made. In evaluating idealizations as individual propositions removed from surrounding context, it is somewhat unsurprising that many look inaccurate. Rice aptly shows how idealization plays a key role in identifying universality behavior by distorting a whole, undecomposed model. This focus on holism and the role idealizations play in a larger modeling context helps Rice’s treatment of idealizations stand apart from many others, including those he explicitly engages with, such as Angela Potochnik (2017), Mich","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857680","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Democratic Law</i>","authors":"Melissa Schwartzberg","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469616","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469616","url":null,"abstract":"The question of how communities may author their own laws, thereby manifesting autonomy (“self-legislation”), arises throughout the history of political thought. In Democratic Law, her Berkeley Tanner Lectures, Seana Valentine Shiffrin offers a distinguished contribution to this long inquiry: she argues that law’s value within democratic societies rests on its communicative capacity, enabling citizens to express their recognition of each other’s equal status.Following an insightful introduction by editor Hannah Ginsborg, Shiffrin’s first lecture, “Democratic Law,” provides the philosophical groundwork for the rest of the volume. Shiffrin characterizes democracy as a system that treats its members with equal concern and respect, and one that enables its citizens to serve as the “equal and exclusive co-authors” of its legal norms and directives (20). Law plays a distinctive and crucial role on this account because it allows us to identify and to communicate our shared moral commitments. Foremost among these joint commitments is that members are due equal recognition of their status as citizens (51) and each of us must intend to convey respect for each other as equal comembers (31). We cannot do so severally, given the scope of the community, but neither can we satisfy our obligation merely by endorsing or complying with existing norms (31–32, 38). Rather, “each of us needs to perform (and receive) a form of communicative action that enacts and thereby expresses our commitment to the respectful treatment that each of us merits as a moral equal and a joint member of our social cooperative venture” (39). Shiffrin argues that law—quotidian or constitutional, common or statutory—is the central means of discharging this communicative duty.The second half of the volume features two lectures on legal applications, “Democratic Law and the Erosion of Common Law” and “Constitutional Balancing and State Interests.” The former focuses on what might seem to be a minor, technical Supreme Court decision concerning frequent-flier programs, yet Shiffrin persuasively argues that it raises far-reaching concerns about the nature of public commitments. The question in Northwest, Inc. v. Ginsberg is whether a federal statute, the Airline Deregulation Act, preempts a state rule of common law by which parties to a contract have an implied covenant of good faith and fair dealing. Shiffrin objects to Justice Alito’s opinion for a unanimous court in Ginsberg for two main reasons. First, it wrongly characterizes the duty of good faith and fair dealing as subject to preemption, as a form of state action around which the parties could not contract, rather than characterizing the duty as pertaining to the underlying meaning of voluntary agreements (74–75). By incorporating a duty of good faith into contract law, a democratic society expresses the value of keeping commitments to each other, and that respect for each other as citizens means not deliberately acting to undermine the ","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857675","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Reasons First</i>","authors":"Eva Schmidt","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469603","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469603","url":null,"abstract":"Mark Schroeder’s latest book delves deeper into the topic of normativity and reasons, while moving his focus from ethics to epistemology. His central aims are, first, to argue that theorizing in normative epistemology profits from comparison with other normative domains (his “Core Hypothesis” [9]); and second, to defend a picture of epistemic normativity that puts reasons first: they can be used to explain and analyze all other epistemic normative phenomena.Part 1 of the book provides a compelling account of normative reasons as competitors (which compete in determining, for instance, what one ought to do or believe) that are act-oriented rather than outcome-oriented, and can be acted on (my reasons to φ can be the reasons for which I φ). Schroeder assumes that there are both objective reasons, which bear on the correctness of belief, and subjective reasons, which determine its rationality or justification.Part 2 aims to solve the problem of unjustified belief for Reasons First epistemology. On this view, normative standings such as justification/rationality and knowledge bottom out in epistemic reasons. Yet it seems that only justified belief or knowledge can provide a subject S with reasons, so that we cannot take reasons as fundamental. So, apparently, perceptual experience—given that it itself is neither knowledge nor justified—cannot provide us with reasons or evidence. But this cannot be right, since perceptual experience is undoubtedly a privileged source of evidence concerning our surroundings. According to Schroeder, to allow for perceptual justification, we need a world-implicating conception of perceptual evidence, as endorsed by disjunctivism, which takes evidence to entail truths about the external world. At the same time, and contrary to disjunctivism, we must conceive of such evidence as nonfactive—it does not have to be true (or consist in a relation to a truth) and so is available not only in the good case of veridical perception but also in illusion or hallucination. Whether S’s belief is rational cannot hinge on minimal differences, as implied by disjunctivism. Schroeder illustrates this with a pair of cases C1 and C2 that are identical except that in C1, S undergoes a veridical perception, and in C2, she undergoes an indistinguishable illusion. (Say, in C1, S is looking at a red ball, but in C2, she is facing a white ball that appears red due to red lighting.) But, importantly, this illusion is a one-time occurrence—S has an otherwise flawless perceptual track record in C1 and C2. In both cases, S’s belief is equally rational, or so Schroeder argues.Schroeder thus rejects disjunctivism. Instead, he endorses the apparent factive attitude view: basic perceptual reasons are—nonfactive—subjective reasons, such as the proposition that I see that the ball is red. But since they entail worldly facts (such as: the ball is red), they are nonetheless world-implicating. For me to possess the reason, it has to appear to me that I see that","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"<i>Mind and World in Aristotle’s</i> De Anima","authors":"Emily Kress","doi":"10.1215/00318108-10469525","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/00318108-10469525","url":null,"abstract":"Here is a fact about humans: we use our senses to pick up on things around us and our intellect to understand whatever is out there to be understood. In Mind and World in Aristotle’s De Anima, Kelsey argues that this fact is, in Aristotle’s view, in need of an explanation. He finds one in De Anima 3.8’s suggestion that “intelligence [is] form of forms, and sensibility form of sensibilia” (432a2–3; quoted on p. 2). Roughly, his proposal is that our sensibility and intelligence “enter into the very idea” of their objects; they know them because they help make them what they are (20).This is an admirably adventurous thesis, and Kelsey’s arguments for it are likewise so. A particular strength, in fact, is the way the book brings out what is at stake philosophically in familiar and seemingly obscure doctrines alike. Two highlights, which I discuss below, are its discussions of how Aristotle’s engagement with his predecessors shapes his questions (and then makes it hard to answer them) and of how his account of perceptible qualities helps him meet this challenge. This book is therefore a significant contribution to scholarship on the De Anima (DA), and it will be of great value to scholars working on Aristotle’s philosophy of mind. Part of what makes it valuable, moreover, is how it encourages us to ask better questions about core Aristotelian doctrines: while some of Kelsey’s proposals (especially his account of per se causation, which I discuss below) are provocative, they are always productively so.The introduction sets up Kelsey’s core question. It is: “What about” our sensibility and intelligence “makes” them “subject[s] of” some “attribute” (6)? What must they be they like—in their essence (8)—to know what they do? The next three chapters argue that the DA is concerned to answer this question, and, moreover, to do so in a particular way: to show why sensibility and intelligence know “real beings” as they really are—not as they appear.Kelsey’s argument for this claim is a highlight of the book. It takes off from the observation that DA 2.5 answers two foundational questions in a way that, according to DA 3.3, should be problematic. These are: (A) whether perceivers and perceptibles “are like or unlike,” and (B) “whether perceiving is a matter of ‘being affected’ or ‘altered’” (40). The difficulty is that 2.5 wants to answer that perception is (A∗) like-by-like and (B∗) a case of being altered—where 3.3 suggests that those very commitments got Aristotle’s predecessors into trouble. Those thinkers held that “both understanding and judging are held to be like a kind of perceiving” (427a17–b6), apparently because they thought these are (A∗) like-by-like and (B∗) being altered (43).This “diagnosis,” Kelsey argues, is interesting because it “connects” (A∗) and (B∗) to another question: whether “how things are” just is “how they appear” (43). (A∗), for instance, reflects the view that “our judgments are … the mere projecting of a random and fluctuating p","PeriodicalId":48129,"journal":{"name":"PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2023-07-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"135857677","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}