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1. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 9
William MacAskill

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In this paper I propose an approach to decision theory that I call metanormativism, where the key idea is that decision theory should take into account decision-theoretic uncertainty. I don’t attempt to argue in favor of this view, though I briefly offer some motivation for it. Instead, I argue that if the view is correct, it has important implications for the causal versus evidential decision-theory debate. First, it allows us to make rational sense of our seemingly divergent intuitions across the Smoking Lesion and The Psychopath Button cases. Second, it generates strong new arguments for preferring the causal approach to decision-theory over the evidential approach.

2. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 9
Renaud-Philippe Garner

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In this paper, I seek to close a gap in Michael Walzer’s argument for the moral equality of soldiers. Specifically, I seek to show that Walzer’s argument for the moral equality of soldiers depends upon an implicit analysis of the function of excuses. I provide this analysis of excuses: a triadic relationship between moral norms, a background of normality and excuses. I then use this analysis to show that Jeff McMahan’s argument for the moral inequality of soldiers rest upon an implausible view of excuses, namely that the conditions of war merely constitute excuses for failing to comply with ordinary, or peacetime, morality. I argue that the conditions of war are best understood as providing a new background of normality rather than a set of excuses. To show this, I identify five conditions that separate the normality of war from the normality of peace.

comments and criticism

3. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 9
Shao-Pu Kang

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Sydney Shoemaker argues that a certain class of self-ascriptions is immune to error through misidentification relative to the first-person pronouns. In their “Self-Consciousness and Immunity,” Timothy Lane and Caleb Liang question Shoemaker’s view. Lang and Liang present a clinical case (somatoparaphrenia) and an experiment (the Body Swap Illusion) and argue that they are counterexamples to Shoemaker’s view. This paper is a response to Lane and Liang’s challenge. I identify the desiderata that a counterexample to Shoemaker’s view must meet and show that somatoparaphrenia and the Body Swap Illusion fail to meet those desiderata. Thus, despite being puzzling phenomena, somatoparaphrenia and the Body Swap Illusion are not counterexamples to Shoemaker’s view.

book reviews

4. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 9
Daniel Deasy

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5. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 9

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6. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 8
Daniel Greco, Brian Hedden

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We defend Uniqueness, the claim that given a body of total evidence, there is a uniquely rational doxastic state that it is rational for one to be in. Epistemic rationality doesn't give you any leeway in forming your beliefs. To this end, we bring in two metaepistemological pictures about the roles played by rational evaluations. Rational evaluative terms serve to guide our practices of deference to the opinions of others, and also to help us formulate contingency plans about what to believe in various situations. We argue that Uniqueness vindicates these two roles for rational evaluations, while Permissivism clashes with them.

7. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 8
Fabrizio Cariani

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Contrastivists view ought-sentences as expressing comparisons among alternatives. Deontic actualists believe that the value of each alternative in such a comparison is determined by what would actually happen if that alternative were to be the case. One of the arguments that motivates actualism is a challenge to the principle of agglomeration over conjunction—the principle according to which if you ought to run and you ought to jump, then you ought to run and jump. I argue that there is no way of developing the actualist insight into a logic that invalidates the agglomeration principle without also invalidating other desirable patterns of inference. After doing this, I extend the analysis to other contrastive views that challenge agglomeration in the way that the actualist does. This motivates skepticism about the actualist’s way of challenging agglomeration.

book reviews

8. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 8
Neal A. Tognazzini

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9. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 8

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10. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 7
Roy T. Cook, Philip A. Ebert

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In this paper, we present a formal recipe that Frege followed in his magnum opus “Grundgesetze der Arithmetik” when formulating his definitions. This recipe is not explicitly mentioned as such by Frege, but we will offer strong reasons to believe that Frege applied it in developing the formal material of Grundgesetze. We then show that a version of Basic Law V plays a fundamental role in Frege’s recipe and, in what follows, we will explicate what exactly this role is and explain how it differs from the role played by extensions in his earlier book “Die Grundlagen der Arithmetik”. Lastly, we will demonstrate that this hitherto neglected yet foundational aspect of Frege’s use of Basic Law V helps to resolve a number of important interpretative challenges in recent Frege scholarship, while also shedding light on some important differences between Frege’s logicism and recent neo-logicist approaches to the foundations of mathematics.

comments and criticism

11. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 7
Knut Olav Skarsaune

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The article defends a mild form of pessimism about moral deference, by arguing that deference is incompatible with authentic interaction, that is, acting in a way that communicates our own normative judgment. The point of such interaction is ultimately that it allows us to get to know and engage one another. This vindication of our intuitive resistance to moral deference is upheld, in a certain range of cases, against David Enoch’s recent objection to views that motivate pessimism by appealing to moral autonomy or understanding. Enoch is right to point out that the value of autonomy or understanding cannot provide reason not to defer, if deferring would reduce the risk of treating others wrongly. But in the kind of case where we would want other people to act authentically towards us, even at the cost of a greater risk of wrongdoing, we should do the same towards them.

book reviews

12. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 7
Carolyn Brighouse

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13. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 7

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14. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 5/6
The Editors

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15. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 5/6
Solomon Feferman

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In the first part of this article, Feferman outlines his ‘conceptual structuralism’ and emphasizes broad similarities between Parsons’s and his own structuralist perspective on mathematics. However, Feferman also notices differences and makes two critical claims about any structuralism that focuses on the “ur-structures” of natural and real numbers: (1) it does not account for the manifold use of other important structures in modern mathematics and, correspondingly, (2) it does not explain the ubiquity of “individual [natural or real] numbers” in that use. In the second part, Feferman presents a summary of his reasons for the skepticism he has towards contemporary metamathematical investigations of set theory. That skepticism led him to reject the Continuum Problem as a definite mathematical one. He contrasts that attitude sharply to Parsons’s “great sympathy for the current explorations of higher set theory.”

16. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 5/6
Peter Koellner

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In this paper I examine Feferman’s reasons for maintaining that while the statements of first-order number theory are “completely clear'” and “completely definite,”' many of the statements of analysis and set theory are “inherently vague'” and “indefinite.”' I critique his four central arguments and argue that in the end the entire case rests on the brute intuition that the concept of subsets of natural numbers—along with the richer concepts of set theory—is not “clear enough to secure definiteness.” My response to this final, remaining point will be that the concept of “being clear enough to secure definiteness” is about as clear a case of an inherently vague and indefinite concept as one might find, and as such it can bear little weight in making a case against the definiteness of analysis and set theory.

17. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 5/6
W. W. Tait

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An observation and a thesis: The observation is that, whatever the connection between Kant’s philosophy and Hilbert’s conception of finitism, Kant’s account of geometric reasoning shares an essential idea with the account of finitist number theory in “Finitism” (Tait 1981), namely the idea of constructions f(X) from ‘arbitrary’ or ‘generic’ objects of various types (triangles, natural numbers, etc.). The thesis is that, contrary to a substantial part of contemporary literature on the subject, when Kant referred to number (as a common noun) and arithmetic, he was not referring to the natural or whole numbers and their arithmetic, but rather to the real numbers (as then understood) and their arithmetic. (This thesis owes, and will receive, some account of Kant’s discussion of number as the schema of magnitude.)

18. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 5/6
W. Sieg

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In his “Kant and Finitism” Tait attempts to connect his analysis of finitist arithmetic with Kant’s perspective on arithmetic. The examination of this attempt is the basis for a distinctive view on the dramatic methodological shift from Kant to Dedekind and Hilbert. Dedekind’s 1888 essay “Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen?” gives a logical analysis of arithmetic, whereas Hilbert’s 1899 book “Grundlagen der Geometrie” presents such an analysis of geometry or, as Hilbert puts it, of our spatial intuition. This shift in the late ninteenth century required a radical expansion of logic: first by the inclusion of principles for “systems” (sets) and “mappings” (functions), but second by a structuralist broadening of axioms and inferential principles. The interaction of mathematics and logic in mathematical logic opened, around 1920, fields of investigation with enormous impact on the philosophy of mathematics, promoting a deeper integration of mathematical practice and philosophical reflection.

19. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 5/6
Charles Parsons

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I comment on Feferman’s views on set theory, in particular criticizing a priori arguments claiming that the continuum hypothesis has no determinate truth value and commenting on his responses to my paper on his skepticism about set theory. I respond to criticisms of his of the structuralism that I have advocated and comment on his view of proof theory. On Koellner’s paper, I register little disagreement but note a difference of sympathy about views such as constructivism. On Tait’s paper, I note that Kant gives more play to the notion of whole number than Tait seems to allow and that Kant’s conception of real numbers is unclear. Responding to Sieg’s paper, I note his emphasis on how much mathematics and its foundations changed from Kant’s time to that of Dedekind and Hilbert and mention my effort to find a limited role for an intuition distantly descended from Kant’s.

20. The Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 113 > Issue: 5/6

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