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1. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 4
Benjamin Bayer How Not to Refute Quine: Evaluating Kim’s Alternatives to Naturalized Epistemology
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This paper offers an interpretation of Quine’s naturalized epistemology through the lens of Jaegwon Kim’s influential critique of the same. Kim argues that Quine forces a false choice between traditional deductivist foundationalism and naturalized epistemology and contends that there are viable alternative epistemological projects. However it is suggested that Quine would reject these alternatives by reference to the same fundamental principles (underdetermination, indeterminacy of translation, extensionalism) that led him to reject traditional epistemology and propose naturalism as an alternative. Given this interpretation of Quine, it is essential that a successful critic of naturalism also examine Quine’s aforementioned principles. The divide between naturalist and nonnaturalist epistemology turns out to be defined by the divide between more fundamental naturalist and nonnaturalist approaches to semantics.
2. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 4
Steven D. Hales, Timothy A. Johnson Time for Change
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Metaphysical theories of change incorporate substantive commitments to theories of persistence. The two most prominent classes of such theories are endurantism and perdurantism. Defenders of endurance-style accounts of change, such as Klein, Hinchliff, and Oderberg, do so through appeal to a priori intuitions about change. We argue that this methodology is understandable but mistaken—an adequate metaphysics of change must accommodate all experiences of change, not merely intuitions about a limited variety of cases. Once we examine additional experiences of change, particularly those in (special) relativistic circumstances, it becomes clear that only a perdurance account of change is adequate.
3. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 4
John Lemos Kanian Freedom and the Problem of Luck
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This article provides a brief explanation of Robert Kane’s indeterministic, event-causal libertarian theory of freedom and responsibility. It is noted that a number of authors have criticized libertarian theories,such as Kane’s, by presenting the problem of luck. After noting how Kane has tried to answer this problem in his recent writings, the author goes on to explain Ishtiyaque Haji’s recent version of the luckargument. The author considers three possible Kanian replies to Haji’s luck argument and argues that the third reply can adequately answer the luck objection. It is also noted that the third reply requires making some significant alterations to Kane’s theory that would also help him resolve certain problems with his views about responsibility for character.
4. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 4
Michael Pendlebury Objective Reasons
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In order to establish that judgments about practical reasons can be objective, it is necessary to show that the applicable standards provide an adequate account of truth and error. This in turn requires that these standards yield an extensive set of substantive, publicly accessible judgments that are presumptively true. This output requirement is not satisfied by the standards of universalizability, consistency, coherence, and caution alone. But it is satisfied if we supplement them with the principle that desire is a source of minimal reasons. This principle is justified despite currently fashionable arguments against the claims of desire.
5. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 4
Bart Vandenabeele Schopenhauer on the Values of Aesthetic Experience
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In this essay, I argue that Schopenhauer’s view of the aesthetic feelings of the beautiful and the sublime shows how a “dialectical” interpretation that homogenizes both aesthetic concepts and reduces thediscrepancy between both to merely quantitative differences is flawed. My critical analysis reveals a number of important tensions in both Schopenhauer’s own aesthetic theory—which does not ultimately succeed in “merging” Plato’s and Kant’s approaches—and the interpretation that unjustly reduces the value of aesthetic experience to a merely preliminary stage of ethical will-less salvation.
6. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 4
Wayne Wright Why Naturalize Consciousness?
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This paper examines the relevance of philosophical work on consciousness to its scientific study. Of particular concern is the debate over whether consciousness can be naturalized, which is typically taken to bear on the prospects for its scientific investigation. It is not at all clear that philosophers of consciousness have properly identified and evaluated the assumptions about scientific activity made by bothnaturalization and antinaturalization projects. I argue that there is good reason to think that some of the assumptions about physicalism and explanation made by the parties to the debate are open to seriousdoubt. Thus this paper is an invitation for those inquiring into whether consciousness can be naturalized to more carefully consider the expected payoff of such efforts.
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7. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 4
Index 2007
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8. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 4
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9. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 3
David Bain Color, Externalism, and Switch Cases
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I defend externalism about color experiences and color thoughts, which I argue color objectivism requires. Externalists face the following question: would a subject’s wearing inverting lenses eventually change the color content of, for instance, those visual experiences the subject reports with “red”? From the work of Ned Block, David Velleman, Paul Boghossian, Michael Tye, and Fiona Macpherson, I extract problems facing those who answer “Yes” and problems facing those who answer “No.” I show how these problems can be overcome, leaving externalism available to the color objectivist.
10. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 3
Todd Jones What’s Done Here—Explaining Behavior in Terms of Customs and Norms
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Terms like “norm,” “custom,” “convention,” “tradition,” and “culture” are used throughout social science, and throughout everyday conversation ,to describe certain types of behaviors. Yet it is not very clear what people mean by them. In this paper, I try to make clearer what is meant by these terms and what makes the behavior they describe possible.
11. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 3
Matthew King The Meno’s Metaphilosophical Examples
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I propose that an ill-appreciated contrast between the examples Socrates gives Meno, to show him how he ought to philosophize, is the key to understanding the Meno. I contend that Socrates prefers hisdefinitions of shape to his account of color because the former are concerned with what shape is, while the latter is concerned with how color comes to be. This contrast suggests that Plato intends ananalogous contrast between the (properly philosophical) way of inquiry that leads to Socrates’ definition of knowledge as “true belief tied down with an account” and the (not properly philosophical) way of inquiry that leads to Socrates’ account of how knowledge comes to be, that is, the “theory of recollection.”
12. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 3
Jack M. C. Kwong Is Conceptual Atomism a Plausible Theory of Concepts?
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Conceptual atomism is the view according to which most lexical concepts lack ‘internal’ or constituent structure. To date, it has not received much attention from philosophers and psychologists. A centralreason is that it is thought to be an implausible theory of concepts, resulting in untenable implications. The main objective of this paper is to present conceptual atomism as a viable alternative, with a view toachieving two aims: the first, to characterize and to elucidate conceptual atomism; and the second, to dispel some misconceptions associated with it. My aim is to show that the prospect of conceptualatomism is a promising one.
13. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 3
Aaron Allen Schiller Psychological Nominalism and the Plausibility of Sellars’s Myth of Jones
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Part of Sellars’s general attack on the Myth of the Given is his endorsement of psychological nominalism, a view that implies that awareness of our own mental states is not given but must be earned.Sellars provides an account of how such awareness might have been earned with the Myth of Jones. Such an account is important for Sellars, for without it the Given can look necessary after all. But aproblem with such accounts is that they can look extremely implausible. Sellars himself seems unconcerned to make his account plausible, and so others have stepped in here. But, I argue, they have done so in ways that fail to respect his psychological nominalism. This evinces, as well as reinforces, a lack of sensitivity to the scope of Sellars’s attack on the Given, the aim of which is the dismantling of “the entire framework of givenness.” In this essay, I show how one can make Sellars’s Myth of Jones plausible, while still respecting his psychological nominalism, by seeing how Jones’s thought is governed by the norms of rationality as interpretability.
14. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 3
Robert Sinclair Quine’s Naturalized Epistemology and the Third Dogma of Empiricism
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This essay reconsiders Davidson’s critical attribution of the scheme–content distinction to Quine’s naturalized epistemology. It focuses on Davidson’s complaint that the presence of this distinction leads Quine to mistakenly construe neural input as evidence. While committed to this distinction, Quine’s epistemology does not attempt to locate a justificatory foundation in sensory experience and does not then equate neural intake with evidence. Quine’s central epistemological task is an explanatory one that attempts to scientifically clarify the route from stimulus to science. Davidson’s critical remarks wrongly assign concerns to Quine’s view that it does not have and further obscures the status of his naturalized conception of epistemology.
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15. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 3
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16. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 2
Alia Al-Saji The Temporality of Life: Merleau-Ponty, Bergson, and the Immemorial Past
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Borrowing conceptual tools from Bergson, this essay asks after the shift in the temporality of life from Merleau-Ponty’s Phénoménologie de la perception to his later works. Although the Phénoménologie conceives life in terms of the field of presence of bodily action, later texts point to a life of invisible and immemorial dimensionality. By reconsidering Bergson, but also thereby revising his reading of Husserl, Merleau-Ponty develops a nonserial theory of time in the later works, one that acknowledges the verticality and irreducibility of the past. Life in the flesh relies on unconsciousness or forgetting, on an invisibility that structures its passage.
17. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 2
Bernard P. Dauenhauer Responding to Evil
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In this paper, I argue that moral and institutional evils, even though they are all contingent, are so pervasive and persistent that there is no practical way of responding to them that would lead eventually to theeradication of all of them. Instead, our practical task is to respond to these evils in ways that respect both the basic capabilities and their associated vulnerabilities that are constitutive of each human being. Todo this most effectively, one should offer unconditional forgiveness to the perpetrators of evil. The attitude that can best underpin this forgiveness is one of a properly understood indefeasible hope, a hopethat always insists that each person is of greater worth than whatever he or she does.
18. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 2
A. C. Genova Externalism and Token-Identity
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This study has two goals. The first is to identify three desiderata required for a successful defense of a version of nonreductive physicalism: semantic externalism, token-identity between mental andphysical events, and nonrelational type-individuation of physical states. In this context, the paper also presents a refutation of recent challenges to content-externalism by those who attempt to resuscitate internalism by focusing on narrow content associated with the fundamental phenomenology, rather than the intentionality, of mental states. The second goal is to defend the token-identity thesis from Tyler Burge’s argument to the effect that token-identity is incompatible with semantic externalism. An account is also offered as to why Burge’s argument, albeit fallacious, might seem persuasive under a certain interpretation of possible worlds.
19. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 2
Nathan Hanna Socrates and Superiority
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I propose an alternative interpretation of the Crito. The arguments that are typically taken to be Socrates’ primary arguments against escape are actually supplementary arguments that rely on what I callthe Superiority Thesis, the thesis that the state and its citizens are members of a moral hierarchy where those below are tied by bonds of obligation to those above. I provide evidence that Socrates holds thisthesis, demonstrate how it resolves a number of apparent difficulties, and show why my interpretation is preferable to competing interpretations.
20. The Southern Journal of Philosophy: Volume > 45 > Issue: 2
Christopher Martin Consciousness in Spinoza’s Philosophy of Mind
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Spinoza’s philosophy of mind is thought to lack a serious account of consciousness. In this essay I argue that Spinoza’s doctrine of ideas of ideas has been wrongly construed, and that once righted it provides the foundation for an account. I then draw out the finer details of Spinoza’s account of consciousness, doing my best to defend its plausibility along the way. My view is in response to a proposal byEdwin Curley and the serious objection leveled against it by Margaret Wilson and Jonathan Bennett.