Anne Conway (1631-1679) is most well known for her insightful criticism of the accounts of human nature advanced by René Descartes and Henry More, two leading luminaries of the seventeenth century. Both Descartes and More are mind-body dualists, and Conway’s criticism of their views proceeds by dismantling the plausibility of dualism in general. In its place, Conway advances a form of mind-body monism: a human being is not a composite of mind and body, but one entity with both mental and physical properties. However, Conway also criticizes some of her fellow monists—in particular, her contemporary, Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677). The aim of this talk is to examine Conway’s arguments against the views of Spinoza. On some issues, it will be argued, her objections miss their mark. Yet at least some of her objections point to foundational difficulties faced by Spinoza’s account of human nature.

Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason (1781/7) famously presents a two-stem theory of human cognition that seeks to integrate the contributions of human sensibility and human understanding—insisting on the unilateral inadequacy of either stem (‘blind’ intuitions, ‘empty’ concepts). Kant’s account of reflecting judgment in theCritique of the Power of Judgment (1790) is the acknowledgment that his two-stem theory provides, at best, an unsteady foundation for a duly critical epistemology. Specifically, Kant recognizes (avant la lettre) that the two-stem theory lends support to both ‘conceptualist’ motifs and to their diametrically opposed ‘non-conceptualist’ counterparts—without resolving the inevitable conflict. Kant offers the mature expression of this conflict in the “Antinomy of the Power of Judgment” in the second, teleological part of the 3^rd Critique. Far from being a side-show in the swampy backwaters of Kant’s philosophy of biology, this antinomy exposes the tension between conceptualist (roughly, determining) and non-conceptualist (roughly, reflecting) strands in critical epistemology as inherently dialectical. It thus reveals critical epistemology itself as beholden to a form of dogmatism; a ‘critical dogmatism,’ as we may call it, fully embracing the air of paradox. The Critique of the Power of Judgment, then, is no mere ornament on Kant’s theoretical philosophy but a meta-critique without which critical epistemology would either be impossible to complete or self-contradictory upon completion. 

In this paper I attempt to provide a novel account of the wrong of mercenarism. I argue that the outsourcing of combat tasks to private parties (mercenaries) consists of a system of either invalid or seriously problematic promises between states and mercenaries that generates a condition of double domination – both those subject to the mercenary’s use of force and the mercenary themselves are dominated. I then explain how my argument also contributes an answer to the broader question of which jobs, if any, ought to be performed exclusively by the state. I argue that we have strong reasons to nationalize jobs the function of which is both socially desirable and can only be fulfilled if employees are bound to stay when an imminent risk of death materializes.

In an earlier paper, I raised and answered the following question:  what grounds the grounding facts?  That is, if a grounds b, what grounds the fact that a grounds b?  What makes that fact hold? In this talk, I will revisit this question, uncovering what is right and what is wrong about the answer I initially defended.  Doing so will lead me into issues about the role of general principles in grounding, about whether or not we should expect a univocal answer, and, time permitting, about parallel questions in the case of causation.   

Abstract. This talk is part of a larger project investigating the possibility of a computational approach to creative intelligence. A line of thought dating back to Peirce and Turing associates creative or “intuition”-based intelligence with explanatory inference. This talk examines the so-called Inference to the Best Explanation’s (IBE) prospects for providing a logic of creative intelligence. Standard articulations of IBE imply the uniqueness claim that exactly one explanation should be inferred in response to an explanandum. This claim has been challenged as being both too strong (sometimes agnosticism between candidate explanatory hypotheses seems the rational conclusion) and too weak (in cases where multiple hypotheses might sensibly be conjointly inferred). I propose a novel interpretation of IBE that retains the uniqueness claim while also allowing for agnostic and conjunctive conclusions. This interpretation also suggests one sense in which the creative process of deriving and guessing new ideas can be automated. Finally, I argue that a particular formal explication of explanatory goodness can helpfully guide computational IBE reasoning.

Controversies over gender, race, and immigration take place in legislatures and social media. For example, there has been a sustained campaign in the United States by media figures like Chris Rufo to rile people up over “Critical Race Theory” by stoking fears about radical indoctrination in k-12 public schools. The controversies reveal a clash of worlds—different value systems, sets of interests, social orders for which language is a significant battlefront; we are engrossed in a war of words. According to James Baldwin, language is a means and tool of power, each describing a different reality. What is the nature of these realities? Do they create worlds so distinct that genuine communication becomes impossible? And what does this mean for things like achieving racial justice? 

Abstract: In this talk, I explore the connection between understanding persons and respecting them. This connection is the focus of my current book project and the culmination of several years of work. But instead of delving into the nuances of the central theoretical claims of this project, in this talk I will explore what motivates it. In doing so, my goal will be to upset some longstanding philosophical biases towards rationalist and rights-based theories of respect, to help clear conceptual space for my alternative claim that understanding persons sometimes constitutes a way of respecting them. The upshot, I will argue, is a view about respect that is focused on persons in their individuality, and the promise of an ethics premised on difference.

TBA