So there’s the Train Case (or is it called the Trolley Case?):
You see a train coming very fast. You look down the track and see that the track forks into two. On the left track, you see that five children have been tied to the track.Â
Archive for December, 2007
The Train Case and the Hospital Case
Monday, December 31st, 2007Information on Philosophy Journals
Thursday, December 27th, 2007I found this great site of information about philosophy journals. It states that it is
A place for authors, editors, and referees to share information on philosophy journals: their editorial practices, response times, backlogs on publishing, policies on providing comments to authors, etc.
I found it from a really helpful discussion at Leiter’s blog. The discussion there began in 2004 and has continued to now (after a year or two of break). Helpful info: Nous, Phil. Studies, PPR, Analysis, Philosophical Quarterly, Canadian Journal of Philosophy all seemed to be good at returning submissions with comments and/or rejections (or resubmissions). Philosophical Review had a little bit of a bad reputation, and it seemed that almost everybody had a horror story about Mind. (But Mind has changed editors since the discussion in 2004 occurred, so it may be different now.)
The 59th Philosopher’s Carnival…
Wednesday, December 19th, 2007Freewill Question!
Monday, December 17th, 2007Show-me bloggers,
Does anyone know the article in which the Rod (Roderick Chisholm that is) claims that agent causation is really just a version of event causation? I remember someone pointing this out to me (or at least an article where someone claims that Chisholm abandoned agent causation in favor of an event causation version of libertarianism) during Vallentyne’s freewill seminar. Anyway, I have been trying to find it, but I can’t locate the article. Anybody know the title or where it can be found???
Evan Fales on Proper Basicality
Sunday, December 16th, 2007In PPR (March 2004), Fales shows that it is actually quite difficult to distinguish properly basic beliefs from properly nonbasic ones. I’ve been worried about this for a while, so I’m glad that Fales wrote about it. If there is no clear distinction between the two, then foundationalism, the dominant epistemological view of today, is quite hard to formulate.
Fales considers the following attempt at (more…)
Kant Attack Ad
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Disagreement and Agnosticism
Tuesday, December 11th, 2007Feldman and others have argued that one’s awareness of apparent disagreement among epistemic peers concerning a proposition P is a sufficient condition to render one’s belief that P unjustified. Roughly, the problem is one of maintaining epistemic symmetry: if I know that people that are just as intelligent as me, informed as me, sincere as me, etc. disagree with me about something, then IF I lack an epistemic reason to prefer my view to theirs, then I ought to be agnostic.
Many folks (e.g. Plantinga, Weatherson) have pointed out that this view has a self-referential problem: if it’s true, then one can’t be justified in believing it (why? because philosophers disagree amongst themselves over whether or not the principle is true!). But I have a slightly different question: does the same consideration count against agnosticism? Feldman and others argue that agnosticism is the only rational move in the midst of (a specified context of) disagreement. But don’t the same considerations show that agnosticism, too, is unjustified? If one knows that epistemic peers endorse P, then isn’t being neutral as to whether or not P just as irrational?
Propositions, Beliefs, and Superman
Saturday, December 8th, 2007It’s been so long that I’m forgetting some of the basic moves in phil. language. Can anyone point me in the right direction here?
Lois Lane believes each of the following:
- Superman is strong.
- Clark Kent is not strong.
I forgot the resolution to this puzzle. Do philosophers agree that the statements indicate the same proposition in each case (i.e. P in the first case and ~P in the second)?