Department of PhilosophyWe all know that, nowadays, physics and philosophy are housed in separate departments on university campuses. They are distinct disciplines with their own journals and conferences, and in general they are practiced by different people, using different tools and methods. We also know that this was… read more about this publication »
Abstract There seems to be universal agreement among Epicurean scholars that friendship characterized by other-concern is conceptually incompatible with Epicureanism understood as a directly egoistic theory. I reject this view. I argue that once we properly understand the nature of… read more about this publication »
Two- and 3-year-old children (N = 96) were tested in an object-choice task with video presentations of peer and adult partners. An immersive, semi-interactive procedure enabled both the close matching of adult and peer conditions and the combination of participants' choice behavior with… read more about this publication »
Valence framing effects occur when participants make different choices or judgments depending on whether the options are described in terms of their positive outcomes (e.g. lives saved) or their negative outcomes (e.g. lives lost). When such framing effects occur in the domain of moral judgments,… read more about this publication »
In Madame Du Châtelet's milieu, many philosophers argued that Newton's physics allowed one to ignore metaphysics, or perhaps required a modest supplement from elements of Locke's metaphysics. In her Institutions physiques, Du Châtelet takes a radically different approach. She contends that Newton's… read more about this publication »
I respond to Moll, Nichols, and Mackey’s review of my book Becoming Human. I agree with many of their points, but have my own point of view on some others. read more about this publication »
People with human immunodeficiency virus (HIV) often have neurocognitive impairment. People with HIV make riskier decisions when the outcome probabilities are known, and have abnormal neural architecture underlying risky decision making. However, ambiguous decision making, when the outcome… read more about this publication »
In four studies, we investigated the role of remembering, reflecting on, and mutating personal past moral transgressions to learn from those moral mistakes and to form intentions for moral improvement. Participants reported having ruminated on their past wrongdoings, particularly their more severe… read more about this publication »
Birch's account of the evolutionary origins of social norms is essentially individualistic. It begins with individuals regulating their own actions toward internally represented goals, as evaluative standards, and adds in a social dimension only secondarily. I argue that a better account begins at… read more about this publication »
AbstractQuantum set theory (QST) and topos quantum theory (TQT) are two long running projects in the mathematical foundations of quantum mechanics (QM) that share a great deal of conceptual and technical affinity. Most pertinently, both approaches attempt to resolve some of the conceptual… read more about this publication »
After two strangers have briefly interacted with one another, both believe that they like their partner more than their partner likes them. A plausible explanation for this liking gap is that people are constantly worrying about how others are evaluating them. If so, one would expect the liking gap… read more about this publication »
Growing evidence indicates that our higher rational capacities depend on social interaction—that only through engaging with others do we acquire the ability to evaluate beliefs as true or false, or to reflect on and evaluate the reasons that support our beliefs. Up to now, however, we have had… read more about this publication »
Chimpanzees help conspecifics achieve their goals in instrumental situations, but neither their immediate motivation nor the evolutionary basis of their motivation is clear. In the current study, we gave chimpanzees the opportunity to instrumentally help a conspecific to obtain food. Following… read more about this publication »
Abstract In this paper, I argue that ‘art’, though an open concept, is not undefinable. I propose a particular kind of definition, a disjunctive definition, which comprises extant theories of art. I co-opt arguments from the philosophy of science, likening the concept ‘art’ to the… read more about this publication »
People frequently entertain counterfactual thoughts, or mental simulations about alternative ways the world could have been. But the perceived plausibility of those counterfactual thoughts varies widely. The current article interfaces research in the philosophy and semantics of counterfactual… read more about this publication »
In this paper, I use interventionist causal models to identify some novel Newcomb problems, and subsequently use these problems to refine existing interventionist treatments of causal decision theory. The new Newcomb problems that make trouble for existing interventionist treatments involve so-… read more about this publication »
In this paper, I draw a parallel between the stability of physical systems and that of economic ones, such as the US financial system. I argue that the use of equilibrium assumptions is central to the analysis of dynamic behavior for both kinds of systems, and that we ought to interpret such… read more about this publication »
The author would like to make the following correction to the article by Hoover (2020): The symbol “↦”, first defined as “is weakly exogenous for” in the first line of the third paragraph of Section 4.3, was inadvertently and systematically converted in production to the symbol “α”. Every instance… read more about this publication »
When comparing the roles of the lightning strike and the dry climate in causing the forest fire, one might think that the lightning strike is more of a cause than the dry climate, or one might think that the lightning strike completely caused the fire while the dry conditions did not cause it at… read more about this publication »