•  247
    The Seduction of Winston Smith
    In Ezio Di Nucci & Stefan Storrie (eds.), 1984 and philosophy, is resistance futile?, Open Court. 2018.
    On the first page of 1984, Winston Smith is confronted with several posters featuring the face of Big Brother and the famous sentence, “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU.” This may not seem like a promising way to seduce someone, but the seduction of Winston Smith by Big Brother in 1984 is a most unusual love story. I call it a seduction because Winston’s mind and heart are slowly won over in the aptly-named Ministry of Love. Moreover, in the final scene of the novel, Winston gazes, with tears in his …Read more
  •  127
    Digital humanities for history of philosophy: A case study on Nietzsche
    In T. Neilson L. Levenberg D. Rheems & M. Thomas (ed.), Handbook of Methods in the Digital Humanities, Rowman & Littlefield. forthcoming.
    Nietzsche promises to “translate man back into nature,” but it remains unclear what he meant by this and to what extent he succeeded at it. To help come to grips with Nietzsche’s conceptions of drive (Trieb), instinct (Instinkt) and virtue (Tugend and/or Keuschheit), I develop novel digital humanities methods to systematically track his use of these terms, constructing a near-comprehensive catalogue of what he takes these dispositions to be and how he thinks they are related. Nietzsche individua…Read more
  •  33
    Virtue Epistemology
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1-51. 1999.
    Contemporary virtue epistemology (hereafter ‘VE’) is a diverse collection of approaches to epistemology. At least two central tendencies are discernible among the approaches. First, they view epistemology as a normative discipline. Second, they view intellectual agents and communities as the primary focus of epistemic evaluation, with a focus on the intellectual virtues and vices embodied in and expressed by these agents and communities. This entry introduces many of the most important results o…Read more
  •  141
    Identifying Virtues and Values Through Obituary Data-Mining
    with Andrew Higgins and Jacob Levernier
    Journal of Value Inquiry 52 (1). 2018.
    Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author finds most salient but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We begin by reviewing studies 1 and 2, in which obituaries were carefully read and labeled. We then report study 3, which further develops these results with a semi-automated, large-scale semantic analysis of several…Read more
  •  116
    How should emotions figure in scientific practice? I begin by distinguishing three broad answers to this question, ranging from pessimistic to optimistic. Confirmation bias and motivated numeracy lead us to cast a jaundiced eye on the role of emotions in scientific inquiry. However, reflection on the essential motivating role of emotions in geniuses makes it less clear that science should be evacuated of emotion. I then draw on Friedrich Nietzsche’s perspectivism to articulate a twenty-first cen…Read more
  •  118
    Intellectual humility can be broadly construed as being conscious of the limits of one’s existing knowledge and capable to acquire more knowledge, which makes it a key virtue of the information age. However, the claim “I am (intellectually) humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. There is an explanatory gap between the meaning of the sentence and the meaning the speaker ex- presses by uttering it. We therefore suggest analyz…Read more
  •  138
    Stereotype threat and intellectual virtue
    In Owen Flanagan & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Naturalizing Virtue, Cambridge University Press. pp. 155-74. 2014.
    For decades, intelligence and achievement tests have registered significant differences between people of different races, ethnicities, classes, and genders. We argue that most of these differences are explained not as reflections of differences in the distribution of intellectual virtues but as evidence for the metacognitive mediation of the intellectual virtues. For example, in the United States, blacks typically score worse than whites on tests of mathematics. This might lead one to think t…Read more
  •  10
    Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen, Personal Value (review)
    Social Theory and Practice 39 (1): 166-170. 2013.
    In her critique of Moore’s (1903, p. 55) suggestion that one might answer the question “What is good?” with “Books are good,” Judith Jarvis Thomson (1997, p. 276) asks what it could mean to say that books are “just plain” good or bad. Aren’t they rather good to read, or in teaching philosophy, or for weighing down papers? This point is apropos in a review of Toni Rønnow-Rasmussen’s Personal Value in two ways. One might worry, first, about his facile dismissal (p. 7) of the notion that such fi…Read more
  •  84
    Epistemic situationism: An Extended Prolepsis
    In Mark Alfano & Abrol Fairweather (eds.), Epistemic Situationism, Oxford University Press. 2017.
    This paper is an extended prolepsis in favor of epistemic situationism, the thesis that epistemic virtues are not sufficiently widely distributed for a virtue-theoretic constraint on knowledge to apply without leading to skepticism. It deals with four objections to epistemic situation: 1) that virtuous dispositions are not required for knowledge, 2) that the Big Five or Big Six personality model proves that intellectual virtues are a reasonable ideal, 3) that the cognitive-affective personality …Read more
  •  135
    Nietzsche, naturalism, and the tenacity of the intentional
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 44 (3): 457-464. 2013.
    In Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche demands that “psychology shall be<br>recognized again as the queen of the sciences.” While one might cast a dubious glance at the “again,” many of Nietzsche’s insights were indeed psychological, and many of his arguments invoke psychological premises. In Genealogy, he criticizes the “English psychologists” for the “inherent psychological absurdity” of their theory of the origin of good and bad, pointing out the implausibility of the claim that the utility of un…Read more
  •  51
    Experimental moral philosophy
    Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 1-32. 2018.
    Experimental moral philosophy emerged as a methodology in the last decade of the twentieth century, as a branch of the larger experimental philosophy (X-Phi) approach. Experimental moral philosophy is the empirical study of moral intuitions, judgments, and behaviors. Like other forms of experimental philosophy, it involves gathering data using experimental methods and using these data to substantiate, undermine, or revise philosophical theories. In this case, the theories in question concern the…Read more
  •  22
    Experimental Moral Philosophy
    with Don Loeb
    In Ed Zalta (ed.), Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2012.
    Experimental moral philosophy began to emerge as a methodology inthe last decade of the twentieth century, a branch of the largerexperimental philosophy approach. From the beginning,it has been embroiled in controversy on a number of fronts. Somedoubt that it is philosophy at all. Others acknowledge that it isphilosophy but think that it has produced modest results at best andconfusion at worst. Still others think it represents an important advance., Before the research program can be evaluated,…Read more
  •  86
    A danger of definition: Polar predicates in moral theory
    Journal of Ethics and Social Philosophy 3 (3): 1-14. 2009.
    In this paper, I use an example from the history of philosophy to show how independently defining each side of a pair of contrary predicates is apt to lead to contradiction. In the Euthyphro, piety is defined as that which is loved by some of the gods while impiety is defined as that which is hated by some of the gods. Socrates points out that since the gods harbor contrary sentiments, some things are both pious and impious. But “pious” and “impious” are contrary predicates; they cannot simultan…Read more
  •  48
    Reversing the side-effect effect: the power of salient norms
    with Brian Robinson and Paul Stey
    Philosophical Studies 172 (1): 177-206. 2015.
    In the last decade, experimental philosophers have documented systematic asymmetries in the attributions of mental attitudes to agents who produce different types of side effects. We argue that this effect is driven not simply by the violation of a norm, but by salient-norm violation. As evidence for this hypothesis, we present two new studies in which two conflicting norms are present, and one or both of them is raised to salience. Expanding one’s view to these additional cases presents, we arg…Read more
  •  9
    Visualizing Values
    with Andrew Higgins, Jacob Levernier, and Veronica Alfano
    In David Rheams, Tai Neilson & Lewis Levenberg (eds.), Handbook of Methods in the Digital Humanities, Rowman & Littlefield. forthcoming.
    Digital humanities research has developed haphazardly, with substantive contributions in some disciplines and only superficial uses in others. It has made almost no inroads in philosophy; for example, of the nearly two million articles, chapters, and books housed at philpapers.org, only sixteen pop up when one searches for ‘digital humanities’. In order to make progress in this field, we demonstrate that a hypothesis-driven method, applied by experts in data-collection, -aggregation, -analysis, …Read more
  •  255
    Placebo Effects and Informed Consent
    American Journal of Bioethics 15 (10): 3-12. 2015.
    The concepts of placebos and placebo effects refer to extremely diverse phenomena. I recommend dissolving the concepts of placebos and placebo effects into loosely related groups of specific mechanisms, including (potentially among others) expectation-fulfillment, classical conditioning, and attentional-somatic feedback loops. If this approach is on the right track, it has three main implications for the ethics of informed consent. First, because of the expectation-fulfillment mechanism, the pro…Read more
  •  68
    Gone are the heady days when Bernard Williams (1993) could get away with saying that “Nietzsche is not a source of philosophical theories” (p. 4). The last two decades have witnessed a flowering of research that aims to interpret, elucidate, and defend Nietzsche’s theories about science, the mind, and morality. This paper is one more blossom in that efflorescence. What I want to argue is that Nietzsche theorized three important and surprising moral psychological insights that have been born o…Read more
  •  17
    Identifying and Defending the Hard Core of Virtue Ethics
    Journal of Philosophical Research 38 233-260. 2013.
    Virtue ethics has been challenged on empirical grounds by philosophical interpreters of situationist social psychology. Challenges are necessarily challenges to something or other, so it’s only possible to understand the situationist challenge to virtue ethics if we have an antecedent grasp on virtue ethics itself. To this end, I first identify the non-negotiable “hard core” of virtue ethics with the conjunction of nine claims, arguing that virtue ethics does make substantive empirical assumptio…Read more
  •  68
    Becoming less unreasonable: A reply to Sherman
    Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 4 (7): 59-62. 2015.
  •  151
    The Semantic Neighborhood of Intellectual Humility
    with Markus Christen and Brian Robinson
    Proceedings of the European Conference on Social Intelligence. 2014.
    Intellectual humility is an interesting but underexplored disposition. The claim “I am (intellectually) humble” seems paradoxical in that someone who has the disposition in question would not typically volunteer it. There is an explanatory gap between the meaning of the sentence and the meaning the speaker expresses by uttering it. We therefore suggest analyzing intellectual humility semantically, using a psycholexical approach that focuses on both synonyms and antonyms of ‘intellectual humility…Read more
  •  155
    The Tenacity of the Intentional Prior to the Genealogy
    Journal of Nietzsche Studies 40 (1): 29-46. 2010.
    I have argued elsewhere that the psychological aspects of Nietzsche’s later works are best understood from a psychodynamic point of view. Nietzsche holds a view I dubbed the tenacity of the intentional (T): when an intentional state loses its object, a new object replaces the original; the state does not disappear entirely. In this essay I amend and clarify (T) to (T``): When an intentional state with a sub-propositional object loses its object, the affective component of the state persists wi…Read more
  •  157
    Trust and distrust in institutions and governance
    with Nicole Huijts
    In Judith Simon (ed.), Handbook of Trust and Philosophy, Routledge. forthcoming.
    First, we explain the conception of trustworthiness that we employ. We model trustworthiness as a relation among a trustor, a trustee, and a field of trust defined and delimited by its scope. In addition, both potential trustors and potential trustees are modeled as being more or less reliable in signaling either their willingness to trust or their willingness to prove trustworthy in various fields in relation to various other agents. Second, following Alfano (forthcoming) we argue that the soci…Read more
  •  109
    Obituaries are an especially rich resource for identifying people’s values. Because obituaries are succinct and explicitly intended to summarize their subjects’ lives, they may be expected to include only the features that the author(s) find most salient, not only for themselves as relatives or friends of the deceased, but also to signal to others in the community the socially-recognized aspects of the deceased’s character. We report three approaches to the scientific study of virtue and value t…Read more
  •  165
    Nietzsche's Moral Psychology
    Cambridge University Press. 2019.
    Introduction 1 Précis 2 Methodology: Introducing digital humanities to the history of philosophy 2.1 Introduction 2.2 Core constructs 2.3 Operationalizing the constructs 2.4 Querying the Nietzsche Source 2.5 Cleaning the data 2.6 Visualizations and preliminary analysis 2.6.1 Visualization of the whole corpus 2.6.2 Book visualizations 2.7 Summary Nietzsche’s Socio-Moral Framework 3 From instincts and drives to types 3.1 Introduction 3.2 The state of the art …Read more
  •  724
    Friendship and the Structure of Trust
    In Alberto Masala & Jonathan Webber (eds.), From Personality to Virtue: Essays on the Philosophy of Character, Oxford University Press Uk. pp. 186-206. 2016.
    In this paper, I describe some of what I take to be the more interesting features of friendship, then explore the extent to which other virtues can be reconstructed as sharing those features. I use trustworthiness as my example throughout, but I think that other virtues such as generosity & gratitude, pride & respect, and the producer’s & consumer’s sense of humor can also be analyzed with this model. The aim of the paper is not to demonstrate that all moral virtues are exactly like friendship…Read more
  •  20
    Epistemic Situationism (edited book)
    Oxford University Press. 2017.
    Table of Contents Introduction: Epistemic Situationism by Abrol Fairweather 1. Is Every Epistemology A Virtue Epistemology? by Lauren Olin 2. Epistemic Situationism: An extended prolepsis by Mark Alfano 3. Virtue Epistemology in the Zombie Apocalypse: Hungry Judges, Heavy Clipboards and Grou Polarization by Berit Brogaard 4. Situationism and Responsibilist Virtue Epistemology by James Montmarquet 5. Virtue Theory Against Situationism by Ernest Sosa 6. Intellectual Virtue Now and Again by Chr…Read more
  •  129
    An Enchanting Abundance of Types: Nietzsche’s Modest Unity of Virtue Thesis
    Journal of Value Inquiry 49 (3): 417-435. 2015.
    Although Nietzsche accepted a distant cousin of Brian Leiter’s “Doctrine of Types,” according to which, “Each person has a fixed psycho-physical constitution, which defines him as a particular type of person,” the details of his actual view are quite different from the flat-footed position Leiter attributes to him. Leiter argues that Nietzsche thought that type-facts partially explain the beliefs and actions, including moral beliefs and actions, of the person whom those type-facts characterize.…Read more
  •  12
    Bragging
    Thought: A Journal of Philosophy 3 (4): 263-272. 2014.
    The speech act of bragging has never been subjected to conceptual analysis until now. We argue that a speaker brags just in case she makes an utterance that is an assertion and is intended to impress the addressee with something about the speaker via the belief produced by the speaker's assertion. We conclude by discussing why it is especially difficult to cancel a brag by prefacing it with, ‘I'm not trying to impress you, but…’ and connect this discussion with Moore's paradox and the recent neo…Read more