Steven Hales

The grand and sweeping claims of many relativists might seem to amount to the argument that everything is relative--except the thesis of relativism. In this book, Steven Hales defends relativism, but in a more circumscribed form that applies specifically to philosophical propositions. His claim is that philosophical propositions are relatively true--true in some perspectives and false in others. Hales defends this argument first by examining rational intuition as the method by which philosophers come to have the beliefs they do. Analytic rationalism, he claims, has a foundational reliance on rational intuition as a method of acquiring basic beliefs. He then argues that there are other methods that people use to gain beliefs about philosophical topics that are strikingly analogous to rational intuition and examines two of these: Christian revelation and the ritual use of hallucinogens. Hales argues that rational intuition is not epistemically superior to either of these alternative methods. There are only three possible outcomes: we have no philosophical knowledge ; there are no philosophical propositions ; or there are knowable philosophical propositions, but our knowledge of them is relative to doxastic perspective. Hales defends relativism against the charge that it is self-refuting and answers a variety of objections to this account of relativism. Finally, he examines the most sweeping objection to relativism: that philosophical propositions are not merely relatively true, because there are no philosophical propositions--all propositions are ultimately empirical, as the naturalists contend. Hales's somewhat disturbing conclusion--that intuition-driven philosophy does produce knowledge, but not absolute knowledge--is sure to inspire debate among philosophers.

Nietzsche is infamous for denouncing logic, but despite the importance of logic in contemporary philosophy, there has been very little scholarly attention paid to his criticisms. This paper argues that Nietzsche's antilogic polemics are directed against semantics, which he regards as being committed to a realist metaphysics. It is this metaphysical realism that Nietzsche abhors, not logical syntax or proof theory. Nietzsche is also at pains to critique logicians who naively accept realist semantics. Other interpreters who cast Nietzsche as a logical nihilist are criticized as unjustly neglecting key prologic texts.

Philosophers have developed three theories of luck: the probability theory, the modal theory, and the control theory. To help assess these theories, we conducted an empirical investigation of luck attributions. We created eight putative luck scenarios and framed each in either a positive or a negative light. Furthermore, we placed the critical luck event at the beginning, middle, or end of the scenario to see if the location of the event influenced luck attributions. We found that attributions of luckiness were significantly influenced by the framing of the scenario and by the location of the critical event. Positively framing an event led to significantly higher lucky ratings than negatively framing the same exact event. And the closer a negative event was placed toward the end of a scenario, the more unlucky the event was rated. Overall, our results raise the possibility that there is no such thing as luck and thereby pose serious challenges to the three prominent theories of luck. We instead propose that luck may be a cognitive illusion, a mere narrative device used to frame stories of success or failure

A beer-lovers' book which playfully examines a myriad of philosophical concerns related to beer consumption. Effectively demonstrates how real philosophical issues exist just below the surface of our everyday activities Divided into four sections: The Art of the Beer; The Ethics of Beer: Pleasures, Freedom, and Character; The Metaphysics and Epistemology of Beer; and Beer in the History of Philosophy Uses the context of beer to expose George Berkeley’s views on fermented beverages as a medical cure; to inspect Immanuel Kant’s transcendental idealism through beer goggles, and to sort out Friedrich Nietzsche’s simultaneous praise and condemnation of intoxication Written for beer-lovers who want to think while they drink

There are two main ways to understand unconditional love. I argue that one is impossible (i.e., no one could love that way) and the other is probably irrational. This has important consequences in a variety of domains. Social policies have been derided on the grounds that they undermine unconditional love, and it has been called "possibly the most valuable aspect of the Christian tradition". The works of Robert Nozick, Elizabeth Anderson, and Richard Taylor on this topic are examined and criticized.

Relativism is one of the most tenacious theories about truth, with a pedigree as old as philosophy itself. Nearly as ancient is the chief criticism of relativism, namely the charge that the theory is self-refuting. This paper develops a logic of relativism that (1) illuminates the classic self-refutation charge and shows how to escape it; (2) makes rigorous the ideas of truth as relative and truth as absolute, and shows the relations between them; (3) develops an intensional logic for relativism; (4) provides a framework in which relativists can consistently promote ethical, mathematical, scientific, religious, and political truths (among others) as being relative; (5) argues that the notion of incommensurability is far less troubling than is commonly thought; and (6) argues that the concept of a perspective as needed by the theory is not prey to Davidson's well-known critique of conceptual schemes. The paper will not defend relativism as the correct theory of truth, nor will it provide a fully satisfying theory about the nature of a perspective. The logic of relativism is primarily meant to provide a formal framework in which relativists can consistently develop their theories. This alone is a considerable step forward, since the debate about relativism often founders upon the rock of self-refutation. It is argued that while 'everything is relative' is inconsistent, 'everything true is relatively true' is not. The latter is all a relativist really needs.

I argue that evolutionary strategies of kin selection and game-theoretic reciprocity are apt to generate agent-centered and agent- neutral moral intuitions, respectively. Such intuitions are the building blocks of moral theories, resulting in a fundamental schism between agent-centered theories on the one hand and agent-neutral theories on the other. An agent-neutral moral theory is one according to which everyone has the same duties and moral aims, no matter what their personal interests or interpersonal relationships. Agent-centered moral theories deny this and include at least some prescriptions that include ineliminable indexicals. I argue that there are no rational means of bridging the gap between the two types of theories; nevertheless this does not necessitate skepticism about the moral—we might instead opt for an ethical relativism in which the truth of moral statements is relativized to the perspective of moral theories on either side of the schism. Such a relativism does not mean that any ethical theory is as good as any other; some cannot be held in reflective equilibrium, and even among those that can, there may well be pragmatic reasons that motivate the selection of one theory over another. But if no sort of relativism is deemed acceptable, then it is hard to avoid moral skepticism.

The present paper poses a new problem for moral luck. Defenders of moral luck uncritically rely on a broader theory of luck known as the control theory or the lack of control theory. However, there are are two other analyses of luck in the literature that dominate discussion in epistemology, namely the probability and modal theories. However, moral luck is nonexistent under the probability and modal accounts, but the control theory cannot explain epistemic luck. While some have posited that “luck” is ambiguous, so that one theory of luck is operative with epistemic luck and a different theory works for moral luck, there are both semantic and philosophical reasons to reject luck ambiguity. Defenders of moral luck must engage with the broader literature on luck and either provide a comprehensive defense of the control theory or concede that moral luck is not a genuine thing in its own right

  One of the most common views about self-deception ascribes contradictory beliefs to the self-deceiver. In this paper it is argued that this view (the contradiction strategy) is inconsistent with plausible common-sense principles of belief attribution. Other dubious assumptions made by contradiction strategists are also examined. It is concluded that the contradiction strategy is an inadequate account of self-deception. Two other well-known views — those of Robert Audi and Alfred Mele — are investigated and found wanting. A new theory of self-deception relying on an extension of Mark Johnston's subintentional mental tropisms is proposed and defended

This paper is an overview of the anglophone Nietzsche scholarship of the last 20 years. There are two types of debates raging in Nietzsche scholarship: interpretive disputes over conceptual and philosophical issues arising out of Nietzsche's work, and metainterpretive wrangling over how the philosophical issues should be approached and how Nietzsche's unpublished writings ought to be considered. In the former category, four prominent Nietzschean themes are examined: perspectivism; systematicity, rationality and logic; the revaluation of values; and the self. In the latter category I discuss the role of the Nachlass, feminist interpretations, and the analytic/continental divide.

In "Nietzsche's Perspectivism", Steven Hales and Rex Welshon offer an analytic approach to Nietzsche's important idea that truth is perspectival. Drawing on Nietzsche's entire published corpus, along with manuscripts he never saw to press, they assess the different perspectivisms at work in Nietzsche's views with regard to truth, logic, causality, knowledge, consciousness, and the self. They also examine Nietzsche's perspectivist ontology of power and the attendant claims that substances and subjects are illusory while forces and alliances of power constitute the only reality. Hales and Welshon present Nietzsche's treatment of perspectivism as both more complex and more fruitful than the common view of it as a doctrine that truth is not objective. Neither a metaphor nor a methodology, perspectivism emerges as a protean concept akin to a unifying theme; an alternative to the absolutism that recurs in science, philosophy, and religion; and a technique for revealing the unimagined possibilities open to every individual.

If we agree, along with Arnauld, Berkeley, Descartes, Hume, Leibniz, and others that our occurrent phenomenal states serve as sources of epistemic certainty for us, we need some explanation of this fact. Many contemporary writers, most notably Roderick Chisholm, maintain that there is something special about the phenomenal states themselves that allows our certain knowledge of them. I argue that Chisholm's view is both wrong and irreparable, and that the capacity of humans to know these states with certainty has to do with the contingent cognitive capacities and abilities people have.

The present book takes a third path. Although it includes commentary on the great historical philosophers and tries to show contemporary relevance, the book introduces students to philosophy topically. While there are references to Buddhism, the Vedas, Islam, and so on, the issues addressed are the bread-and-butter mainstream subjects in broadly analytic Western philosophy. Any student who successfully completes a course based on this book will have a solid grounding in wide variety of topics in different subdisciplines, as well as the pros and cons of different theoretical ways to address those topics. A student who masters the content of this book is well-placed to move on as a philosophy major in the vast majority of philosophy departments. The problems of philosophy are deeply interconnected, and there is no natural or obvious starting point from which to begin. Indeed, plausible arguments might be given for starting with almost any of the central problems in the field. You might think that we should surely start with epistemology; until we understand what knowledge is and settle the matter of whether and how we can gain any knowledge at all, how can we possibly determine whether we can have knowledge of God, or our moral duties, or the nature of the mind? Clearly epistemology is the most fundamental philosophical project. Wait-how can we be sure that knowledge is valuable to have? Or that we ought to care about gaining truth and avoiding error? We'd better start with axiology and sort out duty, obligation, and responsibility first. Normativity and ethics must be foundational. Of course, how can we determine what our epistemic responsibilities are if we don't antecedently know whether we are free to believe one thing rather than another, or if we are truly at liberty to make choices? Let's begin with the issue of free will and figure that out first. If we're not free, that torpedoes a lot of other philosophical agendas. Yet if we don't know what kinds of beings we are, how can we ever determine whether we are free? Maybe personal identity should be the first stop on the road. And so on.

‘Hello, this is the Women’s Center, may I help you?’ ‘Yeah, uh, hi. I don’t really know if I should be calling you, but a friend of mine told me to call. She thought it was a good idea.’ ‘Sure. Let me ask before we go on – are you in a safe place to talk? Are you in any immediate danger?’ ‘I think I can talk. I dunno, I guess I’m not sure. I mean, I don’t think he’s here right now, but he’s always keeping an eye on me. I never really know if he’s watching or not. I don’t think I’m in immediate danger.’.

This paper is a rejoinder to Robert Almeder's "On Reincarnation: A Reply to Hales". I argue that even if we stipulate the case studies of the reincarnationists to be good data, the explanatory hypothesis of reincarnation is a deus ex machina. Without a comprehensive scientific or philosophical theory of the mind that embeds the reincarnation hypothesis, the view should not be taken seriously. The fact that reincarnation is the first explanation of the case studies that comes to mind says more about us and our culture than it does about which explanations are the most probable ones.

There are two main theories about the persistence of objects through time: endurantism and perdurantism. Endurantists hold that objects are three-dimensional, have only spatial parts, and wholly exist at each moment of their existence. Perdurantists hold that objects are four-dimensional, have temporal parts, and only partly exist at each moment of their existence. In this paper we argue that endurantism is poorly suited to describe the persistence of objects in a world governed by Special Relativity, and can accommodate a relativistic world only at a high price, one that we argue is not worth paying. Perdurantism, on the other hand, fits beautifully with our current scientific understanding of the world. Furthermore, we make this argument from implications of the Lorentz transformations, without appeals to geometrical interpretations, dimensional analogies, or auxillary premises like temporal eternalism.

Traditional philosophy relies heavily on the use of rational intuition to establish theses and conclusions. This essay takes up the matter of intuition and argues for a stunning conclusion: appeal to rational intuition is epistemically justified only if a form of foundationalism is true. This type of foundationalism is the thesis that there is at least one proposition whose justification depends on nothing other than itself. The article also argues that unless we can establish that some intuitions are justified, philosophy as an enterprise that provides non-empirical knowledge is impossible. Not to put too fine a point on it then: philosophy is possible only if foundationalism is true. Whether this should be construed as the strongest possible defense of foundationalism, or the greatest objection to the pretensions of philosophy is left to the reader.

This paper is a response to Ronald Lehrer's "Perspectivism and Psychodynamic Psychotherapy". Lehrer treats Nietzsche as promoting only a modest perspectivism according to which different cognitive strategies triangulate the truth. We argue that Nietzsche's perspectivism is much more radical, and defensible, than Lehrer admits. We also suggest that Nietzsche's bundle theory of the self has important implications for psychotherapy and the concept of mental health. According to this theory, the self is an aggregate of ever-changing drives and affects. The conditions of health for such persons are similarly mutable, with no one standard applicable to all persons, or even to the same person over time.