Michael Bennett McNulty

Since the 1990s, psychologists have developed multiple models of prejudicial attitudes. I argue that these models generally fall into one of two categories: individualistic or situationist. The former abstract away (or omit) environmental features from the system of interest and locate the phenomenon in the mind of the individual. However, new models of prejudicial attitudes have foregrounded just those features abstracted away in preceding models. These conceptualizations of attitudes foreground situations. The scientists that posit them claim that measures of implicit bias are better understood as measures of places as opposed to people, for example. These categories of models have very different implications for intervention strategies aimed at reducing the impact of implicit biases. In this paper, I draw on philosophical insights from the philosophy of science to advocate for an integration of these models. The desiderata I provide asks researchers to clarify how citizens and policymakers ought to proceed given the plurality of diverse models. Should interventions at the individual level or structural level be prioritized? This issue has important consequences for achieving egalitarian goals in contemporary society.

Commentaries on the B-Preface of the Critique of Pure Reason tend to focus on Kant's so-called Copernican turn. Much less attention has been paid to the fact that the B-Preface compares the achievement of the Critique to two different scientific procedures: the act of demonstrating a counter-intuitive hypothesis and the act of verifying its correctness by means of a cross-check. Whereas the first procedure seeks to prove that objective cognitions of noumena are impossible, the second procedure seeks to confirm the result of the first. In an allusive and elliptical footnote, Kant compares the second procedure to a procedure carried out by chemists. Deviating from the interpretations put forward by Falkenburg and Schmid, my reconstruction of this footnote puts Kant's use of the terms ‘metaphysician’ and ‘separated’ center stage. Drawing on Kant's distinction between general and special metaphysics in the B-Preface and the Architectonic, his comments on Plato, and other relevant texts, I argue that the footnote addresses, in an extremely compressed manner, Kant's largely implicit conception of the relation between the history of metaphysics, its projected scientific elaboration, and the tasks carried out in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant regards matter as not only extended but impenetrable. However, Kant distinguishes two senses of impenetrability: mechanical and chemical. Kant accepts the former as necessarily belonging to matter, but he denies, or at least sees no reason to accept, the latter. The kind of chemical penetration that Kant is concerned with occurs when no part of the one component matter exists unmixed with the other matter. Here, the two component matters come to fill the whole of the very same space. Kant distinguishes two kinds of process that can lead to such penetration: cases of “literal” dissolution of one matter (a solute) through being broken up by the other (the solvent), in which the former is divided into parts ad infinitum; and cases where the one matter simply progressively permeates the other. Kant considers problems associated with the former that he does not regard as at issue in the latter.

Focusing on Kant’s practical philosophy, I consider here how we best conceive of the public audiences for philosophical works and take up four categories particularly worth addressing. These are: fellow philosophers; fellow academics; non-academics in positions of power or influence; and the public at large. I consider how Kant’s works addressed the first three of these audiences in his own time, and reflect on an instance where the decision to publish his views met with a significant warning. At the end, I take up Kant’s crucial fourth audience, the general public, both in his time and in our own.

This paper examines the emergence of a new approach to stratigraphic complexity, first in geology and then, following its creative appropriation, in paleobiology. The approach was associated with a set of models that together transformed stratigraphic geology in the decades following 1970. These included the influential models of depositional sequences developed by Peter Vail and others at Exxon. Transposed into paleobiology, they gave researchers new resources for studying the incompleteness of the fossil record and for removing biases imposed by the processes of sedimentary accumulation. In addition, they helped reconfigure the cultural landscape of paleobiology, consolidating a growing emphasis on fieldwork and eroding the barrier that had been erected in the 1970s between “paleontology” and “paleobiology.” This paper traces these developments, paying special attention to the simulation models of stratigraphic paleobiologist Steven Holland. It also considers how the integration of sequence and event stratigraphy and paleobiology has begun to influence long-running discussions of incompleteness and bias in the fossil record.

Kant scholars have paid relatively little attention to his raciology. They assume that his racism, as personal prejudice, can be disentangled from his core philosophy. They also assume that racism contradicts his moral theory. In this book, philosopher Huaping Lu-Adler challenges both assumptions. She shows how Kant's raciology--divided into racialism and racism--is integral to his philosophical system. She also rejects the individualistic approach to Kant and racism. Instead, she uses the notion of racism as ideological formation to demonstrate how Kant, from his social location both as a prominent scholar and as a lifelong educator, participated in the formation of modern racist ideology. As a scholar, Kant developed a ground-breaking scientific theory of race from the standpoint of a philosophical investigator of nature or Naturforscher. As an educator, he transmitted denigrating depictions of the racialized others and imbued those descriptions with normative relevance. In both roles, he left behind, as one of his legacies, a worldview that excluded non-whites from such goods as recognitional respect and candidacy for cultural and moral achievements. Scholars who research and teach Kant's philosophy therefore have an unshakable burden to take part in the ongoing antiracist struggles, through their teaching practices as well as their scholarship. And they must do so with a pragmatic attention to nonideal social realities and a deliberate orientation toward substantial racial justice, equality, and inclusion. Lu-Adler pushes the discourse about Kant and racism well beyond the old debates about whether he was racist or whether his racism contaminates his philosophy. By foregrounding the lasting legacies of Kant's raciology, her work calls for a profound reorientation of Kant scholarship.

Perhaps no term in the geological lexicon excites more passions than uniformitarianism, whose motto is “the present is the key to the past.” The term is controversial in part because it contains several meanings, which have been implicated in creating a situation of “semantic chaos” in the geological literature. Yet I argue that debates about uniformitarianism do not arise from a simple chaos of meanings. Instead, they arise from legitimate disagreements about substantive questions. This paper examines these questions and relates them to several “forms of understanding” pursued by researchers in geohistory.

This article is about a start-up problem in scientific practice. Specifically, it is about the problem of justifying paleontological correlation—the practice of using fossils to establish time relations among fossiliferous rocks. Paleontological correlation was the key to assembling a geological timescale during the nineteenth century and remains an important practice in stratigraphic geology to this day. Yet contrary to philosophical expectations, this practice lacked a robust theoretical justification during the first half of the nineteenth century. This article examines what this lack of justification amounted to, as well as how the method of paleontological correlation was justified in practice.

This paper examines Du Châtelet’s and Kant’s responses to the famous vis viva controversy – Du Châtelet in her Institutions Physiques (1742) and Kant in his debut, the Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces (1746–49). The Institutions was not only a highly influential contribution to the vis viva controversy, but also a pioneering attempt to integrate Leibnizian metaphysics and Newtonian physics. The young Kant’s evident knowledge of this work has led some to speculate about his indebtedness to her philosophy. My study corrects such speculations as well as misunderstandings of the Living Forces. This corrective result has implications for how to investigate Kant’s relation to the ever-evolving landscape of Leibniz exegeses.