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Ordinary Language and the Unordinary Philosophy of Peter AchinsteinIn Gregory J. Morgan (ed.), Philosophy of Science Matters: The Philosophy of Peter Achinstein, Oxford University Press. pp. 1. 2011.
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3Jerry Seinfeld as Philosopher: The Assimilated Sage of New ChelmIn David Kyle Johnson (ed.), The Palgrave Handbook of Popular Culture as Philosophy, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 1631-1641. 2022.The epistemic foundation of Hellenic-Christian thought is based on a correspondence between thought and a single reality, but the epistemic foundation of Jewish thought stresses the creative act of perspectival interpretation of an absolute text. This stress on wisdom from extracting a multiplicity of contextualized understandings of an absolute can be seen in the writings of the great rabbis, but also in the work of Jerry Seinfeld. Where Talmudic thought takes as its basis, passages of the Tora…Read more
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30In on the Joke: The Ethics of Humor and ComedyDe Gruyter. 2024.Who is morally permitted to tell jokes about Jews? Poles? Women? Only those in the group? Only those who would be punching up? Anyone, since they are just jokes? All of the standard approaches are too broad or too narrow. In on the Joke provides a more sophisticated approach according to which each person possesses "joke capital" that can serve as "comic insurance" covering certain jokes in certain contexts. When Bob tells a joke about Jews, we can never know exactly what Bob is intending since …Read more
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6Mackie, Martin, and INUS in the Morning in advanceInquiry: Critical Thinking Across the Disciplines. forthcoming.Distinguishing necessary and sufficient conditions can be challenging to undergraduate logic and critical thinking students. Explaining J. L. Mackie’s notion of INUS conditions—insufficient but necessary parts of unnecessary but sufficient conditions—is an even more difficult concept to understand. It is helpful to have memorable examples that not only clarify the concept, but make it easy to remember. Law student turned stand-up comedian Demetri Martin uses necessary, sufficient, and INUS condi…Read more
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12An intervening cause counterexample to Railton's DNP model of explanationPhilosophy of Science 64 (4): 692-697. 1997.Peter Railton (1978) has introduced the influential deductive-nomological-probabilistic (DNP) model of explanation which is the culmination of a tradition of formal, non-pragmatic accounts of scientific explanation. The other models in this tradition have been shown to be susceptible to a class of counterexamples involving intervening causes which speak against their sufficiency. This treatment has never been extended to the DNP model; we contend that the usual form of these counterexamples is i…Read more
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5Bild-ing Science: The Multiplicity of Bild-Types in BoltzmannFoundations of Science 1-20. forthcoming.Ludwig Boltzmann’s Bildtheorie has been portrayed as a pre-cursor of the semantic view of theories and as such, the word “Bild” is translated as model. But this anachronistic understanding of Boltzmann’s use of Bilder fails to account for the wide range of roles they play in his understanding of scientific methodology. When the concept of Bild is understood historically in Viennese thought, a much broader sense emerges that leads to the investigation of its use in multiple ways in various contex…Read more
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10Free-Range Philosophy: Modes of Philosophical Analysis across the Discipline … and across the RoadThe Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 2 (1): 189-202. 2021.Philosophy’s richness comes in part from the wide range of conceptual frameworks from which meaning can be made of aspects of the world. Philosophy can be done from feminist, Marxist, positivist, or Freudian standpoints. The difference in the sorts of analyses produced by these different approaches can be tricky to explain to undergraduates. Contained here are short explanations of the nature of a collection of these frameworks and a fun example of each, an analysis of the chicken crossing the r…Read more
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4Isn’t That Response Clever? A Reply to CriticsThe Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 2 (1): 239-250. 2021.
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3Woke Comedy vs. Pride Comedy: Kondabolu, Peters, and the Ethics of Performed Indian AccentsThe Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 1 (1): 211-219. 2020.Humor can be used as a tool for a wide range of tasks, including fighting for social justice. How to most effectively use it, however, is a matter of contention. Jokes that alienate members of an out-group can be called “Otherizing,” and can cause harm by virtue of the alienation. Woke comics, like Hari Kondabolu, intentionally avoid Otherizing in general, but may engage in a version of it that seeks to defang stereotypical treatments of out-groups by replacing the alienating content with someth…Read more
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4Steven Gimbel: The Importance of Being Funny: Why We Need More Jokes in Our Lives, Al Gini. Rowman and Littlefield, 2017. pp. 168 (review)The Philosophy of Humor Yearbook 1 (1): 277-279. 2020.
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17Isn’T That Clever: A Philosophical Account of Humor and ComedyRoutledge. 2017.The obligatory chapter -- My, how clever: what is humor and what humor is -- Joking matters -- Comedy tonight -- Killing it: humor and comedy aesthetics -- Can't you take a joke?: humor ethics -- Am I blue?: the ethics of dirty jokes -- Is that a Mic in your hand or are you just happy to see me?: comedy ethics.
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4Inconsistent, Vague, and…Just? An Analysis of the National Football League’s 2021 COVID-19 PolicyPhilosophies 7 (2): 27. 2022.The National Football League, the premier professional organization for American football, developed a policy concerning the protocol in cases where players contract COVID-19. This policy includes elements such as collective punishment that appear, at first glance, to be morally problematic. To the contrary, the policy is indeed morally acceptable as we should not think of organizations such as the NFL in the same way we think of governments in stable nations, but rather in the same way that we …Read more
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14Dad jokes, D.A.D. jokes, and the GHoST test for artificial consciousnessScience and Philosophy 9 (1): 73-89. 2021.The ability of a computer to have a sense of humor, that is, to generate authentically funny jokes, has been taken by some theorists to be a sufficient condition for artificial consciousness. Creativity, the argument goes, is indicative of consciousness and the ability to be funny indicates creativity. While this line fails to offer a legitimate test for artificial consciousness, it does point in a possibly correct direction. There is a relation between consciousness and humor, but it relies on …Read more
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17“I Said Something Wrong”: Transworld Obligation in YesterdayFilm-Philosophy 25 (2): 151-164. 2021.Danny Boyle's film Yesterday is a contemporary morality play in which the main character, Jack Malik, a failing singer-songwriter, is magically sent to a different possible world in which the Beatles never existed. Possessing his memory of the Beatles’ catalogue in the new possible world, he is now in sole possession of an extremely valuable artifact. Recording and performing the songs of the Beatles and passing them off as his own, he becomes rich, famous, and deeply unhappy. Once he confesses …Read more
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13The ontology of team: a teleo-structural accountJournal of the Philosophy of Sport 47 (3): 462-476. 2020.An explication of the notion of sports team involves a structural and a teleological element. The basis of a team is structural – a team is a group that containing a Distributed Internal Decision (...
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13It’s about Time: Film, Video Games, and the Advancement of an ArtformPhilosophies 4 (4): 56. 2019.Jon Robson and Aaron Meskin have argued that the insights obtained through the philosophical analysis of video games is not specific to video games, but to a larger class of artistic creations they term Self-Involving Interactive Fictions, or SIIFs. But there is at least one aspect of SIIF video games that is philosophically interesting and does not apply to the class of SIIFs as a whole, the ability to represent non-classical time. If SIIF video games are considered to be an extension of the ar…Read more
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9Heckler EthicsFlorida Philosophical Review 15 (1): 78-87. 2015.The discourse surrounding humor and ethics has focused exclusively on jokes – Are certain jokes immoral to tell? Why can some people tell some jokes and not others? How soon is too soon? Two cases which have widely considered important in assessing the answers to these questions – those of Michael Richards and Daniel Tosh – actually fail to address the questions at all in that while the events discussed occurred during the comedians’ sets in a comedy club, neither were jokes. Both, rather, were …Read more
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5Get With the Program: Kasparov, Deep Blue, and Accusations of Unsportsthinglike ConductJournal of Applied Philosophy 15 (2): 145-154. 1998.Garry Kasparov made two allegations of unfairness in his recent chess match with the computer ‘Deep Blue’. The purpose of this inquiry is to determine whether the ethos of the contest would be violated if the purported activities had occurred and on what grounds. Kasparov’s first allegation, that the program was tampered with during play, would if true, violate fair play as it would encroach on Deep Blue’s autonomy, a necessary condition for fair play in individual strategic endeavours. The most…Read more
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1Conventional Wisdom and the Plane Truth: On Reichenbach's Conventionality of GeometryDissertation, The Johns Hopkins University. 2000.Hans Reichenbach is one of the central figures in the debate concerning the epistemology of geometry. Reichenbach's mature geometric conventionalism, the view that there is no fact of the matter concerning a geometry of physical space, as expressed in The Philosophy of Space and Time is generally considered to be the view's most important formulation. This thesis re-interprets Reichenbach's later view in light of its broader context in Reichenbach's writings. The re-interpreted view is then show…Read more
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8Retroductive Analogy: How to and How Not to Make Claims of Good Reasons to Believe in Evolutionary and Anti-Evolutionary Hypotheses (review)Argumentation 24 (1): 71-84. 2010.This paper describes an argumentative fallacy we call ‘Retroductive Analogy.’ It occurs when the ability of a favored hypothesis to explain some phenomena, together with the fact that hypotheses of a similar sort are well supported, is taken to be sufficient evidence to accept the hypothesis. This fallacy derives from the retroductive or abductive form of reasoning described by Charles Sanders Peirce. According to Peirce’s account, retroduction can provide good reasons to pursue a hypothesis but…Read more
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4If I Had a Hammer: Why Logical Positivism Better Accounts for the Need for Gender and Cultural StudiesStudies in Practical Philosophy 2 (2): 150-166. 2000.
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3Avoiding the Super-Naturalistic Fallacy: Practical Reasoning and the Insightful UndergraduateJournal of Thought 37 (3). 2002.
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2Einstein's Jewish science: physics at the intersection of politics and religionJohns Hopkins University Press. 2012.Introduction : Einstein's Jewish science -- Is Einstein a Jew? -- Is relativity pregnant with Jewish concepts? -- Why did a Jew formulate the theory of relativity? -- Is the theory of relativity political science or scientific politics? -- Einstein and the Jewish intelligentsia -- Einstein's liberal science? -- Conclusion : Einstein's cosmopolitan science.
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Living pinkIn George A. Reisch (ed.), Pink Floyd and Philosophy: Careful with That Axiom, Eugene!, Open Court. 2007.
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13Can Corporations Be Morally Responsible? Aristotle, Stakeholders and the Non-Sale of HersheyPhilosophy of Management 5 (3): 23-30. 2005.Stakeholder theory is a significant development in the drive to provide a foundation for intuitions concerning the moral responsibility connected to corporate decision making. The move to include the interests of workers, consumers, the communities and biological environment in which the corporations instantiations are located run counter to the view in which shareholders’ interests are paramount. The non-sale of the Hershey Foods company to Wrigley1 was the ultimate result of a massive call by …Read more
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12The greening of white pridePhilosophy and Geography 7 (1): 123-140. 2004.At first glance, it is surprising that contemporary racist organizations like the Ku Klux Klan advertise a pro‐environmental stance. This fact, however, might be expected by Luc Ferry, who argues for a connection between the racism and nature protection laws of the Third Reich. Ferry argues that a non‐anthropocentric approach to nature makes it easier to dehumanize humans so that a non‐anthropocentric environmental ethic can transform into racist environmentalism. Does this contemporary case vin…Read more
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Physical Science |
General Philosophy of Science |