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 (skepticism); there are no philosophical propositions (naturalism); 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.

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.

_A Companion to Relativism_ presents original contributions from leading scholars that address the latest thinking on the role of relativism in the philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, logic, and metaphysics. Features original contributions from many of the leading figures working on various aspects of relativism Presents a substantial, broad range of current thinking about relativism Addresses relativism from many of the major subfields of philosophy, including philosophy of language, epistemology, ethics, philosophy of science, logic, and metaphysics.

Metaphysical theories of change incorporate substantive commitments to theories of persistence. The two most prominent classes of such theories are endurantism and perdurantism. Defenders of endurancestyle accounts of change, such as Klein, Hinchliff, and Oderberg, do so through appeal to a priori intuitions about change. We argue that this methodology is understandable but mistaken—an adequate metaphysics of change must accommodate all experiences of change, not merely intuitions about a limited variety of cases. Once we examine additional experiences of change, particularly those in (special) relativistic circumstances, it becomes clear that only a perdurance account of change is adequate.

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.

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.

In the restoration of art and artifacts there are three salient types of value to consider: relic, aesthetic, and practical. Relic value includes an object’s age, aura, originality, authenticity, and epistemic value. Aesthetic value is connected to how an object looks, sounds, or tastes. Practical value involves whether a thing can be used as designed—whether a book can be read, a building occupied, a car driven. I argue that while these are all legitimate values, it is impossible for a restorer to maximize them all. I conclude that restoration inexorably involves aesthetic choices; there is no supreme value to be maximized and we should be pluralists about the right balance of values. Restoration is like baking a cake; there are many wrong ways to do it, but there are many right ways as well.

What little work has been done on high fidelity/audiophile aesthetics uniformly agrees that the aesthetic aim of high fidelity is to achieve maximum transparency—the degree to which the listening experience is qualitatively identical to hearing the live instruments. The present paper argues that due to modern recording techniques, transparency is often impossible and may not be the proper aesthetic goal even in cases of documentary recordings. Instead, audiophilia should be understood as a broadly pluralist artistic endeavor that aims at an idealized generation of a musical event. This positive conception serves to explain away certain debates among audiophiles themselves.

Humanity has thrown everything we have at implacable luck—novel theologies, entire philosophical movements, fresh branches of mathematics—and yet we seem to have gained only the smallest edge on the power of fortune. The Myth of Luck tells us why we have been fighting an unconquerable foe. Taking us on a guided tour of one of our oldest concepts, we begin in ancient Greece and Rome, considering how Plato, Plutarch, and the Stoics understood luck, before entering the theoretical world of probability and exploring how luck relates to theology, sports, ethics, gambling, knowledge, and present-day psychology. As we travel across traditions, times and cultures, we come to realize that it’s not that as soon as we solve one philosophical problem with luck that two more appear, like heads on a hydra, but rather that the monster is altogether mythological. We cannot master luck because there is nothing to defeat: luck is no more than a persistent and troubling illusion. By introducing us to compelling arguments and convincing reasons that explain why there is no such thing as luck, we finally see why in a very real sense we make our own luck, that luck is our own doing. The Myth of Luck helps us to regain our own agency in the world - telling the entertaining story of the philosophy and history of luck along the way.

Virtue epistemologists like Ernest Sosa and John Greco have attempted to explain why knowledge is more valuable than mere true belief. In this talk I demonstrate that both of their accounts fail so profoundly that it is difficult to see how virtue epistemology alone contains the resources to explain the value of knowledge. According to the virtue theoretic approach, knowledge is a kind of success from ability. Knowledge constitutes a competent epistemic performance, and some performances are better than others; not better because they are more accurate, but better because they exhibit the skill of the performer. It is in this way that the performance of knowledge is better than the lucky success of mere true belief. I will show that the Sosa/Greco model entails the false result that the blind review of scholarship should be abolished. This entailment is, by modus tollens, a counterexample to their view. Since it is often held that a comprehensive theory of knowledge ought to explain the value question, the failure of virtue epistemology to do so is a black mark against the virtue approach altogether.

Nietzsche offers a positive epistemology, and those who interpret him as a skeptic or a mere pragmatist are mistaken. Instead he supports what he calls per- spectivism. This is a familiar take on Nietzsche, as perspectivism has been analyzed by many previous interpreters. The present paper presents a sketch of the textually best supported and logically most consistent treatment of perspectivism as a first- order epistemic theory. What’s original in the present paper is an argument that Nietzsche also offers a second-order methodological perspectivism aimed at enhancing understanding, an epistemic state distinct from knowledge. Just as Descartes considers and rejects radical skepticism while at the same time adopting methodological skepticism, one could consistently reject perspectivism as a theory of knowledge while accepting it as contributing to our understanding. It is argued that Nietzsche’s perspectivism is in fact two-tiered: knowledge is perspectival because truth itself is, and in addition there is a methodological perspectivism in which distinct ways of knowing are utilized to produce understanding. A review of the manner in which understanding is conceptualized in contemporary epistemology and philosophy of science serves to illuminate how Nietzsche was tackling these ideas.

There is no such thing as moral luck or everyone is profoundly mistaken about its nature and a radical rethinking of moral luck is needed. The argument to be developed is not complicated, and relies almost entirely on premises that should seem obviously correct to anyone who follows the moral luck literature. The conclusion, however, is surprising and disturbing. The classic cases of moral luck always involve an agent who lacks control over an event whose occurrence affects her praiseworthiness or blameworthiness. Close examination of what it is to have control or to lack it reveals the logical space for counterexamples that do not fit the pattern constitutive of moral luck, and so unravel the whole.

ABSTRACTWe conducted two studies to determine whether there is a relationship between dispositional optimism and the attribution of good or bad luck to ambiguous luck scenarios. Study 1 presented five scenarios that contained both a lucky and an unlucky component, thereby making them ambiguous in regard to being an overall case of good or bad luck. Participants rated each scenario in toto on a four-point Likert scale and then completed an optimism questionnaire. The results showed a significant correlation between optimism and assignments of luck: more optimistic people rated the characters in the ambiguous scenarios as more lucky while more pessimistic people rated the same characters in the same scenarios as more unlucky. Study 2 separated the good and bad luck components of the study 1 scenarios and presented the components individually to a new group of participants. Participants rated the luckiness of each component on the same four-point scale and then completed the optimism questionnaire. We found...

Metaphysical theories of change incorporate substantive commitments to theories of persistence. The two most prominent classes of such theories are endurantism and perdurantism. Defenders of endurance-style accounts of change, such as Klein, Hinchliff, and Oderberg, do so through appeal to a priori intuitions about change. We argue that this methodology is understandable but mistaken—an adequate metaphysics of change must accommodate all experiences of change, not merely intuitions about a limited variety of cases. Once we examine additional experiences of change, particularly those in (special) relativistic circumstances, it becomes clear that only a perdurance account of change is adequate.

The general project of this dissertation is to defend the logical possibility of some human knowledge being held with certainty. I argue that intentional and phenomenal states, while known a posteriori, nevertheless have been historically held in high epistemic esteem. Traditionally they have been considered such that if anything is known with certainty, they are. Recent attempts, especially from considerations in semantics and the philosophy of mind, to undermine the authority of intentional and phenomenal states are investigated and found either to lack punch or to be insufficiently general. In addition, it is suggested that the number and kind of elements in the range of certainty for a thinker covaries with the cognitive capacities and dispositions of that thinker