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9Considering the Scope, History, and Sophistication of Skilled Action in ExpertiseSouthwest Philosophy Review 39 (2): 1-5. 2023.In his paper “Getting Sophisticated: In Favor of Hybrid Views of Skilled Action in Expertise,” Spencer Ivy (2023) argues effectively for what he calls a “sophisticated hybrid” view of expertise, driven by empirical considerations and argument from contemporary phenomenology and cognitive architecture. Here I raise three unfair objections which I think lead to some fair questions that may be productive for discussion and future work.
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7The Ambitious Idea of Kant’s CorollaryIn Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing & David Wagner (eds.), Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 1779-1786. 2018.Misrepresentations can be innocuous or even useful, but Kant’s corollary to the formula of universal law appears to involve a pernicious one: “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature”. Humans obviously cannot make their maxims into laws of nature, and it seems preposterous to claim that we are morally required to pretend that we can. Given that Kant was careful to eradicate pernicious misrepresentations from theoretical metaphysics, the imperative…Read more
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5Means, Ends, and Persons: The Meaning & Psychological Dimensions of Kant’s Humanity Formula, written by Robert AudiJournal of Moral Philosophy 15 (4): 491-494. 2018.
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3Means, Ends, and Persons: The Meaning & Psychological Dimensions of Kant’s Humanity Formula, written by Robert AudiJournal of Moral Philosophy 15 (4): 491-494. 2018.Clic on the DOI link to access the article.
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27Why Ever Doubt First-Person Testimony about Disability?Southwest Philosophy Review 34 (2): 49-54. 2018.In "Disabilities and First-Person Testimony: A Case of Defeat?" Hilary Yancey argues that in at least some cases we have “no significant reason to distrust” the evidential value of first-person testimony concerning the impact of a physical disability on that individual’s well-being. Her argument is premised on a defeasible principle of trust: One should trust the testimony of others regarding p whenever one recognizes that the testifier is in a position to know p. Since the subjective component…Read more
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510The Method of Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals: Establishing Moral Metaphysics as a ScienceDissertation, University of California, Los Angeles. 2006.This dissertation concerns the methodology Kant employs in the first two sections of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Groundwork I-II) with particular attention to how the execution of the method of analysis in these sections contributes to the establishment of moral metaphysics as a science. My thesis is that Kant had a detailed strategy for the Groundwork, that this strategy and Kant’s reasons for adopting it can be ascertained from the Critique of Pure Reason (first Critique) and…Read more
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93The Ambitious Idea of Kant's CorollaryIn Violetta L. Waibel, Margit Ruffing & David Wagner (eds.), Natur und Freiheit. Akten des XII. Internationalen Kant-Kongresses, De Gruyter. pp. 1779-1786. 2018.Misrepresentations can be innocuous or even useful, but Kant’s corollary to the formula of universal law appears to involve a pernicious one: “act as if the maxim of your action were to become by your will a universal law of nature”. Humans obviously cannot make their maxims into laws of nature, and it seems preposterous to claim that we are morally required to pretend that we can. Given that Kant was careful to eradicate pernicious misrepresentations from theoretical metaphysics, the impera…Read more
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Engendering Algorithmic OppressionsBlog of the APA. 2020.In this APA blog, I appeal to two 2020 cases of algorithms gone wrong to motivate philosophical attention to algorithmic oppression. I offer a simple definition, then describe a few of the ways it is engendered. References and extends work by Safiya Noble, Cathy O'Neil, Ruha Benjamin, Virginia Eubanks, Sara Wachter-Boettcher, Michael Kearns & Aaron Roth.
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4Sympathy, Impartiality, and CareSouthwest Philosophy Review 33 (2): 69-76. 2017.In "Monkeys, Men, and Moral Responsibility: A Neo-Aristotelian Case for a Qualitative Distinction," Paul Carron (2017) uses the tragic case of Travis the chimpanzee to test Frans de Waal's gradualism. If Travis is not to blame for anything simply because he's a chimp, then gradualism cannot be total: There must be a qualitative difference between chimps and humans that makes humans morally responsible and chimps not. As I understand it, Carron's neo-Aristotelian thesis is that chimps cannot em…Read more
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6Why Postulate that the Number of Unconceived Scientific Alternatives is Finite?Southwest Philosophy Review 32 (2): 29-33. 2016.The pessimistic induction and the problem of underdetermination in the philosophy of science have a rich history. In their recent incarnation as the problem of unconceived alternatives, most fully articulated by Kyle Stanford (2010) in Exceeding Our Grasp, the induction is more specific and underdetermination is construed more epistemically than is typical…The problem is not that there are empirically equivalent alternatives, that is, alternative between which no empirical evidence could ever d…Read more
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Zeami’s Reply to Plato: Mastering the Art of SarugakuJapan Studies Association Journal 15 (1): 1-22. 2017.Mae Smethurst’s work has largely aimed to articulate nō theater in Western terms from their early roots, primarily through Aristotle’s On Tragedy. Her detailed examination of the shared structure of the content of these independent and superficially dissimilar arts reveals their mutual intelligibility and effectiveness through shared underlying universals. In this spirit, I outline how Zeami answers Plato’s first challenge to artistic performance, as expressed in Ion where Plato argues that rhap…Read more
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8Book review of Means, ends, and persons: The meaning & psychological dimensions of Kant's humanity formula by Robert Audi (review)Journal of Moral Philosophy 15 (4). 2018.Audi's aim in Means, Ends, and Persons is to introduce an ethics of conduct in which treatment of persons features as a central case. The approach to conduct is inspired by Kant, and there are moments of explicit contact, but this book is not meant to be a work of Kant scholarship. The method of argument consists largely in laying out a system of distinctions that are illustrated and defended by simple, familiar examples. Audi's approach here is a continuation of the common-sense intuitionism he…Read more
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A Kantian Theory of the Sensory Processing Subtype of ASD [Autism Spectrum Disorder]Journal of Cognition and Neuroethics 6 (1): 1-15. 2019.Immanuel Kant’s theory of imagination is a surprisingly fruitful nexus of explanation for the prima facie disparate characteristics of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), especially the sub-spectrum best characterized by the Sensory Integration (SI) and Intense World (IW) theories of ASD. According to the psychological theories that underpin these approaches to autism, upstream effects of sensory processing atypicalities explain a cascade of downstream effects that have been characterized in the di…Read more
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15The Morality of Unequal Autonomy: Reviving Kant’s Concept of Status for StakeholdersJournal of Business Ethics 121 (4): 593-606. 2014.Though we cherish freedom and equality, there are human relations we commonly take to be morally permissible despite the fact that they essentially involve an inequality specifically of freedom, i.e., parental and fiduciary relations. In this article, I argue that the morality of these relations is best understood through a very old and dangerous concept, the concept of status. Despite their historic and continuing abuses, status relations are alive and well today, I argue, because some of them …Read more
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3Book review of Kant on Practical Life: From Duty to History by Kristi E. Sweet (review)Journal of the History of Philosophy 52 (2): 381-382. 2014.In Kant on Practical Life: From Duty to History, Kristi E. Sweet accepts Allen Wood’s challenge to present in a single book the entire arc of Kant’s practical philosophy, including both its a priori and empirical aspects, literally from duty to history. Others have successfully undertaken a similar task, notably Robert Louden in Kant’s Impure Ethics, but Sweet succeeds in fulfilling three further distinctive aims: settling persistent but outdated contentions that Kant’s ‘deontological’ and ‘tele…Read more
Areas of Specialization
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Immanuel Kant |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Applied Ethics |
Philosophy of Law |
Philosophy of Computing and Information |
Philosophy of Cognitive Science |