Tom Stoneham

This paper challenges the implied binary division between the specialist historian and the non-historical philosopher by showing how a sub-discipline of philosophy can also be historical. It explores how our actual practices of studying, discussing, teaching and sharing the history of our discipline are theoretically possible, in the restricted sense of being possible while also maintaining our academic, professional and intellectual integrity. Section 1 introduces the problem that actual practice in history of philosophy does not divide valuable contributions neatly into contextualist and presentist; Section 2 analysis the concept of anachronism; Section 3 applies this to ask when an interpretive claim is sufficiently plausible to be asserted; Section 4 shows the possibility of history of philosophy as a valuable intellectual project distinct from pure history and pure philosophy, and with its own standards for the making of interpretive claims.

George Berkeley published the Principles of Human Knowledge Part 1 in 1710, when he was just 25 years old. He never published the projected Part 2, on free will and the self, claiming to have lost the manuscript while travelling in Italy. Part 1, now known simply as the Principles, defends the apparently shocking thesis that there is no material world; all that exists are immaterial minds and the ideas that are their objects of consciousness. At the stroke of a pen, this bold move did away with all the problems that had beset the materialist philosophies dominant during the seventeenth century. Few philosophers of the period denied the immateriality of the mind (Hobbes did, and Locke was accused of doing so), but all agreed that the external, non-mental world consisted of inanimate matter governed by mechanical principles of motion. Such a mechanism seemed unavoidable given the scientific discoveries of the time, but it faced two major problems. One was the interaction between mind and matter, a problem that had plagued Descartes. The other was scepticism: either we could not know what the external world was like, because all we perceived were ideas, or if we had some other route to knowledge, be it scientific induction or rational intuition, it revealed to us that the world was very different from what our perceptual experiences had led us to believe.

The prevalent view of dreaming in western culture (the ‘standard view’) has only occasionally been challenged. It suggests dreaming is a perception-like experience that occurs during sleep and is encoded into memory for recall upon waking. A central assumption in therapy for dream symptoms has not been the subject of sustained challenge. It suggests the retelling of dream narratives is required for the treatment of those symptoms. Theories of dreams and their treatment are clinically relevant: nightmares and other sleep disturbances (NSDs) are key symptoms of trauma-related conditions such as PTSD, and trauma is commonplace. However, theoretically well-founded treatments are difficult to find, so confusion around what dreams are and how they can be treated is a pressing matter for the therapeutic trade. We assess a number of assumptions underlying the treatment of NSDs, and argue that these assumptions stem from the ‘standard view’ of dreaming. We outline theoretical and practical deficiencies in that view and present an alternative on the basis of which divulging dream narratives is not, in principle, required for dreamwork. The alternative view has the potential to increase the range of interventions available for the treatment of NSDs, and thereby to change the nature of interactions with trauma-recovery clients, and others.

This chapter proposes that Locke’s Of the Conduct of the Understanding (1706) can be read as a precursor to the recent psychological literature on cognitive biases. We begin by examining Locke’s intentions and methods, as well as his conception of human reason as universal. In the second section we briefly look at how Locke’s taxonomy fits with contemporary ones and then in the third look at some of the ways Locke thinks we may end up reasoning from false principles. In section four we concentrate on some phenomena Locke identifies which seem to be natural but arational psychological processes. These are forms of mind wandering and distraction, which have been a focus of some recent research in psychology. Finally, we briefly discuss Locke’s probable attitude to the contemporary thought that many cognitive biases might in fact be adaptive heuristics designed for efficient cognitive function in a range of normal conditions.

Arthur Collier (1680-1732) was a contemporary of Berkeley’s who also defended a form of immaterialism. The chapter begins with some historical background about Collier’s writings and their reception before considering two challenges to immaterialism – (1) distinguishing perception from imagination and (2) the nature of the perceiving self – where the two immaterialists had strikingly different approaches. While neither of them developed fully adequate accounts of either imagination or the self, the exercise of comparing them shows that there was in the early eighteenth century the potential for a rich and varied tradition of immaterialist philosophy.

Contemporary theories of consciousness, although very efficient in postulating testable hypotheses, seem to either neglect its relational aspect or to have a profound difficulty in operationalizing this aspect in a measurable manner. We further argue that the analysis of periodic brain activity is inadequate to reveal consciousness’s subjective facet. This creates an important epistemic gap in the quest for the neural correlates of consciousness. We suggest a possible solution to bridge this gap, by analysing aperiodic brain activity. We further argue for the imperative need to inform neuroscientific theories of consciousness with relevant philosophical endeavours, in an effort to define, and therefore operationalise, consciousness thoroughly.

For decades, the field of system safety has designed safe systems by reducing the risk of physical harm to humans, property and the environment to an acceptable level. Recently, this definition of safety has come under scrutiny by governments and researchers who argue that the narrow focus on reducing physical harm, whilst necessary, is not sufficient to secure the safety of AI systems. There is growing pressure to expand the scope of safety in the context of AI to address emerging harms, with particular emphasis being placed on the ways AI systems can reinforce and reproduce systemic harms. In this paper, we advocate for expanding the scope of conventional safety to include non-physical harms in the context of AI. However, we caution against broadening the scope to address systemic harms, as doing so presents intractable practical challenges for current safety methodologies. Instead, we propose that the scope of safety-related harms should be expanded to include psychological harms. Our proposal is partly motivated by the debates and evidence on social media, which fundamentally reshaped how harm is understood and addressed in the digital age, prompting new regulatory frameworks which aimed to protect users from the psychological risks of the technology. We draw on this precedent to motivate the inclusion of psychological harms in AI safety assessments. By expanding the scope of AI safety to include psychological harms, we take a critical step toward evolving the discipline of system safety into one that is better tuned and equipped to protect users against the complex and emerging harms propagated by AI systems.

This paper addresses the fundamental problem of political philosophy, namely under what conditions is the right to command and subject others to punishment—political power—justified?, in the context of the current concentration of digital services into huge, suprajurisdictional platforms, generically known as “Big Tech”. The original source of political power is traditionally the state, an entity distinct from mere governing institutions. This distinction is dissolving as transnationally dominant digital platforms acquire and wield power previously reserved for nation-states. The central thesis is that some Big Tech companies have become literal Digital States. They create and enforce rules over vast populations, exercising a form of unconditional political power that is neither derived from nor fully subject to traditional sovereign governments. The key features of this emerging statehood are the creation of a body of digital citizens, rather than mere users, over whom they wield significant and potentially life-changing power, through the relentless addition of services to deepen user commitment to the platform and the deliberate reduction of interoperability to make it impossible to leave without significant personal loss, creating an ultimate sanction of digital “exile”. Recognizing the reality of Digital States compels a critical re-evaluation of sovereignty, political jurisdiction, and the metaphysical basis of political authority in the digital age.

In this chapter we aim to clarify the debate over the particular question of whether there might have been nothing, and the more general question of the nature of modality, by introducing the concept of a Modal Theory and investigating its form. We begin by arguing that the question of whether there might have been nothing can be pursued independently of the question of the nature of possible worlds; that is, we can investigate what possibilities there are without having to investigate what possibilities are. A theory that governs what possibilities there are we call a ‘Modal Theory’. We then draw attention to the fact that modal theorists, to date, have typically assumed that modal theories are single-criterion, that is, that they have the form: p iff ◇q for nondisjunctive p. In response, we challenge the reasons we take for this assumption and then present an argument for Modal Theory having multiple criteria, a view we dub ‘modal pluralism’. We then investigate the forms of the axioms of such a multiple-criterion Modal Theory, and we conclude by drawing lessons for the debate over whether there might have been nothing.

This chapter includes three claims. The first is that while Berkeley treated the metaphysical problem of universals as unproblematically resolved in favor of nominalism (which he interpreted in an extreme form), he recognized the epistemic problem as a separate issue he needed to engage with and this is the primary positive contribution of his attack on abstraction. The second is that his solution to the epistemic problem is semiotic, but his semantics here is anthropocentric and pragmatic (in contrast to the semantics of visual language). The third is that this semantic theory, while it emphasizes the role of signs and thus has some affinities with formalism, has no special role for formal properties of signs and in fact makes formalism hard to achieve.

Dreams are often defined as sleeping experiences with phenomenal character similar to perceptions of the real world. Hence they pose a prima facie challenge to accounts of phenomenal character in terms of acquaintance relations. One response is disjunctivist: to give a different account of their phenomenal character from that of successful perceivings. I argue that, given the alleged frequency of dreaming on the standard model, this disjunctivist approach weakens the explanatory value of the acquaintance account of the phenomenal character of successful perceivings. Another response is to follow Malcolm and Dennett in denying that dreaming has phenomenal character at all. I present a cultural-social model of dreams and argue that we lack theory-neutral evidence of the phenomenal character of dreams and thus it is legitimate to choose between theories of dreaming on the basis of their fit with our best theory of the phenomenal character of successful perceivings, namely acquaintance.

Jessica Wilson has recently offered a more sophisticated version of the self-defeat objection to Cartesian scepicism. She argues that the assertion of Cartesian scepticism results in an unstable vicious regress. The way out of the regress is to not engage with the Cartesian sceptic at all, to stop the regress before it starts, at the warranted assertion that the external world exists. We offer three reasons why this objection fails: first, the sceptic need not accept Wilson’s characterization of the sceptical thesis and thus need not start her regress; second, even if she did commit to the regress, it would not undermine scepticism in the way Wilson envisages; and third, the appeal to mental state scepticism which is necessary to generate the second and subsequent steps in the regress is not justified.

This paper engages with the debate of how Berkeley reconciles restricting the objects of sense perception to what is immediately perceived with allowing that ordinary physical objects are amongst the objects of perception. Pitcher’s (1986) argument that Berkeley did not take the claim that we perceive ordinary physical objects to be ‘strictly true’ is rejected before we move to the debate between Pappas (2000) and Dicker (2006) about whether Berkeley equivocates about the definition of ‘immediate perception’ in a way which undermines his position. They agree that Hylas must accept indirect realism, but disagree about how this affects the cogency of his argument. However, Stoneham (2002) gave a different account of the dialectic in the First Dialogue that shows both Pappas and Dicker to be mistaken. This allows us to resolve Berkeley’s problem by appeal to the ordinary idea that we can perceive an object by perceiving part of it.

Tom Stoneham introduces an argument found in Berkeley’s essays on the immortality of the soul. This argument can be sketched out like so: all human appetites can (possibly, at least) be satisfied; there is a human ‘appetite for immortality’; thus, the appetite for immortality can (possibly) be satisfied. Stoneham introduces two objections to this argument, one which Berkeley is likely to have anticipated and one which draws on more contemporary insights. Stoneham then argues that Berkeley has the resources to overcome both objections. In putting forward this defence of Berkeley’s argument, Stoneham’s chapter offers novel insights into the role that sign-usage plays in his account of natural desires. As Stoneham reads him, Berkeley sees natural desires as signs of future experiences in roughly the same way that visual experiences serve as signs of tactual experiences in NTV.