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Contemporary white supremacy often takes hold through strategies of racial disavowal. One strategy that political parties and regular citizens in Bulgaria use is what I call determined indeterminacy. Determined indeterminacy is a collective, institutionalized method of denying the ubiquitous systemic racism that undergirds social life. It allows people to naturalize white supremacy and render it adaptably persistent. This is the case especially in contexts of aspirational whiteness, such as Bulgaria, where whiteness is fraught and many people claim that their country has never been racial. Tracing Bulgaria's history of racial disavowal helps us understand how the local particularities of white supremacy naturalize, transform, and set in place long‐standing racial hierarchies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In appraising human actions, an important consideration is whether they are free. If they are compelled, this may be excusatory; if controlled by someone other than the agent, this may mitigate; and if selfishly motivated, this may invalidate excuses. Moral appraisals of action by non‐philosophers do not normally consider whether it can be free under determinism. Metaphysical inquiry about action, by contrast, seems incomplete if it does not consider this. Are there two free will problems, one normative and one metaphysical? If so, they share such terms as ‘could’ and ‘could not’, and thoughtful non‐philosophers question their own normative assumptions once they understand the metaphysical problem determinism poses for the philosophy of action. This paper distinguishes metaphysical from action‐theoretic elements of the free will problem but also connects the metaphysical issues with normative questions about responsibility; it critically appraises some major metaphysical arguments concerning free action; and—to the extent possible in a single paper—it provides a positive account of free action neutral toward determinism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The classic formulation of causal decision theory (CDT) appeals to counterfactuals. It says that you should aim to choose an option that would have a good outcome, were you to choose it. However, this version of CDT faces trouble if the laws of nature are deterministic. After all, the standard theory of counterfactuals says that, if the laws are deterministic, then if anything—including the choice you make—were different in the present, either the laws would be violated or the distant past would be changed. And as several authors have shown, it's easy to transform this upshot of the standard theory of counterfactuals into full‐blown counterexamples to CDT. In response to these counterexamples, I argue here that the problem lies, not so much with CDT's guiding idea—that it's the expected causal consequences of your actions that matter for rational decision‐making—but with the fact that the classic formulation of CDT doesn't pay sufficient attention to the context‐sensitivity of counterfactuals. I develop a contextualist version of CDT which better accounts for this context‐sensitivity. And I show that my theory avoids the problems faced by the classic formulation of CDT in determinstic worlds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I (re)think An Essay on Man with respect to the history of philosophy, by reading Pope's poem comparatively with Spinoza's Ethics , a method suggested by Jean-Pierre de Crousaz's contemporary critiques of the Essay , which accused Pope of Spinozism. I also consider the Essay in the light of Fredric Jameson's assertion that there exist perennial problems that "philosophy," "theory," indeed "thinking" itself cannot solve, but which must continue to be posed anyway, not set aside or abandoned. I thus suggest a new approach to the Essay , focused on several such problems, which have often vexed previous criticism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Avicenna's discussion of future contingent propositions is sometimes considered to entail metaphysical indeterminism. In this paper, I argue that his logical analysis of future contingent statements is best understood in terms of the epistemic modality of those statements, which has no consequences for modal metaphysics. This interpretation is corroborated by hitherto neglected material concerning the question of God's knowledge of particulars. In the Taʿlīqāt, Avicenna argues that God knows particulars by knowing their complete causes, and when contrasted with the human knowledge of particulars, this epistemically superior access shows that the contingency of statements about future particulars is not due to the modal properties of real particulars but to the nature of human access to them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to perdurantist accounts of persistence, transtemporal aggregates of stages, 'worms', are 'the referents of ordinary terms, members of ordinary domains of quantification, subjects of ordinary predications, and so on...on the stage view...it is instantaneous stages rather than worms that play this role'. I argue the stage theory should be preferred as an account of personal persistence. I consider the way in which four‐dimensionalist accounts of personal persistence are organized and the conditions which, arguably, any plausible account of personal persistence should satisfy. I sketch a semantics for the stage theory which yields a stage‐theoretical account of personal persistence that satisfies these conditions. I argue that standard purdurantist accounts do not. I conclude that standard purdurantist accounts fail because, while persons view themselves and their worlds from the time‐bound first‐person perspective of stages, purdurantist accounts privilege the atemporal view of persons as four‐dimensional aggregates of stages or 'worms'. Perdurantist accounts produce counterintuitive results in fission cases because there is a discrepancy between a person's time‐bound first‐person perspective and the purdurantist view from nowhen. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Small human complex systems, here called co-present groups, are found across all fields of human social life. Complexity thinking suggests why this is so: that these groups, irrespective of formal content, have a meta-function of providing maximum complexity to manage the indeterminacy or uncertainty that characterises the most complex of human social issues. This claim depends on an understanding of the functioning of these groups as being characterised by irreducibly complex intersubjective (person to person) relations, which are involved in the processing of raw human experience ('affective processing'), to produce shared meaningfulness. An example of the use of co-present groups in medical continuing professional development (CPD) is given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article documents the social generation and experience of potentiality in the context of radical uncertainty. After a booming decade, the oil bust in mid-2014 wrought havoc on Angola's economy. Immigrant traders and entrepreneurs from West Africa responded to the crisis by assessing their possible livelihoods in and away from Angola. They further couched their search for economic potential in a discourse on Angola's own potential for recovery. By (de)potentializing economies and livelihoods, traders entrenched potentiality, rather than actuality, as a pervasive aspect of their sociality and their ethical orientations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This reading of Plato's First Alcibiades argues that wonder serves as the means through which we can comprehend Alcibiades' gender indeterminacy and the philosophical and political implications of that indeterminacy. While earlier scholarship has approached the presence of the feminine through the binary lens of appropriation, this paper introduces a thesis of identification with the feminine. The thesis of identification is afforded by Plato's portrayal of Alcibiades and the phenomenology of wonder. It offers a more expansive framework for addressing the fluidities and indeterminacies of gender, as called for by the text. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the symposium held at Rutgers University. Topics discussed include challenges to responsibility presented by contemporary neuroscience, such as physicalistic reductionism, determinism, and epiphenomenalism. The speakers at the symposium include Michael S. Moore, who authored the book as well as six commentators who presented papers analyzing and critiquing Moore's work.

In a recent paper, Brian Cutter objected to the consequence argument due to its dependence on the principle that miracle workers are metaphysically impossible. A miracle worker is someone who has the ability to act in a way such that the laws of nature would be violated. While there is something to the thought that agents like us do not have this ability, Cutter claims that there is no compelling reason to regard miracle workers as metaphysically impossible. However, the paper contends that miracle workers are indeed impossible according to well-known theories concerning the laws of nature. This result highlights the reliance of the consequence argument on a plausible premise, which is widely accepted by proponents of non-Humean views of laws. The paper also provides a way to explain away the intuition that miracle workers are possible, but this has the upshot that a recent, two-dimensional formulation of the consequence argument is unsound. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One important challenge for contingentists is that they seem to be unable to account for the meaning of some apparently meaningful modal discourse that is perfectly intelligible for necessitists. This worry is particularly pressing for higher-order contingentists, contingentists who hold that it is not only contingent which objects there are, but also contingent which semantic values there are for higher-order variables to quantify over. Objections against higher-order contingentism along these lines have been presented in Williamson (Mind 119(475):657–748, 2010; Modal logic as metaphysics, Oxford University Press, 2013, ch. 7), and Fritz and Goodman (Mind 126(504):1063–1108, 2017). This paper presents a way for contingentists to respond to these challenges. The upshot is that the contingentist can account for the meaningfulness of the problematic modal claims by pretending necessitism to be true, but in some cases it turns out to be indeterminate whether they are true. I defend this strategy against the objections against pretence-strategies presented in Fritz and Goodman (Mind 126(504):1063–1108, 2017, §4). Furthermore, I defend the plausibility of the resulting indeterminacy from the contingentist's perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social ontologists commonly think that our ideas about social entities, and about other people also inhabiting the social realm, play an important role in making those entities into what they are. At the same time, we know that our ideas are often indeterminate in character, which presumably would mean that this indeterminacy should carry over to the social realm. And yet social indeterminacy is a neglected topic in social ontology. It is argued that this neglect can be traced to how a particular approach that favors ahistorical reconstructions in making sense of social entities has come to dominate social ontology. If we think beyond the parameters set by this approach, however, we can see that recognizing indeterminacy as a pervasive phenomenon in the social realm might open up new interpretative possibilities in relation to different social categories. This argument is at least partly in line with recent calls for a move towards nonideal social ontology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to relate two debates about how logic and language influence thought. There is an axis of discussion about whether there exists a plurality of logic or a single logical system as an evaluation criterion for any reasoning context. In linguistics, the debate arising from the strong and weak interpretations of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis has centralized the discussion around the degree of influence or determination of language on thought. From different perspectives and theoreticalconceptual frameworks, logic, and linguistics delimit and problematize a field of inquiry and reflection. The article, from a transdisciplinary perspective, intends to account for and postulate communicating vessels between these debates, considering the nuances of each approach. It also seeks to propose its own hypothesis on the problem raised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite being subjected to decades of sharp criticism, privacy policies published by companies remain a linchpin of privacy regulation. Representations in these policies provide the main measure against which consumer privacy can be judged. Policies are rarely read by consumers. Instead, these policies are interpreted by company decision makers tasked with interpreting whether a proposed course of action is consistent with stated policies as well as underlying privacy law. To be effective, policies must constrain use of consumer data even when they are given a company-friendly reading. Experimental evidence on the interpretation of privacy policies provides no grounds for encouragement about such constraint, because it suggests that policies are often so ambiguous that neither laypeople nor experts can consistently interpret them. This Article supports those experimental findings with real-world evidence--court filings by experts appointed to consider the legality of transfers of consumers' private data. The study finds that even independent, court appointed experts rely on interpretive practices that are unreliable and inconsistent. It reveals divergences concerning what even relatively common, standard privacy policy provisions actually mean, in relatively common situations, such as the attempt to sell data as part of a reorganization or liquidation. This suggests that privacy regulation should not rely too heavily on the language of privacy policies unless greater consensus can be reached. The Article then proposes to put the interpretation of privacy policies on more sound footing. It explores two primary approaches. Privacy policies could be subjected to more certain meaning through a turn to standardization, where policies are communicated by reference to interpretive principles laid out by regulation or by understanding grounded in empirical research on the meaning of the various terms. Alternatively, privacy policies could be subjected to a set of interpretive principles that would provide a more certain basis for interpretation and also encourage drafters of policies to state themselves more clearly. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the development of the "Confucian Contingency Model," which challenges individualistic notions of persons, agency, and morality prevalent in contemporary discourse. Topics include three commonly recognized orientations in understanding persons, agency, and morality, namely "Non-Contingent Autonomy," "Contingency-Influenced Agency," and "Determinism."

Through a literary analysis of Alice Munro's short story "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" (1999), the article explores the theme of indeterminacy and gaps in the text and their impact on readers' interpretation. Drawing on the concepts of Iser's implied reader, Kukkonen's embodied reader, and Abbot's acceptance of unknowability, the article reveals how Munro engages readers in constructing hypotheses and continuously challenges them by introducing new insights, prompting revisions of interpretations. By exploring the deliberate indeterminacies in Munro's narrative, this study aims to elucidate the interplay between authorial intention and the reader's interpretive agency. The article also mentions the film adaptation of Munro's short story by the Canadian director Sarah Polley, Away from Her (2006), and highlights the use of indeterminacy within the visual medium. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay reads Hobbes' account of human action against Aristotle's accounts of animal motion and human action, thus offering a new perspective for understanding Hobbes' account and illuminating a neglected aspect of Hobbes' relationship to Aristotle. I argue that the basic structure of Hobbes' account is indebted to Aristotle's account of animal motion, except that Hobbes purges the teleological elements from his predecessor and presents a picture that is mechanistic and explicitly deterministic. Moreover, while Aristotle introduces 'deliberation' as a way of explaining the diversity of human actions as their varied attempts at realizing the distinctly human end of the good life, Hobbes' radically anti-Aristotelian notion of 'deliberation' explains that diversity in terms of the fundamental uncertainty of the passions. I conclude with some reflections on two related tensions in Hobbes: between Hobbes' determinism and his account of human action, and between his ethical project of reducing human life to mere life and his separate ethical project of justifying diverse ways of life. This essay contributes to our understanding of the significance of Hobbes' account of human action in both the history of the debate on determinism and the history of ethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the article, the author discusses the potential implications of computerized methods of communication to French and Francophone studies. Other topics include the legacy of determinism of experts like Michel Foucault and Aristotle, the noncausal relations between political reality and scholarship, and the enunciation of race in French poetry by citing the novel "The Plague" by Albert Camus.

This article defends the existence of borderline consciousness. In borderline consciousness, conscious experience is neither determinately present nor determinately absent, but rather somewhere between. The argument in brief is this. In considering what types of systems are conscious, we face a quadrilemma. Either nothing is conscious, or everything is conscious, or there's a sharp boundary across the apparent continuum between conscious systems and nonconscious ones, or consciousness is a vague property admitting indeterminate cases. Assuming mainstream naturalism about consciousness, we ought to reject the first three options, which forces us to the fourth, indeterminacy. Standard objections to the existence of borderline consciousness turn on the inconceivability of borderline cases. However, borderline cases are only inconceivable by an inappropriately demanding standard of conceivability. I conclude with some plausible cases and applications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A position that has been called 'classical indeterminism' has recently been developed in order to model vagueness: this approach appeals to an object-language 'determinately' operator, the semantics of which are defined in such a way as to preserve the principle of bivalence. I suggest that a prominent argument against this strategy, which I call the Field–Williamson argument, fails. The classical indeterminist position in its general form was anticipated by the Aristotelian commentators in their discussions of Aristotle's famous 'sea battle' passage concerning future contingency. But I maintain that, ironically enough, the strategy is less happily applied in this case, where a version of the Field–Williamson argument succeeds. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article was created based on a talk given by Canisia Lubrin with the Black Canadian Studies Association (BCSA) for their 2022 conference, "Black Solidarities, Thought and the Quest for Black Freedom." It engages with the theme of Black solidarities, thought, and the quest for Black freedom, in the interest of recognizing the complexities of its range. In this era of new forms of Black dispersement, the author offers this as a care work in the core character of Blackness. It is a wish for a kind of respite from the ontological over-determinism that bares down on us from all directions, from the restlessness that forms the tenor of our being in this world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay offers a reflection on which ethics can critically guide the field of management learning in the Anthropocene. Based on a negative ontology of humankind and nature, I understand the Anthropocene as being unmanageable and imposing an ethical dimension of the impossible on the field of management learning. Inspired by the Lacanian concept of tragic ethics, which is based on certain categories – radical contingency, indeterminacy and the impossible – I propose a tragic ethics for the Anthropocene. Such ethics, articulated to an indigenous ontology and ethics, presents the possibility of an open way of knowing and learning in the context of management learning, which is necessary not only for the radical contingency of the Anthropocene but also for the inclusion of other voices and knowledge, both human and nonhuman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the standard account of directive insincerity, emphasizing an asymmetry between sincere directives and assertives. It discusses the asymmetry arises from the traditional view's exclusion of self-addressed speech, where the speaker issues directives to themselves; aiming to show that this asymmetry is not incoherent; reevaluated in the context of cognitive mechanisms for pragmatic competence; and highlighting similarities with assertives in terms of sincerity determinants.

The issue of whether and how we have the control necessary for freedom and moral responsibility is central to all control accounts of freedom and moral responsibility. The problem of luck for libertarians aims to show that indeterministic agents are ill‐equipped with the control required for freedom and moral responsibility. In view of this, we must either endorse scepticism about the possibility of free and morally responsible agents, or make some form of, possibly revisionary, compatibilism work. In this paper, I shall offer a new solution to the problem of luck for libertarians. After outlining the problem of luck, I shall argue that, given a particular approach to mental causation, indeterminism can be viewed as an essential requirement of free and morally responsible action. After this, I shall distinguish between different types of inability and show how this provides us with a solution to the problem of luck. Finally, I shall consider some advantages and objections to the proposed solution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Libertarianism about free will conjoins the thesis that free will requires indeterminism with the thesis that we have free will. Here the claim that we have experiential evidence for the libertarian position is assessed. It is argued that, on a straightforward reading, the claim is false, for our experiences as agents don't support the claim that free will requires indeterminism. However, our experiences as agents may still have a role to play in an overall case for libertarianism, insofar as they give us some (defeasible) reason to think that we have free will. This latter claim is defended against a pair of objections that have been leveled against it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The connection between Social Work and social relationships can be seen as obvious, but it is complex indeed. The aim of this article is to explore several analytical concepts for a better understanding of the deeply «social» (relational) nature of social work practice. Some fundamental semantic, epistemological, and methodological issues regarding this relationship are briefly explored, with particular attention to the dynamics of networking in coping processes. The background of the paper includes general considerations about the scientific nature and «epistemological object» of Social Work, as well as about the discipline's best place in the ongoing debate between the classical paradigms of determinism on the one hand and of phenomenology on the other. The ambivalent meanings that the widely used term «social» can assume within the label of «Social Work» are analysed, and the different possible connotations of the term «relationship» are discussed. A set of operational coordinates is proposed to better understand what relational (or relationship-based) professional Social Work is and eight levels of relationality in Social Work professional practice are proposed, based on the idea of reciprocity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If indeterminism is to be necessary for moral responsibility, we must show that it doesn't preclude responsibility (the Luck Problem) and that it might enhance it (the Enhancement Problem). A 'strong luck claim' motivates the Luck Problem: if an agent's choice is undetermined, then her mental life will be causally irrelevant to her choice, whichever way she decides. A 'weak luck claim' motivates the Enhancement Problem: if an agent's choice is undetermined, then even if her mental life is causally relevant to her choice, whichever way she decides, we cannot explain how she settles her choice. Only the weak luck claim is plausible. However, its plausibility depends on our accepting that we could only settle our choices if they are settled by additional exercises of agency. If we instead understand the process of settling decisions in procedural terms, we can begin to sketch a solution to the Enhancement Problem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigating the research question of how divine apostolicity affects God's interaction with the world and humanity, predicates apostolicity as being a divine attribute. The logical extension therefore necessitates consideration of the apostolic attribute as an ontological, Trinitarian and operational characteristic demonstrated in the divine-human inter-relationship. Knowledge was drawn from relevant and authoritative sources: Ancient Near Eastern, Israelite, biblical, Hellenistic, reformation and contemporary theological and scientific. They were examined to accurately articulate diverse academic views, to provide critical appraisal of historical, theological and scientific investigation and theoretical frameworks, axiomatic for current and future research. The research method was of necessity an ontological consideration of the nature of God as a transcendent-immanent and relational reality. Epistemological analysis examines the multiple and developing theories of causation, of divine providence determinist or necessitarian, indeterminist or contingent, or an open participatory view of natural order. Philosophical, theological and scientific paradigms expose the founding theoretical principles confronting positivist-determinist and post-positivist-contingent views, thereafter enabling the proposition of an apostolic paradigm. (Cohen et al., 2018: 3, 5-6, 10, 14, 16, 18, 28, 34). The apostolic paradigm articulates a dynamic relationship to the world and humanity with particular attention to New Testament incarnational Christological and pneumatological parameters that postulate a paradigm change and subsequent rereading of the worldview through apostolic dynamic phases. Herein lies the contribution to the existing body of knowledge and contemporary biblical worldview developments in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The increasing ubiquity of algorithmically mediated digital texts continues to generate debate about the instability and indeterminacy of texts. The American composer John Cage is well known for disrupting traditional Western aesthetics by incorporating chance operations, algorithms, and indeterminacy into his musical compositions and literary texts. This article analyzes materials found in the pre-print archive of Cage's printed book, M (published in 1973 by Wesleyan University Press), in order to understand how Cage brought his aesthetic of indeterminacy into print. Through analysis of archival materials, it is argued that Cage exercised control over the performance and reading of his texts, even as he ceded authorial control to the aleatory processes of the I Ching -- the ancient Chinese book of divination -- and to the arbitrary choices of the typesetter/printer. This article offers new understanding about algorithms and indeterminacy in the performance of bibliographic codes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Interpretations of Genesis 50:20 have typically sought to understand the parallelism between good and evil according to systematic categories. Theologians have read the verse as one that invokes notions of human determinism or fate. This article contends for an alternative reading of 50:20 that pays heed to its role within the prevailing plot-structure. By understanding 50:15–21 as a secondary moment of crisis within the broader narrative, Joseph’s assertion invokes a redemptive dynamic. He proclaims the outworking of good, in line with the thematic emphases of the Jacob tôlĕdôt: the notion of royalty and the patriarchal promises. In turn, this outworking of good appeals to a broader narrative arc that extends to God’s “created good” established in Genesis 1. The purpose of such a statement is didactic, as the narrator confronts his readers through the words of Joseph, who has become the herald of redemptive good. Have the readers acquiesced to this worldview, or do they, like the brothers, still have lessons to learn? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why should a lottery be used in the allocation of an indivisible good to which participants in the lottery have an equally strong claim? Stone argues that when indeterminacy arises, in which it is impossible to satisfy the equality condition requiring like cases to be treated alike, the impartiality principle suggests that the agent responsible for the allocation task should not intend to favor one over another on the basis of invalid reasons. In this article, I argue that the impartiality principle is neither sufficient nor necessary to explain the fairness of lotteries. Instead, the fairness of lotteries is explained by the sanitizing effect that lotteries generate to screen out the reactive attitudes of resentment and indignation that claimants might otherwise have if they do not obtain the good in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An interview with Spinozist philosopher Frédéric Lordon is presented. Topics discussed include epistemological split between British and French Marxism regarding the study of history as a science; agency with free will, designating it as determinism's antipode and accused of judicial pursuit when they cannot be judged responsible for their own actions.

We present a new puzzle about logical truth, necessity, and moral responsibility. We defend one solution to the puzzle. A corollary of our preferred solution is that prominent arguments for the incompatibility of determinism and moral responsibility are invalid. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a cognitive anthropological critique of François Jullien's approach to language and culture. Jullien approaches 'culture' as a coherent set of concepts across time and space, relying primarily on identifying Chinese (and Greek) thought with particular concepts expressed in language. This mischaracterizes human culture, which exists on the level of individual mental representations, and relies on a form of linguistic determinism which fails to stand in the face of psychological and anthropological evidence. This leads Jullien to claim an incredible degree of cultural (and ontological) divergence between the Chinese and Europeans. By accounting for the distribution and dynamism of mental representations, the degree to which thought is underdetermined by language, and above all the divergence of intuitive and reflective cognition on the individual level, we can arrive at an alternative, ontologically realistic account of cultural divergence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There is a longstanding argument that purports to show that divine foreknowledge is inconsistent with human freedom to do otherwise. Proponents of this argument, however, have for some time been met with the following reply: the argument posits what would have to be a mysterious non‐causal constraint on freedom. In this paper, I argue that this objection is misguided—not because after all there can indeed be non‐causal constraints on freedom (as in Pike, Fischer, and Hunt), but because the success of the incompatibilist's argument does not require the real possibility of non‐causal constraints on freedom. I contend that the incompatibilist's argument is best seen as showing that, given divine foreknowledge, something makes one unfree—and that this something is most plausibly identified, not with the foreknowledge itself, but with the causally deterministic factors that would have to be in place in order for there to be infallible foreknowledge in the first place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perceptual experience supports the assignment of confidences in belief – doxastic confidences. To explain this fact, many philosophers appeal to Perceptual Indeterminacy, which holds that perceptual content can be more or less determinate. Others instead appeal to Perceptual Confidence, which says that perceptual experience supports doxastic confidences because it assigns confidences too. Morrison argues that a primary reason to favour Perceptual Confidence is that it is uniquely capable of accounting for bell-shaped doxastic confidence distributions; we call this the bell curve objection to Perceptual Indeterminacy. Here we show that two recent defences of Perceptual Indeterminacy, due to Nanay and Raleigh and Vindrola, fail to adequately address the bell curve objection. But we also argue that all is not lost for proponents of Perceptual Indeterminacy. They can counter the bell curve objection by embracing a third view, which we call Perceptual Noise. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The consequence argument purports to show that determinism is true only if no one has free will. Judgments about whether the argument is sound depend on how one understands locutions of the form 'p and no one can render p false'. The main interpretation on offer appeals to counterfactual sufficiency: s can render p false just in case there is something s can do such that, were s to do it, p would be false; otherwise, s cannot render p false. Here I show that, in the context of the consequence argument, this interpretation conflicts with widely endorsed principles governing the logic of counterfactuals. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

I defend counterfactual decision theory, which says that you should evaluate an action in terms of which outcomes would likely obtain were you to perform it. Counterfactual decision theory has traditionally been subsumed under causal decision theory as a particular formulation of the latter. This is a mistake. Counterfactual decision theory is importantly different from, and superior to, causal decision theory, properly so called. Causation and counterfactuals come apart in three kinds of cases. In cases of overdetermination, an action can cause a good outcome without the latter counterfactually depending on the former. In cases of constitution, an action can constitute a good outcome rather than causing it. And in cases of determinism, either the laws or the past counterfactually depend on your action, even though your action cannot cause the laws or the past to be different. In each of these cases, it is counterfactual decision theory which gives the right verdict, and for the right reasons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this essay is to provide an interpretive and evaluative introduction to Franco 'Bifo' Berardi's critical media theory and to situate it with a view to understanding but also thinking beyond the limitations of an aesthetic practice rooted almost exclusively in conscious, language-based thought. It begins by examining the way in which Berardi conceptualizes the techno-social paradigm emerging in the passage from late industrial society to semiocapitalism (a form of capitalism based on immaterial labour and the explosion of the infosphere), connecting this to the ecological-aesthetic concerns of Félix Guattari. It concludes by questioning the prospects of poetry to forge lines of escape from the determinism of techno-linguistic governance, suggesting, by way of N. Katherine Hayles and Donna Haraway, that extra-linguistic, nonconscious resources may provide a broader and more viable theoretical palette for conceiving of indeterminability beyond, behind, and in the interstices of a complex digital ecology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Eidos magazine, from the University of the North, presents its 40th issue with a variety of essays and a review. The article by Sebastián Alejandro González Montero and Lucas Uribe Lopera on the concept of community stands out, as well as Filippo Salimbeni's article on a third way in 19th-century political philosophy, and Nicolás García De Castro and Alejandro Villamor Iglesias' articles on the philosophy of science. Other topics addressed include text and experience, art as a map of intensity, the concept of death from S. Kierkegaard's thinking, memory and stigmatization in the case of the Colombian township El Salado. The issue concludes with a review of the book "El nadador de Paestum" by Tonio Hölscher. [Extracted from the article]

Newtonian mechanics was for centuries virtually universally regarded as the absolute model of scientific knowledge. However, during the 20th century, developments in physics prompted the need to broaden the conceptual and theoretical framework around fundamental issues such as the predictive power of scientific models or the role of the observer in the description of physical phenomena; this in turn revitalised the long-standing debate between determinism and indeterminism. Today, the disciplinary discussion, far from reaching a consensus, has given rise to new kinds of questions that reflect a change in what Cassirer calls the ideal of knowledge. From a historical synthesis of the debate of the last decades, the present article seeks to point out some contemporary perspectives on indeterminism in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Major creative insights may challenge the fundamental assumptions of a discipline and may generate vigorous (and negative) reactions. Further, such creative insights may require that a scholar courageously defies the crowd and zeitgeist, strives to overcome obstacles and challenges to their views, and develops a strong work ethic that facilitates creativity. B. F. Skinner's radical behaviorism is considered as a prototypical example of a major creative insight and current psychological research is discussed that supports Skinner's writings. In addition to showing how radical behaviorism was a major creative insight, the present article evaluates Skinner's writings with the aim to "buy low and sell high" as advocated by an investment approach to creativity (Sternberg & Lubart 1995). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Walter Pater's exploration of fate as both a literary figure and a philosophical concept, examining its significance in the context of fin de siècle European thought. Topics include the presence of fate in the works of various writers such as Verlaine, Nietzsche, and Maeterlinck, Pater's treatment of fate within the framework of historical determinism and modern science, and the aesthetic transformation of life into a coherent narrative as conceptualized by Pater.

Deflationists hold that it does not seem to us, in experience, as though time robustly passes. There is some recent empirical evidence that appears to support this contention. Equally, empirical evidence suggests that we naïvely represent time as dynamical. Thus deflationists are faced with an explanatory burden. If, as they maintain, the world seems to us in experience as though it is non-dynamical, then why do we represent time as dynamical? This paper takes up the challenge of investigating, on the part of the deflationist, one candidate explanation. We hypothesise that people's belief that the future is what we call deliberatively open partly explains why they represent time as dynamical. In a series of two experiments we test this hypothesis. We find no evidence that beliefs about deliberative openness explain why people represent time as dynamical. Hence there remains an explanatory burden for the deflationist to discharge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we clarify, unpack, and ultimately resist what is perhaps the most prominent argument for the compatibility of free will and determinism: the epistemic argument for compatibilism. We focus on one such argument as articulated by David Lewis: (i) we know we are free, (ii) for all we know everything is predetermined, (iii) if we know we are free but for all we know everything is predetermined, then for all we know we are free but everything is predetermined, (iv) if for all we know we are free but predetermined, then it is really possible that we are, so (v) compatibilism. We uncover how the crucial epistemic modality underlying (iv) must be understood, and contend that, understood this way, the libertarian can resist (iv). Importantly, however, resisting the argument does commit the libertarian to what has been called "flip-flopping"—but we argue that this is perfectly coherent. We conclude by articulating two crucially ways the libertarian can resist the argument, by saying that we can know that determinism is false "from the armchair". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Michel Serres said that history is the propagation of effects, saying in his conversations with Bruno Latour, "we experience time as much in our inner senses as externally in nature, as much as le temps of history as le temps of weather," characterized more by turbulence than by Euclidean geometry. Setting out from Serres' nautical meditation on noise, guided by Giuseppe Longo's and interlocutors' characterization of the random as a function of theory and measure, one can distinguish the random from the non-schematizable noisy. How do we think given the noisy dynamics of the world? Bernard Stiegler's epiphylogenetic technologies and Gilbert Simondon's transindividuating technics prepares considering thought as collective as well as individual activity. After sallies into algorithmic technology to establish its limits, we consider how epiphylogenetic thought develops in the presence of indeterminacy. We return to noise not as a simple veil between the discernible and indiscernible, but as a constitutive aspect of the complexification and enrichment of developmental ontologies, an enrichment co-articulated by epiphylogenetic imagination and technics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]