48th Philosophers’ Carnival

Welcome to the 48th Philosophers’ Carnival.

I suppose this’ll be the “School’s Out For Summer” edition of the Carnival (despite the fact that some of you are either teaching or taking summer courses). And so, in that spirit, I’d like to first direct your attention to Alice Cooper’s 1978 performance of “School’s Out” on the Muppet Show.

And now let’s get to the philosophy. As I noted earlier, I’ll be dividing selections into their respective branches of philosophy, and so only those submissions that very clearly belong to a(t least one) particular branch of philosophy made the cut.

METAPHYSICS

Jessica Leech of the “Bloggin the Question” blog discusses the copula modification approach to modal language. She concludes, “In order to give the copula modifier account of modality fair trial, we cannot follow McGinn’s lead. We must either find an alternative way to understand modal satisfaction, or find a better way to make sense of copula modification than in terms of modification of satisfaction.”

John Depoe of the “Fides Quaerens Intellectum” blog examines one of the premises of the Kalam cosmological argument for the existence of God, asking, “Why should we think that ‘whatever begins to exist must have a cause’ is true?”

And Bryan Norwood of the “Movement of Existence” blog notes four prominent theories of truth and various objections to each.

EPISTEMOLOGY

Avery Archer of “The Space of Reasons” blog begins with McDowell’s disjunctivism and adds a further distinction between weak and strong belief. Archer explains, “To strongly believe that p entails that a subject is intellectually/ rationally/ doxastically committed to p being true. To weakly believe that p entails that a subject is intellectually/ rationally/ doxastically committed to p being likely or highly probable.”

Amy Wuest of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog discusses the importance of virtues in epistemology. She begins with an account of what virtue epistemology is and proceeds to show how virtue epistemology both (a) “reconciles important epistemic problems” and (b) deals with a couple of interesting cases in particular.

Martin Cooke of the “Enigmania” blog explains how both Humean and Cartesian skepticism motivate us to take seriously what is common sense.

ETHICS

Alonzo Fyfe of the “Atheist Ethicist” blog takes a Euthyphro kind of approach to the claim that morality is ultimately a matter of genetics. He asks, “Is X morally good because it is loved by the genes? Or is X loved by the genes because it is morally good?” And according to Fyfe, “If the genetic moralist takes the first horn of this dilemma, she falls into a trap of saying that the most horrendous acts can be good. . . . If the genetic moralist takes the second option, then we are still missing an account of what ‘wrong’ is.”

Seth Baum of the “Felicifia” blog addresses the concept of infinite utility as a potential problem for utilitarian ethical theories. According to Baum, “Utilitarianism’s got a problem: It recommends maximizing total utility, but if there’s even the slightest chance that this total utility could be infinitely large, then the whole system breaks down.”

Brian Berkey of the “Philosophy from the Left Coast” blog examines and expands upon Elizabeth Ashford’s argument against Bernard Williams’ claim that utilitarianism is incompatible with agents’ integrity. Berkey concludes, “If there is a good argument for the view that there are limits to what morality can demand of individuals, it must appeal to considerations other than the effects of certain moral demands on agents’ existing self-conceptions.”

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

Over at the “On Philosophy” blog, Peter asks us to “[i]magine that one day that basic components of the world were instantaneously replaced by other things, in a one-to-one correspondence, which had the same patterns of interactions (the same functional properties) as the things they replaced. Would we notice the change?” He’ll conclude that “if we accept that all properties are ultimately functional properties, consciousness, being some functional property of our biological brains, must ultimately be able to be found in non-biological systems of sufficient complexity as well.”

Justin of the “Panexperientialism” blog considers the argument of Graham Cairns-Smith in his book Evolving the Mind that consciousness would not have evolved if it did not have adaptive effects upon the physical and wonders how an epiphenomenalist might respond.

Quincy Faircloth of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog argues on Epicurean lines that we should not fear death. According to Faircloth, his materialistic view of the soul “leads Epicurus to his most profound argument for not fearing death. If the soul dies when the body dies there is no reason whatsoever to fear death, because we simply will not exist to experience it.”

PHILOSOPHY OF LANGUAGE

Guest-blogging on Michael Horton’s “Nothing but the Truth-in-L” blog, Carl Ehrett first lays out four different ways of making the same objection to epistemicism (the idea that the vagueness of terms is an epistemic phenomenon) and then suggests that the objection is often made on the wrong grounds. He writes, “[T]his objection tends to be utilized by those who wish to hold that the meaning of ‘bald’ is not precisely bounded; but the objection cannot be so used, for the problem of the objection is generated not by holding that the meaning of ‘bald’ is precisely bounded, but rather merely by holding that ‘bald’ has a meaning at all, as I will attempt to show here.”

Nathan of the “Philosophy and Literature” blog explains why the deconstruction of speech acts “misses the point.” Specifically, such deconstruction “loses all linguistic intention, and in this regard speech acts invariably retain all linguistic intention when the ontological status on language is understood.”

And in a post that could just as easily be put in either the Epistemology or Philosophy of Religion section, Joseph Long of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog uses the causal theory of reference to criticize a central premise of Sam Harris’ Reasons for Belief argument Christianity, namely, the premise that states, “[I]f two people having all the same supporting belief-schema for their respective faiths and the faiths are inconsistent with each other, then neither has more reason than the other to believe her faith.”

PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Many of you are probably familiar with the Free Will Defense as it serves to respond to the Problem of Evil. Richard Brown of the “Philosophy Sucks!” blog tries his hand at reviving one of Mackie’s arguments against the Free Will Defense by asking, “[W]hy it is that our being free requires that we be allowed to do evil?”

In the past couple of weeks, Alexander Pruss has posted two arguments for the existence of God on “The Prosblogion” blog. One has to do with the permissibility of unconditional love, the other with gratitude.

LEGAL and POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

Jeremy Pierce of the “Parableman” blog asks whether or not President Bush is his own president. (His discussion is an off-shoot of the one that started when Trent Dougherty asked, “Who is God’s God?“).

Thom Brooks of “The Brooks Blog” links to his latest work on Hegel’s legal philosophy. His suggestion is that “Hegel is a natural lawyer, although not of a more familiar variety.”

And Joseph Orosco of the “Engage: Conversations in Philosophy” blog suggests an alternative way to conceive of the justification behind diversity-aimed legislation.

DECISION THEORY

On the Big Ideas blog, Newcomb’s Paradox is first summarized and then reduced to a pair of sorites paradoxes.

There’s also an interesting new post up on the “Thoughts, Arguments, and Rants” blog about Newcomb’s Paradox, for those who are interested.

HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

Ashok Karra of the blog “Rethink” submitted an interpretation of Plato’s Republic, 331d-336a. There are four parts, the first of which is here.

Ian Wasser of the Florida Student Philosophy Blog investigates the claim that Nietzsche is a reductionist with respect to humans being driven solely by the “will to power” like machines. This post is the second in a three-post discussion of Nietzsche’s conception of the “will to power.”

REVIEWS

David Gross reviews Arne Johan Vetlesen’s book Evil and Human Agency. Gross calls the book an attempt to “to reconcile sociological, psychological, and philosophical accounts of human evildoing, particularly those prompted by attempts to wrestle with the Holocaust and other examples of large-scale massacre: things like Hannah Arendt’s examinations of totalitarianism and ‘the banality of evil,’ and the Milgram experiment.”

COMICS

Thad Guy has a good one about free will.

Jonathan Ichikawa’s series on realism (parts one, two, and three) made me laugh.

And I also like this one, which I found over at On Philosophy.

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It’s been a pleasure hosting the Philosophers’ Carnival. In closing, I’d like to encourage everyone to continue the many interesting discussions taking place over at the 2nd Annual Online Philosophy Conference. And if you’re interested in hosting a future Philosophers’ Carnival, you can find out how to do so here.