Are we gullible? Can we be easily influenced by what others tell us, even if they do not deserve our trust? Many strands of research, from social psychology to cultural evolution suggest that humans are by nature conformist and eager to follow prestigious leaders. By contrast, an evolutionary perspective suggests that humans should be vigilant towards communicated information, so as not to be misled too often. Work in experimental psychology shows that humans are equipped with sophisticated mechanisms that allow them to carefully evaluate communicated information. These open vigilance mechanisms lead us to reject messages that clash with our prior beliefs, unless the source of the message has earned our trust, or provides good arguments, in which case we can adaptively change our minds. These mechanisms make us largely immune to mass persuasion, explaining why propaganda, political campaigns, advertising, and other attempts at persuading large groups nearly always fall in deaf ears. However, some false beliefs manage to spread through communication. I argue that most popular false beliefs are held reflectively, which means that they have little effect on our thoughts and behaviors, and that many false beliefs can be socially beneficial. Accepting such beliefs thus reflects a much weaker failure in our evaluation of communicated information than might at first appear.

According to the standard story of action, a story that can be traced back at least to David Hume (1740), actions are those bodily movements that are caused and rationalized by a pair of mental states: a desire for some end, where ends can be thought of as ways the world could be, and a belief that something the agent can just do, namely, move her body in the way to be explained, has some suitable chance of making the world the relevant way. Bodily movements that occur otherwise aren't actions, they are mere happenings (Davidson 1963, Davidson 1971).

Kant's original version of transcendental philosophy took both Euclidean geometry and the Newtonian laws of motion to be synthetic a priori constitutive principles—which, from Kant's point of view, function as necessary presuppositions for applying our fundamental concepts of space, time, matter, and motion to our sensible experience of the natural world. Although Kant had very good reasons to view the principles in question as having such a constitutively a priori role, we now know, in the wake of Einstein's work, that they are not in fact a priori in the stronger sense of being fixed necessary conditions for all human experience in general, eternally valid once and for all. And it is for precisely this reason that Kant's original version of transcendental philosophy must now be either rejected entirely or (at least) radically reconceived. Most philosophy of science since Einstein has taken the former route: the dominant view in logical empiricism, for example, was that the Kantian synthetic a priori had to be rejected once and for all in the light of the general theory of relativity.

It seems intuitively obvious that what I am doing right now is more real than what I did just one second ago, and it seems intuitively obvious that what I did just one second ago is more real than what I did forty years ago. And yet, remarkably, every philosopher of time today, except for the author, denies this obvious fact about reality. What went wrong? How could philosophers get so far away from what is the most experientially evident fact about reality?

‘You can’t stop progress’, we are endlessly told. But what is meant by “progress”? What is “progress” toward? We are rarely told. Human flourishing? And a culture? That would be a good start – but rarely seems a criterion for ‘progress’. (In fact, survival would be a good start…)

Rather, ‘progress’ is simply a process, that we are not allowed, apparently, to stop. Or rather: it would be futile to seek to stop it. So that we are seemingly-deliberately demoralised into giving up even trying.

Questioning the myth of ‘progress’, and seeking to substitute for it the idea of real progress – progress which is actually assessed according to some independent not-purely-procedural criteria – is a vital thing to do, at this point in history. Literally: life, or at least civilisation, and thus culture, may depend on it.

Once we overcome the myth of ‘progress’, we can clear the ground for a real politics that would jettison the absurd hubris of liberalism and of most ‘Leftism’. And would jettison the extreme Prometheanism and lack of precaution endemic to our current pseudo-democratic technocracy. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not fall into complete pessimism or into an endorsement of the untenable and unsavoury features of conservatism. The challenge, in other words, is to generate an ideology or philosophy for our time, that might yet save us, and ensure that we are worth saving.

This paper is then a kind of reading of Wittgenstein’s crucial aphorism on this topic: ‘Our civilization is characterized by the word progress. Progress is its form rather than making progress being one of its features.’

Together, these entail that for every true proposition p, there exists some thing which could not exist and p be false.

This paper outlines and criticises two models of terrorism, the Rational Agent Model (RAM) and the Radicalisation Model (RAD). A different and more plausible conception of the turn to violence is proposed. The proposed account is Moderate Epistemic Particularism (MEP), an approach partly inspired by Karl Jaspers’ distinction between explanation and understanding. On this account there are multiple idiosyncratic pathways to cognitive and behavioural radicalisation, and the actions and motivations of terrorists can only be understood (rather than explained) by engaging with their subjectivity in a way that depends on a degree of empathy. Scepticism is expressed about attempts to model radicalisation and predict political violence. This scepticism is based on reflections concerning the nature of complex particulars. The implications of MEP for counterterrorism are briefly discussed.

Though everyday life accords a great deal of significance to practical abilities – such as the ability to walk, to speak French, to play the piano – philosophers of action pay surprisingly little attention to them. By contrast, abilities are discussed in various other philosophical projects. From these discussions, a partial theory of abilities emerges. If the partial theory – which is at best adequate only to a few examples of practical abilities – were correct, then philosophers of action would be right to ignore practical abilities, because they could play no fundamental role in an account of human agency. For the idea that practical abilities do play a fundamental role in human agency to be worth considering, an alternative conception of them is needed. As a first step, I attempt some of the necessary ground-clearing work.

What is it reasonable to believe about our most successful scientific theories such as the general theory of relativity or quantum mechanics? That they are true, or at any rate approximately true? Or only that they successfully ‘save the phenomena’, by being ‘empirically adequate’? In earlier work I explored the attractions of a view called Structural Scientific Realism (hereafter: SSR). This holds that it is reasonable to believe that our successful theories are (approximately) structurally correct (and also that this is the strongest epistemic claim about them that it is reasonable to make). In the first part of this paper I shall explain in some detail what this thesis means and outline the reasons why it seems attractive. The second section outlines a number of criticisms that have none the less been brought against SSR in the recent (and as we shall see, in some cases, not so recent) literature; and the third and final section argues that, despite the fact that these criticisms might seem initially deeply troubling (or worse), the position remains viable.

The term ‘consciousness’ is a latecomer upon the stage of Western philosophy. The ancients had no such term. Sunoida, like its Latin equivalent conscio, meant the same as ‘I know together with’ or ‘I am privy, with another, to the knowledge that’. If the prefixes sun and cum functioned merely as intensifiers, then the verbs meant simply ‘I know well’ or ‘I am well aware that’. Although the ancients did indeed raise questions about the nature of our knowledge of our own perceptions and thought, and introduced the idea of an inner sense, they did not characterize the mind as the domain of consciousness. Aristotelians conceived of the mind as the array of powers that distinguish humanity from the rest of animate nature. The powers of self-movement, of perception and sensation, and of appetite, are shared with other animals. What is distinctive of humanity, and what characterizes the mind, are the powers of the intellect – of reason, and of the rational will. Knowledge of these powers is not obtained by consciousness or introspection, but by observation of their exercise in our engagement with the world around us. The mediaevals followed suit. They likewise lacked any term for consciousness, although they too indulged in reflections upon ‘inner senses’ – in the wake of Avicenna's distinguishing, arguably to excess, five such senses.

There has recently been a great interest in models in the natural sciences. Models are used mainly for their representational functions: they help to concretize certain relationships between parameters in studying physical systems. For instance, we might be interested in representing how the planets orbit around the sun—a scale model of the solar system is an ideal tool for achieving this end. We are free to leave out one or two planets or ignore the moons which many of the planets have. Alternatively, we might be interested in studying the relationship between two particular parameters—how one may be dependent on the other. Then we construct a functional model and determine the functional relationship between them. For instance, the orbital period of a planet is functionally dependent on the average distance of the planet from the sun.1 Models are rather widespread in the social sciences, especially in economics where functional models are used to study relationships between, say, supply and demand. Economics, however, also uses a different kind of model which is also used in the natural sciences: the hypothetical or as if model. Economists employ as if constructions when they assume economic agents to be perfectly rational beings who always seek to maximize their utilities. It is common knowledge that economic agents are not perfectly rational and that the assumptions of perfect rationality and optimal information are at best idealizations which do not, strictly speaking, correspond to the economic reality of how economic agents behave in the market-place.

Last weekend, I made a bookcase. To begin with, I went and bought various pieces of wood and several screws. Then I screwed the pieces of wood together. In doing so, I created something new: my bookcase. And this bookcase is made up of the pieces of wood and the screws. In other words, they're parts of it.

The question I shall attempt to address in what follows is an essentially historical one, namely: Why did analytic philosophy emerge first in Cambridge, in the hands of G. E. Moore and Bertrand Russell, and as a direct consequence of their revolutionary rejection of the philosophical tenets that form the basis of British Idealism? And the answer that I shall try to defend is: it didn't. That is to say, the ‘analytic’ doctrines and methods which Moore and Russell embraced in the very last years of the nineteenth century were not revolutionary, did not emerge first in Cambridge, were the creation of neither Russell nor Moore and cannot be explained by appeal to facts concerning British Idealism. The adoption of the doctrines and methods which characterised the earliest manifestations of British analytic philosophy are to be explained neither by reference to anything specifically British, nor by appeal to anything unproblematically philosophical. Or so I shall argue.

Hume famously warned us that the ‘[The] ultimate springs and principles are totally shut up from human curiosity and enquiry’. Or, again, Newton: ‘Hitherto I have not been able to discover the cause of these properties of gravity … and I frame no hypotheses.’ Aristotelian science was concerned with just such questions, the specification of occult qualities, the real essences that answer the question What is matter, etc?, the preoccupation with circular definitions such as dormative virtues, and so on. The rise of modern science is usually seen as a break with the sterility of Aristotelianism, so what exactly is it that modern science does discover, if it is not the essential nature of matter, of force, of energy, of space and time? A famous answer was provided by Poincaré: ‘The true relations between these real objects are the only reality we can attain.’ This is often regarded as the manifesto of so-called structural realism, as espoused in recent years by John Worrall, for example (cp. his (1989)). In response to the arguments of Larry Laudan (1982) against convergent realism, Worrall points to the continuity in the formal relations between elements of reality expressed by mathematical equations, while the intrinsic nature of these elements of reality gets constantly revised.

This chapter will focus on the biomedical moral enhancement of offenders – the idea that we could modify offenders’ brains in order to reduce the likelihood that they would engage in immoral, criminal behaviour. Discussions of the permissibility of using biomedical means to address criminal behaviour typically analyse the issues from the perspective of medical ethics, rather than penal theory. However, recently certain theorists have discussed whether brain interventions could be legitimately used for punitive (as opposed to purely therapeutic) purposes. For instance, Jesper Ryberg argues (although he himself is not a retributivist) that there is nothing to prevent retributivists from endorsing brain interventions as a legitimate form of retributive punishment. Legal academics have not yet paid sufficient attention to whether this proposal would be compatible with international human rights law, nor have retributivist philosophers discussed whether their favoured penal theories have the conceptual resources to explain why brain interventions would not be an appropriate method of punishment. This chapter considers whether there is any indication that these interventions are being used at present for punitive purposes and whether this would violate the European Convention on Human Rights. It examines different versions of retributivism and considers which theory is in the best position to challenge the use of brain interventions as a form of punishment. Finally, it considers whether offering these interventions as an alternative to punishment would violate principles of proportionality.

Hume's essay on the credibility of miracle reports has always been controversial, with much debate over how it should be interpreted, let alone assessed. My aim here is to summarise what I take to be the most plausible views on these issues, both interpretative and philosophical, with references to facilitate deeper investigation if desired. The paper is divided into small sections, each headed by a question that provides a focus. Broadly speaking, §§1–3 and §20 are on Hume's general philosophical framework within which the essay is situated, §§4–11 and §19 are on Part 1, §12–18 are on Part 2, and the final three sections §§18–20 sum up my assessment of his arguments.

Verse is text which is divided into lines. In this paper I explore a psychological account of how verse is processed, and specifically the hypothesis that the text is processed line by line, such that each line is held as a whole sequence in the limited capacity of working memory. I will argue that because the line is processed in this way, certain low-level aesthetic effects are thereby produced, thus giving a partial explanation for why verse is often a highly valued type of verbal behaviour. The general goal is to address the question of what literary form is, from a psychological perspective, and how the textual presence and psychological processing of form can contribute to particular aspects of the aesthetic experience of verse.

This paper is about the contemporary debate concerning folk psychology–the debate between the proponents of the theory theory of folk psychology and the friends of the simulation alternative. At the outset, we need to ask: What should we mean by this term ‘folk psychology’?

This paper will sketch a model of the human mind according to which the mind's structure is massively, but by no means wholly, modular. Modularity views in general will be motivated, elucidated, and defended, before the thesis of moderately massive modularity is explained and elaborated.

In this paper I argue that social networking sites (SNSs) are emotion technologies that promote a highly charged emotional environment where intrinsic emotion regulation is significantly weakened, and people's emotions are more strongly modulated by other people and by the technology itself. I show that these features of social media promote a simplistic emotional outlook which is an obstacle to the development and maintenance of virtue. In addition, I focus on the mechanisms that promote group-based anger and thus give rise to affective polarisation. In the final section, after a discussion of the positive value of some forms of anger, I argue that SNSs should not be designed to prohibit or suppress anger, but that its encouragement should also be avoided. I conclude with a suggestion about how this might be achieved.