Philosophical Writings 

About: Philosophical Writings is an academic journal. The journal publishes majorly in the area(s): Philosophy of logic & Coherence theory of truth. It has an ISSN identifier of 1361-9365. Over the lifetime, 18 publications have been published receiving 47 citations.

Intuitive Biases in Judgements about Thought Experiments: The Experience Machine Revisited

Abstract: This paper is a warning that objections based on thought experiments can be misleading because they can elicit judgments that, unbeknownst to the judge, have been seriously skewed by psychological biases. The fact that most people choose not to plug in to the experience machine in Nozick‟s famous thought experiment has long been used as a knock-down objection to hedonism. The reluctance to plug in is widely thought to show that real experiences are more important to us than pleasurable experiences. This paper argues that the commonplace choice to remain in reality when offered a life in the experience machine is best explained by status quo bias – the irrational preference for things to remain the same. An alternative thought experiment, preliminary empirical evidence, and a discussion of how psychological biases can affect our judgments are provided to support this argument.

Heidegger on philosophy and language

Abstract: This paper attempts to explain why Heidegger‟s thought has evoked both positive and negative reactions of such an extreme nature by focussing on his answer to the central methodological question “What is Philosophy?” After briefly setting forth Heidegger‟s answer in terms of attunement to Being, the centrality to it of his view of language and by focussing on his relationship with the word „philosophy‟ and with the history of philosophy, the author shows how it has led Heidegger to construct his own work, itself linguistic, as a self-referential union of form and meaning. It is suggested that, from a Heideggerian perspective, this gives his work added argumentative force but, conversely, allows the critic no point of entry into his hermeneutical circle – hence the extreme reactions. This observation is then applied to address a related critical question; it is used to make sense of the apparent distinction, in Heidegger‟s work, between talking about attunement to Being and actually effecting such an attunement. The author argues that, for Heidegger, there is actually no distinction and that his apparent descriptions of attunement to Being at once describe and effect such an attunement. This union can therefore be conceived as one dimension of the intimacy, previously observed, between form and content and which is recognised to be a feature of Heidegger‟s work by both the acolyte and the critic.

Belief or 'Belief': Rush Rhees on Religious Belief Language

Abstract: T recent book Rush Rhees on Religion and Philosophy contains a stimulating collection of writin~s by Rush Rhees on a variety of topics in the philosophy of religion. Comprising accounts of personal, religious and moral struggles, these essays provide a refreshing change from the often dry, overly technical approach to philosophy writing. Despite spanning more than thirty years, Rhees' s essays disclose a fairly consistent philosophy .of religion with a clear emphasis. Since he was Wittgenstein's student and long-time friend as well as a literary executor ofWittgenstein's writings, it is not surprising that Rhees's comments on the philosophy of religion reveal a distinctly Wittgensteinian approach, both in content and style. Moreover, Rhees's particular way of doing philosophy of religion seems, in retrospect, to have set the course that subsequent philosophy of religion of the Wittgensteinian type would take. Two themes, or methods, inform nearly the whole book: a concentrated focus on the \"grammar\" of religious statements and a selective reliance on verificationism. Although the latter may sound provocative since Wittgensteinian philosophy of religion can rightly be seen as a polemic against logical positivism, I will argue that Rhees's reliance on verificationism is important for his project. In this essay, I want to consider Rhees' s treatment of the sense of religious language, for it both exemplifies his approach to nearly all aspects of his philosophy of religion, and it discloses what I will argue is his chief failing: the distortion of Christian concepts on the basis of what he thinks ought to be deep about religion. In what follows I will ( 1) sumtnarise his contrast between how we come to have ordinary beliefs about the world versus how religious believers come to faith and belief in God; and (2) show that his treatments of the Christian beliefs in God and an afterlife distort what nearly all Christians take these beliefs to amount to? My goal will

Epistemic Contextualism, Epistemic Relativism and Disagreement

Abstract: In the recent philosophy of language literature there is a debate over whether contextualist accounts of the semantics of various terms can accommodate intuitions of disagreement in certain cases involving those terms. Relativists such as John MacFarlane have claimed that this motivates adopting a form of relativist semantics for these terms because the relativist can account for the same data as contextualists but doesn’t face this problem of disagreement (MacFarlane 2005, 2007 and 2009). In this paper I focus on the case of epistemic predicates and I argue that on a certain assumption about what is involved in assessing an utterance the epistemic contextualist can solve her problem of disagreement. This undercuts a motivation for epistemic relativism.