Kim Sterelny (ANU), "The Social Contract in a Complex World"
Other
Humans differ from other great apes in many ways, but one crucial difference is that our social worlds are vastly more co-operative than those of any other great ape. In my view, we now have a good conceptual model of the origins of human co-operation and it stability in the Pleistocene. But…
Katalin Balog (Rutgers): "Acquaintance and the Mind-Body Problem"
Other
In this paper I begin to develop an account of the acquaintance that each of us has with our own conscious states and processes. The account is a speculative proposal about human mental architecture and specifically about the nature of the concepts via which we think in first personish ways about…
Jonathan Herington (ANU), "Security and Essential Contestability"
Activity
There is a consensus with political science and law that ‘security’ is an essentially contested concept. This consensus is based upon the diversity of accounts (such as national security, human security, ontological security etc.) which are all said to compete over the proper definition of ‘…
Edward Elliott (ANU): What's Wrong With What the Racist Says?
Other
Abstract: What’s wrong with racist terms and other “defective” thick concepts? Answers to this question have been important in some recent discussions on conceptual role semantics (CRS) and the notion of epistemic analyticity. It has been argued that either CRS does not have the resources to…
Christian Barry (ANU), On Failing in One's Duties to Assist
Other
Duties to address severe deprivation based on being able to assist at some cost—assistance-based duties—are commonly thought (correctly, it is assumed in this paper) to be much less stringent than duties to address severe deprivation based on having contributed to its occurrence—contribution-based…
Samuel Scheffler (New York University), "The Afterlife"
Other
Like many people nowadays, though unlike many others, I do not believe in the existence of an afterlife as normally understood. That is, I do not believe that individuals continue to live on as conscious beings after their biological deaths. To the contrary, I believe that biological death…