John Bengson’s “The Intellectual Given”!

Here’s the abstract: Intuition is sometimes derided as an abstruse or esoteric phenomenon akin to crystal-ball gazing. Such derision appears to be fuelled primarily by the suggestion, evidently endorsed by traditional rationalists such as Plato and Descartes, that intuition is a kind of direct, immediate apprehension akin to perception. This paper suggests that although the perceptual analogy has often been dismissed as encouraging a theoretically useless metaphor, a quasi-perceptualist view of intuition may enable rationalists to begin to meet the challenge of supplying a theoretically satisfying treatment of their favoured epistemic source. It is argued, first, that intuitions and perceptual experiences are at a certain level of abstraction the same type of mental state, presentations, which are distinct from beliefs, hunches, inclinations, attractions, and seemings. The notion of a presentation is given a positive explication, which identifies its characteristic features, accounts for several of its substantive psychological roles, and systematically locates it in a threefold division among types of contentful states. Subsequently, it is argued that presentations, intuitive no less than sensory, are by their nature poised to play a distinctive epistemic role. Specifically, in the case of intuition, we encounter an intellectual state that is so structured as to provide justification without requiring justification in turn—something which may, thus, be thought of as ‘given’.

I’ve especially enjoyed:
Laurie Paul “What You Can’t Expect When You’re Expecting” Res Philosophica
Katia Vavova “Evolutionary Debunking of Moral Realism” Phil Compass
Shaun Nichols _Bound_ OUP
John Doris _Talking to Ourselves_ OUP

Benjamin Lennertz, “Quantificational Credences” (http://quod.lib.umich.edu/p/phimp/3521354.0015.009/–quantificational-credences?view=image)

Abstract:
In addition to full beliefs, agents have attitudes of varying confidence, or credences. For instance, I do not believe that the Boston Red Sox will win the American League East this year, but I am at least a little bit confident that they will – i.e. I have a positive credence that they will. It is also common to think that agents have conditional credences. For instance, I am very confident – i.e. have a conditional credence of very-likely strength – that the Red Sox will win the AL East this year given that their pitching staff stays healthy. There are good reasons to think that conditional credences are neither credences nor some combination of credences. In this paper, I show that similar reasons support thinking that agents have what we can call quantificational credences – attitudes like, thinking that each AL East team with a healthy pitching staff is at least a little bit likely to win the division – which are neither credences, conditional credences, nor some combination thereof. I provide a framework for assessing the rationality of credal states which involve quantificational credences. And I give a general picture of credal states that explains the similarities and differences between ordinary, conditional, and quantificational credences.

Bernardo Kastrup – ‘Why Materialism is Baloney’
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Why-Materialism-Is-Baloney-everything/dp/1782793623

It’s not actually a masterpiece, I would say, and I would even argue with some of it, but the title does it for me and it is at least a good poke in the eye for its targeted fashionable dogma.

Anton Ford, ‘The Arithmetic of Intention’, American Philosophical Quarterly 52/2.

The neo-Aristotelian character of recent work on philosophy of action by Anscombe, Thompson, Ford, Lavin, etc. has already been much remarked. I appreciate the way that Ford brings out a neglected neo-Fregean side of this school. His treatment of Intention §5 particularly helpful; he suggests it is not a seemingly circular definition of action, but a signal that action is a formal concept.

1) Mahrad Almotahari and Adam Hosein. “Is anything just plain good?” Philosophical Studies 172: 1485-1508.

2) Charles McCarty. “Structuralism and Isomorphism” Philosophia Mathematica 23: 1-10.

3) David Ebrey. “Why are there no conditionals in Aristotle’s logic?” Journal of the History of Philosophy 53: 185-205.