Sculpting Character: Aristotle’s Voluntary as Affectability (V-D)
Audrey L. Anton (The Ohio State University)

Most scholars find two criteria for distinguishing that which is voluntary from that which is not in Aristotle’s corpus: agency and knowledge. That is, for something to be voluntary it must issue from the agent under consideration and the agent must have adequate knowledge of the particulars involved. While Aristotle certainly suggests these criteria, he also clarifies several exceptions to these rules. Scholars rarely try to reconcile these exceptions with the two principles, and for good reason; to do so would result in contradiction. Still, there is reason to believe that Aristotle’s view was too coherent and precise to require admitting exceptions. In this paper, I explore the possibility that these criteria are suggestions for how to evaluate feelings and actions based on a more fundamental feature of the voluntary. I argue that there is a third fundamental consideration Aristotle had in mind that is constitutive of the voluntary. I suggest that Aristotle’s theory of the voluntary is one concerned with whether an agent’s character may be positively affected by praise and blame. That is, whatever is voluntary is that which, if praised or blamed, could positively contribute to the development, alteration, or strength of character. This account implies that emotions may be voluntary. This implication seems to be a virtue of the proposed account, since Aristotle explicitly begins his third book of Nicomachean Ethics with a declaration that both emotions and actions receive praise and blame when they are voluntary. Despite this comment, the majority of secondary literature addressing the voluntary focuses exclusively on actions. It is my contention that failure to recognize emotions as voluntary can lead (and has led) to an incomplete picture of Aristotle’s notion of the voluntary. After arguing for this interpretation, I reevaluate the examples previously considered “exceptions,” finding their original volitional category assignments to align precisely with my suggestion.

Formal Epistemology, New Philosophical Directions (III-C)
Horacio Arló-Costa (Carnegie-Mellon University)

The techniques of formal epistemology have been traditionally used in order to tackle old and new epistemological problems. Indeed, formal epistemology has been concerned with some familiar questions: what is the nature of knowledge and belief? What are their relationships? How do we change opinions and values? But there are philosophical problems (and philosophical positions) that appear and only make sense in the context of a given formal epistemology. For example, when Richard Jeffrey proposes that probability should be the only epistemological primitive notion and that we should eliminate all other doxastic and epistemological notions, he is introducing a philosophical position that does not exist without the previous introduction of a suitably formalized notion of probability and probability change. Moreover, the issue of the philosophical adequacy of a formal epistemology is also a kind of novel philosophical problem that only arises in the context of the formal theory. In this talk I will survey some of these novel philosophical problems. In particular, I will discuss the limitations of radical probabilism, the prospects of a bounded notion of rationality (of the sort proposed by Herb Simon) and the philosophical adequacy of some formal accounts of belief fixation and belief change. Formal theories used in the context of a particular formal epistemology are just instruments that make possible certain types of philosophical theorizing. Different uses of the same tools, or the use of different tools to analyze the same problem usually generates a multiplicity of philosophical points of view regarding some well-known philosophical problems. The dialogue between these philosophical positions might shed additional light on the problems themselves. I will close my talk with a comparison of two very different epistemological positions regarding the problem of how to represent belief change.

Plethoric Formal Epistemology (III-C)
Vincent F. Hendricks (Roskilde University)

Ian Hacking once noted that the hallmark of any fertile research program is plethora—the ability of the program to produce new and interesting phenomena. Formal epistemology is coming of age now, has a life of its own and is certainly a fertile research program in the plethoric sense.
Formal epistemology is a composite held together by a large toolbox of methods drawn from logic, mathematics, computer science, economics, social science, linguistics and cognitive psychology to mention but a few. One may be seduced into buying the idea that although the discipline is held together technically it is not in any philosophically interesting sense held together conceptually. Buying this idea is going to leave one with buyer’s regret.
It turns out that crucial philosophical concepts like
•Active Agency
•Reliability Analysis
•First vs. Third Person Perspectives on Inquiry
are unilaterally shared by approaches ranging from belief revision theory, dynamic epistemic logic, Bayesianism to formal learning theory.
Why, how and where to go—this talk will attempt to say.

Natural Kinds, Essences, and Contemporary Science
Joseph LaPorte (Hope College)

I will represent a contemporary perspective about where recent science not available to ancients and medievals leaves us with respect to essentialism. Most philosophers today are essentialists about biological kinds like oak, cat, and mammal. They are also essentialists about chemical kinds like water, gold, jade. Specialists today tend to be essentialists about chemical kinds but, in view of evolutionary science, they tend to be anti-essentialists about biological kinds. I will argue that essentialism remains plausible in view of contemporary science, both with respect to chemical kinds and with respect to biological kinds. However, the usual views according to which scientists discover and report theoretical identity statements identifying the essence of various kinds is mistaken. Scientists refine the meaning of terms when they report the essences of our kinds. The coherence of the foregoing combination of positions may seem doubtful: it has raised doubts on the part of good philosophers. Accordingly, I will address worries.

Sententialism and Higher-Order Attitude Attributions (III-D)
Kirk Ludwig (University of Florida)

Stephen Schiffer has recently offered a clever objection to sententialist theories of attitude reports that focuses on higher-order attitude attributions. In a nutshell, the objection is that someone could know the content of the sententialist analysis of, for example, ‘Galileo believed that the earth moves’, without know what Galileo believed. Curiously, however, the difficulty Schiffer raises for sententialists is equally a problem for propositionalists, and any solution available to the propositionalist is equally available to the sententialist. This shows that there are unexplored difficulties in our understanding of the notion of knowing what someone believes: for it shows that this cannot be captured simply by way of relating someone to a proposition that relates the believer to any object as such, whether it has its “content” essentially or not.

Wanted Pregnancies and Women’s Autonomy (III-A)
Amy Mullin (University of Toronto–Mississauga)

I understand autonomy as the ability to act in ways that are meaningful to one’s self. We are only capable of autonomy when we have various resources, personal and social. We need the ability to recognize our emotions, the ability to deliberate about the means of achieving our goals, the ability to make commitments and care about some things or people, the ability to control impulses that conflict with what we care about, the capacity to perceive salient aspects of our environment and to acquire and evaluate relevant information, access to information, the ability the ability to imagine alternatives, access to trusted and trustworthy others, self-trust, and an environment that makes it possible to predict with some degree of certainty the outcomes of various courses of action. While unwanted pregnancies can clearly threaten women’s autonomy, wanted pregnancies can too. (1) They may lack adequate information (about the changes they may experience and the moral decisions they may be required to make). (2) They may find it difficult to imagine alternatives to the dominant model of pregnancy as only about and for the developing fetus. (3) They may lack access to trusted and trustworthy others who care about them and their goals and priorities (pregnancy significantly increases a woman’s chance of being physically abused, and those with whom she is in relation will often see the interests of the fetus as trumping hers). (4) Pregnancy is a time of considerable change and risk, making it difficult for women to assess the likely outcomes of their desires and actions.
Therefore if pregnancy is not to diminish autonomy, women need more than freedom from nonconsensual sex, access to birth control, and availability of abortion. We must also consider how to support the autonomy of women experiencing wanted pregnancies.

The Innocent Eye: Seeing-as without Concepts (II-E)
Nicoletta Orlandi (University of North Carolina–Chapel Hill)

Can one see one thing as another without possessing a concept of it? The answer to this question is intuitively negative. This is because seeing X as F is usually taken to consist in the application of the concept “F” to X. Nearly by definition, then, one cannot see X as F without possessing a concept of F. Contrary to this line of reasoning, I think that the question of whether we can see X as F without possessing a concept of F is an open and partially empirical question. Seeing X as F involves seeing X in a certain way, namely as F, and whether concepts are required in order for someone to see something in a certain way is an open question. So, in this paper I argue against the idea of understanding seeing-as in terms of the application of concepts to something given. I propose an alternative theory of seeing-as according to which seeing-as involves seeing something in a way that is driven by what visible features of a figure or object one pays attention to. I show that this alternative is well supported by the evidence but it avoids implausible views of visual content. Adopting this alternative makes the question of whether one can see one thing as another without possessing a concept of it into an open question and it suggests how the question can be answered affirmatively.

Consent and the Formula of Humanity (IV-E)
Japa Pallikkathayil (Harvard University)

Kant famously argued that one ought never to treat others merely as a means. It is unclear, however, what exactly treating someone merely as a means comes to. In this paper, I explore one prominent approach to explicating this idea. This approached, advanced by Christine Korsgaard and Onora O’Neill, suggests that one treats another merely as a means if one treats the other in a way the other could not possibly consent to being treated. Call this the “possible consent interpretation.” In Section I, I argue that the possible consent interpretation involves attributing to Kant an implausible view, one that we have good evidence he did not espouse. In Section II, I argue that Korsgaard’s attempt to address the implausibility of the view being attributed to Kant is inadequate. In Section III, I argue that when the motivation behind the possible consent interpretation is made clear, the view has implausible implications that have thus far gone unnoticed. These implications suggest that the possible consent interpretation articulates a view that is fundamentally misguided. Finally, I offer a suggestion regarding how we might go about trying to develop an alternate interpretation.

Natural Kinds in the Later Middle Ages: The Case of Duns Scotus (I-C)
Giorgio Pini (Fordham University)

Later medieval authors commonly assumed that things fall into different kinds, which they called “essences” or “quiddities.” They also maintained that our classificatory concepts mirror these essences or quiddities, at least in some important respects. There was considerable debate, however, about how to fill out the details of this picture. In this paper, I will focus on some of the main positions discussed between the thirteenth and fourteenth century, with particular attention devoted to the thought of John Duns Scotus (1266-1308). Specifically, I will consider three questions. First, what is the ontological status of the essences into which the world is divided? Second, what is the relationship between those essences and the classificatory concepts by which we describe the world? Third, what do general terms such as “human being” and “horse” mean? Ideas in our mind or essences in the world? In considering these two questions, Scotus and his contemporaries were deeply aware of the limitations of our cognition. Since all our knowledge is based on information coming from the senses, and since only accidents can be sensed, it follows that a thing’s essence is beyond the grasp of what we can sense and so, to a certain extent, beyond the grasp of what we can know. But Scotus and his contemporaries also insisted on the necessity to give certainty to our scientific knowledge notwithstanding our cognitive limitations. It is in these later medieval debates that the basis for the distinction between nominal and real essence was posited. As a result, later medieval thinkers may turn out to be much closer to early modern thought than it is usually thought.

Aristotle on Defective Kinds (I-C)
Charlotte Witt (University of New Hampshire)

Over the past twenty years a new appreciation of Aristotle’s biological writing, which comprises some 25 percent of his extant corpus, has emerged. With that new appreciation has come a reinterpretation of the conceptual structure and metaphysical commitments of Aristotelian biology. The traditional taxonomic view of Aristotle’s biology that emphasized the notions of species, genus and differentia has been reconsidered, raising new questions about the compatibility between the biology and both Aristotle’s theory of scientific understanding and his metaphysics. I propose an interpretation of kinds in Aristotle’s biology that is grounded in a teleological metaphysics of biological individuals. Interpreted in this way Aristotle’s biology is compatible with a plausible reading of his metaphysics of substance. I also develop the view that Aristotelian kinds are strongly normative by considering his discussion of female animals and defective kinds. By strongly normative I mean that an individual belongs to the kind if that individual is subject to the norms that govern the kind, and an individual is subject to the norms that govern the kind if the norms are explanatory in relation to that individual.