INTRODUCTION
VOLUME 44
From the literature of 2024
As editors of the Philosopher‘s Annual, we receive a long list of exceptional papers from our nominating editors and find ourselves faced with the difficult but rewarding task of narrowing down our selection to only ten. Careful reading and discussion lead us to reflect on the many diverse virtues a paper can realize. While each paper offered here is excellent for a unique set of reasons, what every paper on this list has in common is simple: given your limited time and the many great papers in circulation, we think this is a paper well worth reading. We hope the short summaries that form the rest of this introduction will give you a sense of where to start.
This year, multiple selected papers pose compelling challenges to an orthodox view. In “What is the Point of Political Equality?” Daniel Wodak challenges a thesis long embraced by egalitarian theorists — that political equality is equality of opportunity for influence. Wodak points to a troubling real-life case: In Australia in 1962, First Nations citizens were given the right to vote, but were denied the duty to vote that was imposed on other Australians, for whom voting was compulsory. This policy, the paper argues, made First Nations citizens less politically equal without reducing their opportunity for influence. It urges us to reconsider our conception of political equality in favor of a definition usually rejected out of hand — political equality as equality of influence tout court. Moreover, it makes a case for reconceptualizing the point of political equality as a relational duty on the state to treat citizens as equal coauthors of the law. Getting this right is especially important, says Wodak, in a moment when democracy is threatened by the rise of authoritarianism and the orthodox view of political equality is “at best complacent about oligarchy” (p. 407). The paper reinvigorates a theoretical debate that may be cut off too soon, while remaining grounded in political philosophy’s real-world stakes.
Two selected papers in the history of philosophy also give careful arguments in favor of daring conclusions. A paper claiming the discovery of a new Platonic argument for the existence of the Forms doesn’t arise often. Such grand, ambitious claims are usually met with skepticism among philosophers. So, color us surprised to find that Fiona Leigh’s “The Theory of Being and the Argument for Forms in Plato’s Sophist” makes a modest but persuasive case. Much like a Platonic Virgil, Leigh takes the reader’s hand on a journey through Plato’s dialogue, the Sophist. Sticking closely to the text throughout the paper, Leigh first gives a specific account of the Stranger’s dunamis proposal, which she argues is a definition for being, that rests on what has causal power (dunamis). She then notes that this definition relies on an expansive notion of causation — namely, Platonic or formal causation — which in turn can be explicated in terms of participation. The Stranger then argues, Leigh shows, that Change, Rest, Being, Sameness, and Difference are “beings” via the dunamis proposal and do not reduce to each other. Given the reliance of dunamis on formal causation (and thus “participation”), Leigh concludes that the Stranger identifies these “beings” as Forms. Throughout, Leigh pays careful attention to note the assumptions and stipulations that underlie the Stranger’s account.
It has traditionally been thought that Kant denies the possibility of actually infinite tota synthetica in order to prevent his begging the question against the transcendental realist in the first antinomy. Against this view, Rosalind Chaplin offers an undoubtedly revisionist but compelling argument in favor of the opposite. In “Kant on the Conceptual Possibility of Actually Infinite Tota Synthetica,” she argues that Kant in fact allows for the possibility of actually infinite tota synthetica. Chaplin first treats Allison’s argument that Kant rejects actually infinite tota synthetica by, among other things, pointing to rather explicit textual evidence that Kant accepts at least their logical possibility. She then rescues Kant from the problem that an actually infinite tota synthetica requires a synthetic succession of an infinite series (which seems impossible) by arguing that while such a succession is not really or psychologically possible, it is still logically possible and thus conceivable as a whole. The upshots of this argument are fascinating. Among the most surprising, Chaplin notes that Kant breaks with Leibniz and may even anticipate Cantor in his account of infinity. We think this paper is an excellent example of being charitable to one’s interlocutors and to philosophers of the past while remaining faithful to what they have said — and the unexpected theoretical fruits of considering alternative interpretations of the views they held.
The concept of relative size is at the core of contemporary set theory: is infinite set A at least as big as infinite set B, for example? The standard outline of relative size comes straight from Cantor: set A is at least as big as set B if and only if any two distinct members of A can be paired with distinct members of B. In “Cantor, Choice, and Paradox,“ Nicholas DiBella proposes a Cantorian variation: that set A is at least as big as set B if and only if any two distinct members of A can be paired with disjoint nonempty subsets of set B. DiBella shows that the two accounts are equivalent if the axiom of choice is true, and he does not try to argue that the standard account is somehow “wrong,” but suggests his as an alternative understanding of set and class size that opens new prospects for mathematical and philosophical exploration, particularly in a territory in which we don’t assume the axiom of choice. One example is the division paradox: on the standard account, given the negation of the axiom of choice, a set can counter-intuitively be partitioned into a set that is bigger than it is. Using DiBella’s alternative account, that is not true: any set will be as at least as big as any partition of it, regardless of whether the axiom of choice is true or false.
While the papers mentioned thus far impressed us with their compelling critiques of a received view, several other selected papers stood out for their illuminating analyses of a vexing set of disagreements. A central project in metaphysics is to offer metaphysical explanations of the less fundamental in terms of the more fundamental. But further distinctions between the nature of different kinds of metaphysical explanation are rarely discussed. Ezra Rubenstein’s “Two Approaches to Metaphysical Explanation” carefully teases apart two types of metaphysical explanation — the generation approach and the reduction approach — and demonstrates the centrality of both approaches for explanatory metaphysics. The generation approach accounts for cases in which “the fundamental generates, or gives rise to, less basic features of reality, whereas the reduction approach seeks to reinterpret our conception of reality in perspicuous, or less metaphysically distorted, terms” (p. 1108). Rubenstein gives metaphysicians the tools to make good use of each approach, while leaving space to decide where each approach is most appropriate in their explanatory projects.
In philosophy of science, the No Miracles Argument for scientific realism has long been used to challenge anti-realists — how could it be that our scientific theories are so successful and yet, as the anti-realist holds, are not at least approximately true? Caspar Jacobs’s “Comparativist Theories or Conspiracy Theories?” breathes new life into No Miracles-style arguments by bringing one into the debate between absolutism and comparativism. Absolutists hold that fundamental quantities are non-comparative. For example, saying that mass of particle i is 5kg is a non-comparative fact about the particle, because it is not being judged against another particle’s mass. Meanwhile, comparativists hold that fundamental quantities are comparative; e.g., that particle i is five times as massive as another particle. Adeptly making use of examples from physics, the paper argues that absolutists have an advantage over comparativists, who must face their own version of the No Miracles challenge.
Imagine that you are on a ship and have the option to sail to either the north or south side of an island. Going north will save one person. Going south will save five. Which option should you choose? Taurek’s challenge to ethicists that the numbers shouldn’t count — that both saving the one and the five are morally permissible — has vexed philosophers ever since it was posed in the 1970s, spawning a vast literature about whether and how the ‘numbers count.’ In “Each Counts for One”, Daniel Muñoz offers a fascinating diagnosis of the seemingly intractable disagreement underlying this dialectic. Using tools from social choice theory, Muñoz proposes two different ways in which “each counts for one”. In the Taurekian sense, each counts for one in the sense that everyone gets a veto in a social choice function that requires unanimity. In the sense defended by Derek Parfit and others, each counts for one in the sense that everyone gets a vote in a social choice function that requires majority vote. Along the way, Muñoz details how various assumptions in social choice theory (e.g. Anonymity) provide intuitive force for varying ideas of “equality” that underlie the Taurekian and Parfitian positions. Whether or not you think that Taurek himself would buy Muñoz’s diagnosis, we think it’s a convincing and unique explanation of why this literature has seemed so irresolvable.
If I say the dessert is delicious, or that it tastes like it contains cilantro, what I’ve said invites the inference that I have myself tasted the dessert: what Dilip Ninan calls an acquaintance inference. That is perfectly in accord with an expressivist account of taste predicates: in saying that the dessert is delicious I am expressing my reactions to my own experience. But expressivism has had a troubled history, in part because the acquaintance inference seems to disappear in further embeddings: ‘If the dessert is delicious, that will please Bina,’ for example. In “An Expressivist Theory of Taste Predicates,“ Ninan considers two analyses of the acquaintance inference and its disappearance in further embeddings: an epistemic view, built on the principle that one may assert φ only if one knows φ, and a view of acquaintance as a presupposition of ‘the dessert is delicious.’ He critiques both of these approaches, specifically with an eye to how they predict embeddings in Boolean connectives, generalized quantifiers, and epistemic modals. In the end, he argues, the data should motivate a re-consideration of expressivism, in particular a form of ‘lightweight expressivism’ built using a supervaluational account of assertion.
Finally, some papers distinguished themselves by their innovation — their ability to propose an account that is both totally novel and highly persuasive. Nick Riggle begins “Aesthetic Value and the Practice of Aesthetic Valuing” by asking the reader to name a handful of influential theories in ethics, political science, metaphysics or epistemology. That seems easy. He then asks the reader to name a handful of influential theories in aesthetics, and suggests it would be hard to get beyond two. Those theories, he suggests, focus too narrowly on the relation between a single observer and the object, locating aesthetic value either in the object itself or in a single observer’s experience. What Riggle attempts is to add a new and very different theory: aesthetic communitarianism, in which aesthetic value is grounded at least partially in terms of a participatory practice beyond the individual observer, characterized by imitation, sharing, and self-expression within a wider aesthetic community.
In “Toward a Virtue-Based Account of Racism,” Ian Peebles gives an account of racism as race-based ill-will or race-based deficient goodwill. Race-based ill-will is a negative attitude — willing someone ill — that is directed toward a person on the basis of their perceived race. Race-based deficient goodwill is a certain lack of attention: a failure to attend to moral considerations that are relevant to another person on the basis of that person’s race. The paper offers an abundance of edifying examples. An instance of race-based ill-will is a physical assault against an Asian American in response to COVID-19, while an example of race-based deficient goodwill is when a listener attempts to undermine a storyteller’s report of marginalization in virtue of the storyteller’s race. One of the strengths of the piece is that, although it does not treat certain societal structures as a central feature of racism, it recognizes their role in creating and sustaining racism. In this sense, the paper encourages a re-imagining of what is meant by structural racism — we are hopeful that it will elicit much fruitful discussion.
We think all ten of these papers exhibit some form of philosophical excellence, and we are very pleased to share them with you in this year’s Philosopher’s Annual. We warmly invite you to explore them, and we hope they reward your attention as fully as they have rewarded ours.
Patrick Grim
Gabrielle Kerbel
Lorenzo Manuali
Sophia Wushanley |
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