Diversity Reading List

Summary: This chapter takes you through the history of teleological arguments and an analysis of them: beginning with traditional teleological arguments and their origins, and moving to discuss modern day 'fine tuning' and 'many worlds' arguments. Along the way, Garcia considers criticisms of these various arguments.

Abstract:
Ephecticism is the tendency towards suspension of belief. Epistemology often focuses on the error of believing when one ought to doubt. The converse error—doubting when one ought to believe—is relatively underexplored. This essay examines the errors of undue doubt. I draw on the relevant alternatives framework to diagnose and remedy undue doubts about rape accusations. Doubters tend to invoke standards for belief that are too demanding, for example, and underestimate how farfetched uneliminated error possibilities are. They mistake seeing how incriminating evidence is compatible with innocence for a reason to withhold judgement. Rape accusations help illuminate the causes and normativity of doubt. I propose a novel kind of epistemic injustice, for example, wherein patterns of unwarranted attention to farfetched error possibilities can cause those error possibilities to become relevant. Widespread unreasonable doubt thus renders doubt reasonable and makes it harder to know rape accusations. Finally, I emphasise that doubt is often a conservative force and I argue that the relevant alternatives framework helps defend against pernicious doubt-mongers.

Content: Govier distinguishes four kinds of slippery slope arguments - conceptual, precedential, causal and mixed - and argues that only the last kind are likely to ever be sound.

Abstract: It is often taken for granted by writers who propose - and, for that matter, by writers who oppose - 'justifications' of inductions, that deduction either does not need, or can readily be provided with, justification. The purpose of this paper is to argue that, contrary to this common opinion, problems analogous to those which, notoriously, arise in the attempt to justify induction, also arise in the attempt to justify deduction.

Abstract: I defend the view that we should not overintellectualize the mind. Nonhuman animals can occupy islands of practical rationality: they can have contextbound reasons for action even though they lack full conceptual abilities. Holism and the possibility of mistake are required for such reasons to be the agent's reasons, but these requirements can be met in the absence of inferential promiscuity. Empirical work with animals is used to illustrate the possibility that reasons for action could be bound to symbolic or social contexts, and connections are made to simulationist accounts of cognitive skills.

Abstract:
The book argues that women's perspectives and gender issues must be mainstreamed across African philosophy in order for the discipline to truly represent the thoughts of Africans across the continent. African philosophy as an academic discipline emerged as a direct challenge to Western and Eurocentric hegemonies. It sought to actualize the project of decolonization and to contribute African perspectives to global discourses. There has, however, been a dominance of male perspectives in this field of human knowledge. This book argues that African philosophy cannot claim to have liberated people of African descent from marginalization until the androcentric nature of African philosophy is addressed. Key concepts such as Ujamaa, Negritude, Ubuntu, Consciencism, and African Socialism are explored as they relate to African women's lives or as models of inclusion or exclusion from politics. In addition to offering a feminist critique of African philosophy, the book also discusses topics that have been consistently overlooked in African philosophy. These topics include sex, sexuality, rape, motherhood, prostitution, and the low participation of women in politics. By highlighting the work of women feminist scholars such as Oyeronke Oyewumi, Nkiru Nzegwu, Ifi Amadiume, Amina Mama, and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, the book engages with African philosophy from an African feminist viewpoint. This book will be an essential resource for students and researchers of African philosophy and gender studies.

Abstract:
The book argues that women's perspectives and gender issues must be mainstreamed across African philosophy in order for the discipline to truly represent the thoughts of Africans across the continent. African philosophy as an academic discipline emerged as a direct challenge to Western and Eurocentric hegemonies. It sought to actualize the project of decolonization and to contribute African perspectives to global discourses. There has, however, been a dominance of male perspectives in this field of human knowledge. This book argues that African philosophy cannot claim to have liberated people of African descent from marginalization until the androcentric nature of African philosophy is addressed. Key concepts such as Ujamaa, Negritude, Ubuntu, Consciencism, and African Socialism are explored as they relate to African women's lives or as models of inclusion or exclusion from politics. In addition to offering a feminist critique of African philosophy, the book also discusses topics that have been consistently overlooked in African philosophy. These topics include sex, sexuality, rape, motherhood, prostitution, and the low participation of women in politics. By highlighting the work of women feminist scholars such as Oyeronke Oyewumi, Nkiru Nzegwu, Ifi Amadiume, Amina Mama, and Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, the book engages with African philosophy from an African feminist viewpoint. This book will be an essential resource for students and researchers of African philosophy and gender studies.

Abstract: The goal of the research programme I describe in this article is a realist epistemology for arithmetic which respects arithmetic's special epistemic status (the status usually described as a prioricity) yet accommodates naturalistic concerns by remaining funda- mentally empiricist. I argue that the central claims which would allow us to develop such an epistemology are (i) that arithmetical truths are known through an examination of our arithmetical concepts; (ii) that (at least our basic) arithmetical concepts are accurate mental representations of elements of the arithmetical structure of the inde- pendent world; (iii) that (ii) obtains in virtue of the normal functioning of our sensory apparatus. The first of these claims protects arithmetic's special epistemic status relative, for example, to the laws of physics, the second preserves the independence of arithmetical truth, and the third ensures that we remain empiricists.

Abstract: Controversy remains over exactly why Frege aimed to estabish logicism. In this essay, I argue that the most influential interpretations of Frege's motivations fall short because they misunderstand or neglect Frege's claims that axioms must be self-evident. I offer an interpretation of his appeals to self-evidence and attempt to show that they reveal a previously overlooked motivation for establishing logicism, one which has roots in the Euclidean rationalist tradition. More specifically, my view is that Frege had two notions of self-evidence. One notion is that of a truth being foundationally secure, yet not grounded on any other truth. The second notion is that of a truth that requires only clearly grasping its content for rational, a priori justified recognition of its truth. The overarching thesis I develop is that Frege required that axioms be self-evident in both senses, and he relied on judging propositions to be self-evident as part of his fallibilist method for identifying a foundation of arithmetic. Consequently, we must recognize both notions in order to understand how Frege construes ultimate foundational proofs, his methodology for discovering and identifying such proofs, and why he thought the propositions of arithmetic required proof.

Abstract:

Many artifacts that are part of the public landscape—including monuments, memorials, murals, and many viewing towers, arches, gardens, public sculptures, and buildings—are designed to communicate knowledge. It is common to describe such public artifacts as speech, and also to describe them as transmitting knowledge of one sort or another. But the claim that these artifacts can be knowledge-transmitting speech is not typically developed as the complex claim in philosophy of language and social epistemology that it is. I will argue that such public artifacts can be testimony. This raises several philosophically important questions: How can public artifacts be speech, and more specifically, how can they testify? Whose testimony are they? To whom and about what are they testifying? And what is the epistemological status of this testimony—when should it be trusted? Surely if public artifacts can testify, then they can also mislead; it would be strange for them to be a form of testimony that is always trustworthy. Taking seriously their status as testimony means taking seriously as well the ways in which they can communicate false or unentitled claims. I hope that the idea that public artifacts not only communicate but testify is prima facie plausible; it certainly seems like monuments, memorials, and public artworks, for instance, tell us things, and that they can tell the truth or lie to us.