This essay first introduces the moral sense theories of Francis Hutcheson, David Hume, and Adam Smith, and clarifies important differences between them. It then examines whether moral judgment based on the moral sense or moral sentiments varies according to one’s metaphysical beliefs. For this, the essay mainly applies those theories to such issues as stem cell research, abortion, and active eu...

Pluralism, according to Michael P. Lynch, is the thesis that there are or can be more than one true story of the world; there can be incompatible but equally acceptable accounts of some subject matter.’ The opposite view, absolutism, states that there can be only one true story about how the world is. In our ordinary lives both theses have intuitive pull. Most of us are ready to say that there ...

ion / abstract / to abstract 9,11, 14-16, 40-42, 66, 71, 84, 87,90, 94, 97, 100, 101, 119, 190,191, 194-196, 205, 206, 211, 242, 247, 249, 255, 257, 263, 279,297-299, 306 – mathematical abstraction 41 – ontological abstraction 41-43

In this paper I identify some unexplored implications of content externalism. The implications can be traced to the role that metaphysical realism plays in some of the standard arguments for content externalism. I do not regard these implications as undermining the case for externalism. I identify them, rather, as part of an attempt at honest accounting: the revisionary nature of content extern...

In some criminal cases a forensic psychiatrist is asked to make an assessment of the state of mind of the defendant at the time of the legally relevant act. A considerable number of people seem to hold that the basis for this assessment is that free will is required for legal responsibility, and that mental disorders can compromise free will. In fact, because of the alleged relationship between...

The purpose of this paper is to examine the status of logic from a metaphysical point of view – what is logic grounded in and what is its relationship with metaphysics. There are three general lines that we can take. 1) Logic and metaphysics are not continuous, neither discipline has no bearing on the other one. This seems to be a rather popular approach, at least implicitly, as philosophers of...

This paper describes an intelligent exploratory learning environment based on an architecture that allows students to analyze examples by exploring the reasoning of an expert system that embodies the domain topic knowledge. The domain is that of entity relation diagramming (ERD), a database modeling technique. The system presents the student with a series of English descriptions of database sit...

Critics of contemporary metaphysics argue that it attempts to do the hard work of science from the ease of the armchair. Physics, not metaphysics, tells us about the fundamental facts of the world, and empirical psychology is best placed to reveal the content of our concepts about the world. Exploring and understanding the world through metaphysical reflection is obsolete. In this paper, I will...