Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

Wilson, Alastair

2024 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

doi: 10.1093/arisoc/aoae007

How, if at all, can scientific progress improve our view of the modal facts? According to rationalist approaches to modal epistemology, science has no substantive role: a priori reflection reveals the structure of modal space, and a posteriori science merely locates us within that modal space, by identifying the actual properties and structures instantiated at our world. According to modal naturalist approaches, science provides evidence about the structure of the underlying modal space. In this paper I distinguish four versions of modal naturalism, with science playing an increasingly robust evidential role, and discuss their plausibility.

Lear, Gabriel Richardson

2024 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

doi: 10.1093/arisoc/aoae009

Aristotle claims that the virtuous person acts for the sake of to kalon. To understand this idea, I examine the analogy he draws between craft and virtue. I argue that the kalon is a formal feature of well-ordered wholeness and that the virtuous person takes intellectual pleasure in perceiving (or remembering or imagining) the kalon-in-action, akin to pleasure in observing artworks or works of nature. However, the virtuous person’s pleasure in kalon action is primarily a pleasure of practical reason. In these ways, Aristotle’s concept of the kalon is and is not like the modern aesthetic concept of the beautiful.

Isserow, Jessica

2024 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

doi: 10.1093/arisoc/aoae006

A looming deadline. A difficult situation at home. A heated phone conversation that redirects our attention. Certain features of our circumstances can be (at least partially) excusing; sometimes, agents who act wrongly in the face of circumstantial pressures are not (that) blameworthy for having done so. But we’re rather bad at detecting these factors that excuse others from blame. When put together, these two observations yield an under-appreciated problem: we fall short of procedural norms of blame in fairly systematic ways.

Hill, Scott

2024 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

doi: 10.1093/arisoc/aoae010

There is a wealth of evidence which indicates that arguments are not very efficient tools for changing minds. Against this scepticism, Dutilh Novaes (2023) presents evidence that, given the right social context, arguments sometimes play a significant role in belief revision. However, drawing on Levy (2021), I argue that the evidence Dutilh Novaes cites is compatible with the view that it is not arguments that change individual minds but instead belief outsourcing that occurs alongside the consideration of arguments.

Dodd, Julian

2024 Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

doi: 10.1093/arisoc/aoae008

Robert Trueman (2022) sets out and defends an ‘immodest’ identity theory of truth: that is, an identity theory in which the facts with which true propositions are identical are things whose totality is the world: i.e. obtaining states of affairs. This brief reply argues that Truman’s theory falls foul of a perennial objection to such immodest identity theories: namely, that it cannot explain how a candidate proposition’s putative elements can be unified into a proposition proper without this proposition being true.