Scott Kimbrough, Jacksonville University An emerging movement called “experimental philosophy” provides a new angle on the venerable debate about moral responsibility and determinism. Philosophers claiming that moral responsibility is incompatible with determinism (“incompatibilists”) generally insist that common sense is on their side, that the concept of moral responsibility employed by ordinary people requires an ability […]

Presidential Address of the 57th Annual Meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association, 2011 Brook J. Sadler, University of South Florida What is plagiarism and why is it wrong, if it is? I won’t be suckered into the carnival game of trying to define plagiarism; many have tried their hand at it only to come away […]

Reconciling with Harm: An Alternative to Forgiveness and Revenge Nancy A. Stanlick, University of Central Florida I. Introduction: Harm that Goes Right to the “Bone”—Beyond Bastard out of Carolina With respect to harm or wrongdoing, the traditional reactive attitudes and actions are forgiveness of, revenge against, and reconciliation with a perpetrator. Most accounts of forgiveness […]

Brandon Hogan, University of Pittsburgh I. Introduction Deontological ethical theories appear to be inconsistent on their own terms because they include agent-centered restrictions. Samuel Scheffler defines an agent-centered restriction as “a restriction which it is at least sometimes impermissible to violate in circumstances where a violation would serve to minimize total overall violations of the […]

James M. Okapal, Missouri Western State University I. Introduction We make choices throughout the day: Which wine goes better with dinner? Do I prefer reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land or watching Cinema Paradiso for my evening entertainment? These choices involve comparison. A comparativist says that if a comparison is possible, then the […]

Community, Equality, and Value Pluralism in G.A. Cohen’s Why Not Socialism? Winner of the Outstanding Graduate Paper Award at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association David O’Brien, Florida Atlantic University Introduction Among G.A. Cohen’s many disagreements with John Rawls’s theory of justice is a macro- level dispute about the structure of political […]

John Riser, Florida Gulf Coast University Introduction While this essay recapitulates various well-known events and works in the development of Andrei Platonov’s views from utopian communism through disillusioned cynicism to what I will characterize as humanistic communalism, my primary objective is to present a positive assessment of Platonov’s resultant philosophy of life as accessible, relevant […]

Winner of the Gerritt and Edith Schipper Undergraduate Award for Outstanding Undergraduate Paper at the 57th Annual Meeting of the Florida Philosophical Association Theodore D. Locke, University of North Florida I. Introduction Consider a world in which every proposition obtains (i.e., under a given consequence relation every proposition holds); call this world “the trivial world.” […]

Randolph Feezell, Creighton University Introduction Pascal’s famous wager for the rationality of belief in God is one of those relatively rare philosophical arguments that has an immediate intuitive appeal to ordinary people. Belief in God just makes sense, the common argument goes. A person has everything to gain and nothing to lose by believing in God. […]

Xiaoqiang Han, University of Toronto The subject-predicate form is the predominant sentential form in English and many other languages, as it seems to represent the two fundamental functions of a language if the language can ever be used to talk about particular things at all: the function of reference and the function of predication. The […]