P. Kyle Stanford’s Exceeding our Grasp (2006) shows how the problem of unconceived alternatives presents a significant challenge to realism. Stanford argues that the history of science offers repeated instances of scientists failing to conceptualize rational alternatives to ruling scientific doctrines, implying that our present scientific theories are likely to be similarly underdetermined. This article extends Stanford’s argument and provides it with a longer history. It shows how the principle of unconceived alternatives was explicitly deployed during the medieval and early modern periods to undermine scientific realism in particular cases. These arguments typically made reference to divine omnipotence and the principle that God could have produced phenomena in numerous ways inconceivable to finite human minds. In this theological register, unconceived alternatives offered a way of minimizing potential tensions between theological doctrines and prevailing scientific theories. The article concludes with some brief reflections on the applicability of the principle of unconceived alternatives to conceptions of God.

Timely access to blood products is essential in disaster medicine and pre-hospital emergency care. Natural and man-made disasters often render roads unusable, impeding traditional logistics. In such settings, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) offer a viable alternative due to their mobility and speed. However, UAV-based transport of blood transfusion bags introduces critical concerns such as maintaining optimal storage temperature, minimizing shock impact, and achieving precise delivery to designated sites.1,2

How do digital platforms affect coordination in the restaurant market? In particular, how do they reshape firms’ positions in the quality space and their dependence on both consumers’ valuations and competitors’ choices? Focusing on the case of a widely used platform for restaurant booking and reviewing, we analyze the dine-in services market in the city of Lille, France. In line with economic sociology’s definition of markets as concrete social spaces, we frame these restaurants as a producer market in which multiple quality conventions coexist. We use sequential mixed methods and data (observations and interviews, web-scraping and business data) to show that platforms rationalize firms’ practice of observing one another as a basis for making decisions on volume and quality. The rise of digital platforms provides producers with devices that amplify their view of competitors, standardize their offerings and support the stability of their business choices over time, conditional on spatial constraints and quality choices.

Philosophers of science have overlooked the role of theory in neuroscience, resulting in a somewhat surprising naïveté regarding the nature and function of neuroscientific theories. Here I provide a framework that identifies and begins to characterize what we need to know about neuroscientific theories so as to improve our epistemic standing. I argue that we need an account of the structural, interpretive, and functional aspects of neuroscientific theories, using the neuron doctrine as an illustrative case study. I introduce the novel metaphor of theoretical infrastructure as a guide for making sense of neuroscientific theories and their place within neuroscientific practice.

Christine Korsgaard avers that the value we place on specific personal choices — understood as goals or ends — involves committing to them, or forming a care, which is itself conditioned by the value-conferring ability of the valuer. In other words, personal autonomy implies the objective value of the agent’s autonomous choosing and their coeval cares projects. Commentators like Andrea Sangiovanni, Paul Guyer, and Rae Langton criticize Korsgaard’s commitment-based conception of autonomous choosing. This article reviews these objections and then proposes a modified Korsgaardian framework concerning the objective value of autonomous choosing, which, I propose, avoids these critical objections.

The complex relation between a person and their mental disorder is a recurring theme in (reflections on) psychiatric practice. As there is no uncontested concept of ‘self’, nor of ‘mental disorder’, the ‘self-illness’ relation is riddled with ambiguity. In this feature article, we summarise recent philosophical work on the phenomenon of ‘self-illness ambiguity’, to provide conceptual tools for psychiatric reflections on the self-illness relation. Specifically, we argue that the concept of self-illness ambiguity may contribute to patients’ self-understanding and shed light on how paradigms of care and research should be revised in order to help clinicians support that self-understanding. We also suggest that the concept of self-illness ambiguity may improve the understanding of particular mental disorders, and may offer conceptual tools to address various ethical matters (including stigma and responsibility).

Within a single month in 2024, media in three provinces wrote about government spending by special warrant. This is unusual public attention to an obscure financial instrument. Governor’s special warrants are a practical solution to the problem of government urgently needing to spend money in the public interest when the legislature cannot readily be convened to grant approval. We describe how special warrants are being used less in exigent circumstances and more as a convenience. This practice is evident across jurisdictions and the parties in power and is persistent over decades. This research note shows how legal grey holes and the accelerated pace of decision making can result in changes in the practice of government that go unrecognized in our understanding of law and constitutional convention. Using an original compendium of statutory provisions combined with historical analysis, we raise research questions about public finance and parliamentary constitutionalism in Canada.

In autumn 2023, the Curtis R. Priem Experimental Music and Performing Arts Center (EMPAC) at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute presented Shifting Center, an exhibition that explored sound through geological formations, architecture, and cultural artefacts. Using spatialisation techniques such as higher-order ambisonics and wave field synthesis, the works created immersive and disorienting auditory experiences. Curators Vic Brooks and Nida Ghouse framed ‘shifting centre’ as a metaphor for dislocation, evoking feminist and political theories of marginalised peripheries and centralised power. While the exhibition was conceptually and technically ambitious, we argue that the aurality of EMPAC itself – marked by abstraction, isolation and immersion – ultimately muted its decolonial potential. By tracing a lineage of spatial audio from the 1958 Philips Pavilion, we examine how architectural acoustics shape the possibilities of what can be heard in EMPAC, limiting the aural and more-than-aural reception of works presented there.

There has been significant interest in addressing the underrepresentation of various demographic groups in philosophy. Indeed, many have proposed remedies at the disciplinary level. However, underrepresentation is an issue that varies by subfield in philosophy. Women, for example, are especially underrepresented in subfields considered formal (e.g., logic). As has already been argued in the existing literature, addressing underrepresentation, even within subfields, is not as simple as recruiting more students from underserved populations. Instead, we advocate for a student-centered approach, promoting inclusive pedagogy. In this paper, we share a case study in which we implemented feminist and trauma-informed interventions in two undergraduate formal logic courses and investigated their impact with respect to elements of structural injustice. We found that our interventions successfully eliminated existing gender-based differences in perceptions of self-efficacy and largely diminished students’ perceptions of the objectivity of logic, but were unsuccessful at changing students’ impressions of the broader applicability of logic. By sharing our interventions, we hope to provide educators with practical tools and ideas for implementing similar approaches in their classrooms. By sharing our results, we invite educators to reflect on the potential impact of similar approaches in formal philosophy courses and on tools for measuring that impact.

We show how finiteness properties of a group and a subgroup transfer to finiteness properties of the Schlichting completion relative to this subgroup.n Further, we provide a criterion when the dense embedding of a discrete group into the Schlichting completion relative to one of its subgroups induces an isomorphism in (continuous) cohomology. As an application, we show that the continuous cohomology of the Neretin group vanishes in all positive degrees.

Del Santo and Gisin have recently argued that classical mechanics exhibits indeterminacy and that by treating the observables of classical mechanics with real number precision we introduce hidden variables that restore determinacy. In this article we introduce the conceptual machinery required to critically evaluate these claims. We present a characterization of indeterminacy which can capture both quantum indeterminacy and the classical indeterminacy Del Santo and Gisin propose. This allows us to show that there is an important difference between the two: their classical indeterminacy can be resolved with hidden variables in a manner which is not possible for quantum indeterminacy.

The present study investigated if/how individual differences in heritage language (HL) experience modulate gender agreement processing among Spanish heritage speakers (HSs). We reanalyzed the data from Luque and colleagues (2023), which reported an aggregate biphasic N400–P600. The present analysis revealed that sensitivity to morphological markedness was positively modulated by HL proficiency and exposure/use. Higher proficiency led to increased P600 across markedness conditions—the typical signature of L1-dominant processing—while increased Spanish exposure/use resulted in increased N400 for Default Errors—a signature attested only in HSs in this domain. Formal instruction led to increased N400 but reduced P600 for Feature Clash Errors. We interpret these results to suggest that the N400 reflects a morphophonological pattern-matching strategy with some HSs relying (more) on this mechanism as Spanish exposure and use increases. Markedness also modulated the relative engagement of pattern-matching (N400) versus automatic grammatical processing (P600), depending on the transparency/saliency of morphophonological patterns.

Contrary to longstanding opinion, it was Luther, not Calvin, who first interpreted Christ’s descent into hell as an event of suffering and feeling forsaken by God. Though Lutheran tradition afterward emphasised a victorious interpretation taken from Luther’s famous ‘Torgau sermon’, a more ambivalent legacy exists in his own writings. Sufficient attention is therefore warranted to view Luther as a forerunner to Calvin’s use of the cry of dereliction to interpret the descensus. Understanding this nuance can smooth the edges of a myopic age-old debate between the two traditions, since the two Reformers have more in common than not on the doctrine.