Philosophy and the Empirical, Volume XXXI

Peter A. French is the Lincoln Chair in Ethics and Professor of Philosophy at Arizona State University.He was the founding Director of the Lincoln Center for Applied Ethics from 2000 to 2013. Before that he was the Cole Chair in Ethics, Director of the Ethics Center, and Chair of the Department of Philosophy of the University of South Florida. He was the Lennox Distinguished Professor and Chair of Philosophy at Trinity University, and served as Exxon Distinguished Research Professor in the Center for the Study of Values at the University of Delaware. During his distinguished 48-year career in academia he has also been a professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, and Northern Arizona University. Dr. French earned a BA from Gettysburg College, an MA from the University of Southern California, a Ph.D. from the University of Miami and did post-doctoral work at Oxford University. He was awarded a Doctor of Humane Letters (L.H.D.) degree for his work in philosophy and ethics from Gettysburg College in 2006.Dr. French has an international reputation in ethical and legal theory and in collective and corporate responsibility and criminal liability. He is the author of twenty books including War and Moral Dissonance; The Virtues of Vengeance; Cowboy Metaphysics; Ethics and College Sports; Corporate Ethics; Responsibility Matters; Collective and Corporate Responsibility; Ethics in Government; The Scope of Morality; Corporations in the Moral Community; The Spectrum of Responsibility; Corrigible Corporations and Unruly Laws; and War and Border Crossings: Ethics When Cultures Clash. He is a founding editor with Howard Wettstein of Midwest Studies in Philosophy, a leading annual book series in analytic philosophy. As a single author, co-author, and editor he has contributed 61 books to the philosophical literature.Dr. French has lectured at locations around the world. Some of his works have been translated into Chinese, Japanese, German, Italian, French, Serbian, and Spanish. Dr. French also was the editor of the Journal of Social Philosophy for 16 years and general editor of the Issues in Contemporary Ethics series. He has published scores of articles in the major philosophical and legal journals and reviews, many of which have been anthologized. In 2002 Dr. French was appointed to the Board of Officers of the American Philosophical Association. In 2008 the APA's Newsletter on Philosophy and Law dedicated an issue to him.

This volume focuses on a current issue of central important in contemporary philosophy, the relationship between philosophy and empirical studies. In recent years an older paradigm - philosophy as conceptual analysis - is giving way to a more varied set of models of philosophical work, and the current volume explores in detail a range of exciting examples. As with other volumes of Midwest Studies, each of the essays is a previously unpublished contribution by a major scholar.

The Use of Empirical Evidence to Assess and Critique Judicial Decisions. From My Lai to Abu Ghraib:The Moral Psychology of Atrocity. Render Unto Philosophy that which is Philosophy's. Philosophical Thought Experiments, Intuitions and Cognitive Equilibrium. Reason Explanation in Folk Psychology. The Folk Probably Don't Think What You Think They Think:Experiments on Causation by Absence. The Epistemology of Thought Experiments: First vs. Third Person ApproachArguments from Reference and the Worry About Dependence. INTENTIONAL ACTION, FOLK JUDGMENTS, AND STORIES:SORTING THINGS OUT. Folk Intuitions, Slippery Slopes, and Necessary Fictions: An Essay on Saul Smilansky's Free Will Illusionism. Free Will, Moral Responsibility, and Mechanism: Experiments on Folk Intuitions. Do We Have A Coherent Set of Intuitions About Moral Responsibility?. The Rise of Compatibilism:. A Case Study in the Quantitative History of Philosophy. Can Moral Obligations Be Empirically Discovered?. Pragmatic Abilities in Autism Spectrum Disorder:A Case Study in Philosophy and the Empirical. How To Challenge Intuitions Empirically Without Risking Skepticism. The Cosmic Ensemble: Some reflections on the nature-mathematics symbiosis