Race as a Symptom of Injustice (Henry Weiss)

It is often assumed that racial distinction – the existence of racially distinct populations within the same society – will persist after the elimination of racial injustice. This paper disputes that assumption. I adopt a framework under which racial distinction may persist due to three broad causes: racial segregation, pressure from social institutions to practice racial endogamy, and personal preferences for racial endogamy. I examine the conditions under which each of these causes is likely to obtain and argue that each is characterized by injustice. I conclude that racial distinction is a symptom of injustice, and is unlikely to persist after the achievement of racial justice.

Is Art Essentially Art? (Grace Atkins)

Michelangelo’s David is art. Taking the puzzle of material constitution seriously, we might ask: is the lump of clay coincident with David art? Moreover, if there are a great number of coincident objects that vary with respect to their modal fragility, are those objects also art? If so, is their aesthetic status essential to them, or merely accidental? This paper embraces what Bennett calls the ‘wild bazillion things’ of material plenitude, and investigates how an abundant metaphysics bears on debates in aesthetics. At the heart of the project lies two questions: one non-modal, and one modal; how many of the objects coincident with art are also art? and how many of those are art essentially? To address these questions, I ask if the art-making properties of an object are neutral and modally volatile. In the ideology of plenitude, a neutral property is such that if some object has it, everything coincident with that object also has it. The non-modal question turns on whether an art-making property is neutral or not. The novel notion of a modally volatile property is such that if some object has it essentially, then it is coincident with an object that has it accidentally. The modal question turns on whether an art-making property is modally volatile or not. To show the methodology in action, I apply it to a toy model of what counts as art featuring two individually necessary and jointly sufficient conditions; one causal, and the other intentional. Given that these conditions have a causal and intentional dimension, the project indirectly addresses a number of general questions we might have regarding how to think about the peculiar objects in plenitude. Do they have causal power? Can we value them; aesthetically or otherwise? Are they the kind of things we can see, intend, and create? 

Mental Causation and the Metaphysical Commitments of Scientific Naturalism (Evan Jones)

In this paper, I reconstruct and assess the causal closure argument for physicalism, and the dilemma it raises for mental causation. After reconstructing the argument, I identify and criticize two implicit assumptions about causation undergirding it. Both reductive type physicalists and non-reductive token physicalists accept these two assumptions. Such views are forms of what I will call scientific naturalism, importing commitments about causation from a metaphysical picture of what science must be like. Once we recognize and reject these commitments, the field is open for an anti-reductionist "naive naturalist" view of the mind and its causal power.