Pro-Fil – An Internet Journal of Philosophy

Keith J. Holyoak – The Human Edge: Analogy and the Roots of Creative Intelligence

2025-04-14T20:49:14+02:00

Book Review

Moralizing Beauty – Some Critical Observations

2025-04-14T21:57:47+02:00

In this paper, I intend to criticize an argument, made by the philosopher Panos Paris, claiming that moral goodness is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of beauty. I will argue that Paris’s idea of functional beauty, on which his argument relies, does not work, as it misrepresents judgements of beauty, in fact reducing them to moral judgements. I will argue that judgements of beauty and moral judgements should be understood as distinct and independent of each other. That is, the morally good is not necessarily beautiful, and the beautiful is not necessarily morally good.

A Critique of Metaethical Constructivism

2025-03-18T20:13:03+01:00

Metaethical constructivism, proposed by Sharon Street, has been described as a novel and promising metaethical theory. It is a form of cognitivist anti-realism that purports to be without substantive normative assumptions, while still allowing for the possibility of an agent being mistaken about what is normatively true for them. Here, I present five objections to the theory’s purported strengths. I argue primarily that metaethical constructivism cannot do without substantive normative assumptions, that it is not a novel position in metaethics but a kind of relativism, and that the possibility of an agent being mistaken about what is normatively true for them is more limited than it might seem. I also argue that constructivism does not allow us to evaluate distant pasts and futures, and that it blurs the line between normative truth and falsity.

The King and Ace Puzzle: A Proposal of Solution from a Term Logic

2025-03-31T16:08:46+02:00

What I call the ‘king and ace puzzle’ here is an inference whose correct conclusion is hard to infer for people. There are reasoning theories offering explanations about this fact, including relevant frameworks such as the mental logic theory and the theory of mental models. In this paper, I claim that a term logic such as Inheritance Logic can also give us its account of that cognitive phenomenon. The key is the assumption of an equivalence: conditionals can be deemed as inheritance copulas.