Actualist

30-04-2021
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Actualist

A person who believes that the geological past can be explained in terms of processes observable in the present; a proponent of actualism. A person who advocates the theory that only what is actual exists; a proponent of actualism. An actuary is a business professional who analyzes the financial consequences of risk. Actuaries use mathematics, statistics, and financial theory to study uncertain future events, especially those of concern to insurance and pension programs.

Jack Spencer has a cool new paper, 'The Procreative Asymmetry and the Impossibility of Elusive Permission' (forthcoming in Phil Studies). I found reading it to be really helpful for clarifying my thoughts on the procreative asymmetry.Back in 'Rethinking the Asymmetry' (CJP, 2017), I argued for two main claims: (i) we have reason to bring good lives into existence, whereas 'strong asymmetry' intuitions to the contrary can be explained away; and (ii) the intuition that we should prioritize existing lives is better accommodated by a form of modest partiality towards the (antecedently) actual than by Roberts' Variabilism (or any other strong-asymmetry-implying view). To avoid incorrectly permitting miserable lives to be brought into existence, I argued, actualist partiality should be supplemented with a principle proscribing the predictably regrettable.To illustrate (borrowing the evocative names from Jack's examples), suppose that Joy will be happy if created, and Misery will be miserable if created. We can coherently discount Joy's interest in coming to exist, without this consequently generating new grounds for regret (though if we happen to bring her into existence, we may subsequently be extra-happy about this). By contrast, if we create Misery due to discounting her interest in non-existence, her new status as actual undermines the very basis for our prior discounting. Our decision, in this case, is predictably regrettable, in a way that casts doubt on the coherence of the moral reasoning that led to it. So we should instead regard interests (like Misery's) in avoiding bad existence to be not coherently discountable. This places an important constraint on any kind of actualist partiality, or so I argued.In his new paper, Jack nicely expands upon this sort of view. According to his Stability principle, 'If p makes it the case that an agent is permitted to choose a, then p would . . .

News source: Philosophy, et cetera

Definitions

from The Century Dictionary.

  • noun One who is interested in or deals with actualities; a realist: opposed to idealist.

from the GNU version of the Collaborative International Dictionary of English.

  • noun One who deals with or considers actually existing facts and conditions, rather than fancies or theories; a realist; -- opposed to idealist.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun A proponent of actualism.

Etymologies

Actualistic Research

Examples

  • Plantinga's version of actualist representationism faces its own version of the Quinean challenge, namely, the problem of specifying the individual essences which are supposed to replace non-actual possible objects.

  • This line of thought affords actualist representationists a powerful means to accommodate many apparently recalcitrant modal truths about non-actual possible objects, provided that these non-actual possible objects can be individuated uniquely by means of actually existing potential parts or origin.

  • In actualist representationism, existence is conceptually prior to actual existence.

  • The trouble for actualist representationism is that there is no obvious way to make sense of the pronoun ˜it™ in (b).

  • Let us examine how actualist representationists handle apparent modal truths asserting the possibility of non-actual objects.

  • If those actualist representationists are right and consistency is indeed a modal notion, then actualist representationism is not a reductionist theory of modality.

  • If we understand Zalta's theory this way, we have the following actualist picture: All objects are actual and existing, some objects are necessarily non-spatial, and other objects are possibly spatial and possibly non-spatial.

  • This involves a nested possibility, which is troublesome to actualist representationism

  • The talk of abstract objects may be vaguely reminiscent of actualist representationism, which employs representations, which are actual abstract objects.

  • Most of those who advertise their positions as actualist hold not only (5) with the most comprehensive domain of discourse in mind but also (1), and therefore (2) - (4) as well.

Related Words

Actualist Definition

Comments

Actualism Means

Actualist

Actualistic Studies

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