Are we acquainted with the self in experience? It may seem so. After all, we tend to be confident in our own existence. A natural explanation for this confidence is that the self somehow shows up in experience. Yet philosophers in both the Eastern and Western philosophical traditions have been sceptical of self-acquaintance. Despite centuries of debate, the matter remains controversial. But the persistence of this dispute is puzzling. Why can we not simply settle this question by introspection? Here, many (...) philosophers hold that the self is elusive. Hence, to address this question we need to use a more indirect method. To this end, philosophers have turned to pathologies of self-awareness such as depersonalization and thought insertion to argue for self-acquaintance, a strategy I label the Pathology Argument. In this paper, I criticize the Pathology Argument on the grounds that we can better explain the symptoms of these disorders without appeal to self-acquaintance. (shrink)

Neil Levy’s latest book proposes a general explanation of the fact that many people have ‘bad beliefs’. Levy doesn’t define what he means by ‘bad belief’. In fact, he explicitly refuses to define t...

The Apaṇṇaka Sutta, one of the early recorded teachings of the Buddha, contains an argument for accepting the doctrines of karma and rebirth that Buddhist scholars claim anticipates Pascal’s wager. I call this argument the Buddha’s wager. Does it anticipate Pascal’s wager and is it a good bet? Contemporary scholars identify at least four versions of Pascal’s wager in his Pensées. This article demonstrates that the Buddha’s wager anticipates two versions of Pascal’s wager, but not its canonical form. Like Pascal’s (...) wager, the Buddha’s wager presents a decision problem between two opposing theses in an epistemic context that lacks evidence of their truth or falsity. Like Pascal, the Buddha also tries to solve this problem using dominance, superdominance or ‘superduperdominance’ reasoning. The Apaṇṇaka Sutta likely provides the earliest textual example of such reasoning. While the Buddha’s wager does not exhibit the expected utility reasoning of the best-known form of Pascal’s wager, the article suggests a reformulation that parallels Alan Hájek’s (2018) vector-value reformulation. Is it a good bet? This article argues that it is not if this means we are rationally required to accept its recommendation. This is because, while it avoids two of the major objections levelled against Pascal’s wager, it succumbs to one and has at least two problems of its own. (shrink)

The opening paragraph of Papineau’s The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience, states the book’s Central Question (CQ): ‘What is the metaphysical nature of the conscious properties we enjoy when we hav...

We know our own intentional actions in a distinctively first-personal way. Many accounts of knowledge of intentionally doing something, A, assume that grounds for the knowledge would have to establish or indicate that it is true that one is intentionally doing A. In this paper, I argue against this assumption, showing how it entails being in a Moore-paradoxical situation. I argue that if knowledge of intentionally doing A were such that grounds for it must be truth-indicating, then one could always (...) wonder, when doing A, whether A is for one a goal. However, just as wondering whether p is true is incompatible with thinking that one believes p, so wondering whether A is for one a goal is incompatible with thinking that one is intentionally doing A. We must allow, then, that one’s knowledge of intentionally doing A is itself a representation of A as a goal to be accomplished, apt to be grounded by reasons for doing A. I show that the first-personal character of knowledge of acting intentionally resides in its being practical rather than theoretical. (shrink)

Suppose that, for reasons of animal welfare, it would be better if everyone stopped eating chicken. Does it follow that you should stop eating chicken? Proponents of the “inefficacy objection” argue that, due to the scale and complexity of markets, the expected effects of your chicken purchases are negligible. So the expected effects of eating chicken do not make it wrong. -/- We argue that this objection does not succeed, in two steps. First, empirical data about chicken production tells us (...) that the expected effects of consuming *many* chickens are not negligible. Second, this implies that the expected effect of consuming one chicken is ordinarily not negligible. *Parity* between your purchase and other counterfactual purchases and *uncertainty* about others’ consumption behavior each tend to pull the expected effect of a single purchase toward the average large scale effect. While some purchases do have negligible expected effects, many do not. (shrink)

In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘philosophy moves’: prominent tropes featured in contemporary academic philosophy. Moves are more than patterns—they are tools for advancing and enriching philosophical debates. By recognizing these patterns in the philosophical literature, we collect an ensemble of moves for deployment in novel contexts, each with the potential to forge new paths of philosophical investigation through a given topic. The moves featured in this paper are constructive and progressive, with the potential to push past stalemates (...) and open a wider conceptual landscape. Following a presentation of five exemplars taken from the philosophy of biology literature, I show how different moves could be made within a current interdisciplinary debate. Overall, I aim to demonstrate that recognizing these patterns is insightful pedagogically and potentially useful when used as part of one’s philosophical methodology. (shrink)

A family of familiar linguistic tests purport to help identify when a term is ambiguous. These tests are philosophically important: a familiar philosophical strategy is to claim that some phenomenon is disunified and its accompanying term is ambiguous. The tests have been used to evaluate disunification proposals about causation, pain, and knowledge, among others. -/- These ambiguity tests, however, have come under fire. It has been alleged that the tests fail for polysemy, a common type of ambiguity, and one that (...) is at issue in philosophically interesting cases. Furthermore, the objection that the tests fail for polysemy is often taken to be an undeniable bit of linguistic data. -/- We argue that this is mistaken. The objection implicitly relies on controversial assumptions about how to account for copredicational sentences, in which a single argument is ascribed prima facie incompatible properties. Furthermore, on several viable theories of copredication, the objection fails. However, our discussion also reveals that even if ambiguity tests are preserved, they may be significantly harder to execute than previously thought. (shrink)

This article challenges a reductive analysis of social practices by distinguishing five kinds of reason for following the rules of conventional practices. Depending on one’s preferred intellectual tradition, conventional practices enable coordination, facilitate cooperation, constitute activities, fulfil reciprocity, or specify abstract rights. Instead of being rival theories of social practices, these different models complement one another in a normative analysis of social practices. By distinguishing five kinds of reasons to follow conventional rules, this paper supports a more dynamic conventionalist analysis (...) of subjects like property, the law, professional obligation, civic responsibility, and culture. (shrink)

This collection focuses on relations between probability or Bayesian credence on the one hand and rational belief or knowledge on the other, relations undergirding epistemic lottery paradoxes. A co...

Kelly McCormick’s The Problem of Blame aims to resolve a tension. On the one hand, blame seems to be a valuable social tool. On the other hand, it seems punitive and potentially unnecessary or unju...

According to the so-called golden rule, we ought to treat others as we want to be treated by them. This rule, in one form or another, is part of every major religion, and it has been accepted by many philosophers with various ethical views. However, if the literal golden rule is interpreted as an absolute rule, it is problematic. In this paper, I introduce a new version of this famous principle that is similar to various classical definitions. According to this (...) variant, the rule can be formulated in the following way: If you want it to be the case that if x were in your situation and you were in x’s situation then x would do H to you, and you have a good will, then you ought to do H to x. I show how this version can be derived from a small set of highly plausible premises, and I defend it against some of the most interesting and/or common objections against the golden rule in the literature. I conclude that we have good reason to believe in this rendition of the principle. (shrink)

Bruno Whittle (2019) has recently extended Kripke’s semantical theory of truth to languages containing generalized quantifiers. There are reasons for axiomatizing semantical theories, and for regarding Halbach and Horsten’s PKF as a good axiomatization of Kripke’s. PKF is a theory in Partial Logic. The present paper complements Whittle’s by showing how Partial Logic, and then PKF, may be extended to cover binary quantifiers meaning ‘every’, ‘some’, and ‘most’.

This paper defends the avowal view of self-deception, according to which the self-deceived agent has been led by the evidence to believe that ¬p and yet is sincere in asserting that p. I argue that the agent qualifies as sincere in asserting the contrary of what they in the most basic sense believe in virtue of asserting what they are committed to believing. It is only by recognizing such commitments and distinguishing them from the more basic beliefs whose rational regulation (...) is automatic that the tension between the self-deceived agent’s actions and assertions can be explained in a core subset of cases of self-deception. (shrink)

When one communicates that they are in pain, it is often assumed that the speaker is providing an assertion or report. Call this the cognitivist stance of pain utterances. Nevertheless, many sentential pain utterances seem to have both assertive and imperatival communicative content in virtue of expressing both the speaker's pain belief and the pain experience, respectively. I call this view hybrid expressivism about pain. In this paper, I take the imperativist idea of pain seriously and show that, via an (...) expression relation, pain utterances inherit the imperative and motivational force of the pain. A hybrid expressivist stance better explains why pain utterances often have the perlocutionary effect of eliciting care from others, and it can provide a new understanding of what it means to silence one's pain. (shrink)

Call ‘radical moral theorizing’ the project of developing a moral theory that not only tries to conform to our existing moral judgments, but also manifests various theoretical virtues: consistency, simplicity, explanatory depth, and so on. Many moral philosophers assume that radical moral theorizing does not require any particular metaethical commitments. In this paper, I argue against this assumption. The most natural justification for radical moral theorizing presupposes moral realism, broadly construed; in contrast, there may be no justification for radical moral (...) theorizing if moral anti-realism is true. (shrink)

Ravasio (2023) recently presents an interesting discussion of strategies to deal with lookism. He categorizes strategies into revisionary and redistributive ones and argues for a case against the former. This note is a critical response to both the taxonomy and the evaluation. I argue that the taxonomy needs to be improved and that the case against revisionary strategies cannot be maintained.

In recent philosophical work on attention, several authors have employed versions of an argument purporting to show that attention is not identical to any cognitive process. Others have criticised this argument. The present article addresses those various criticisms, and shows the original argument to be a valid one. It also shows that this argument cannot be resisted by taking attention to be a disjunction of several processes, by taking it be a genus of process that is composed of various species, (...) nor by taking it to be a process-determinable, for which particular cognitive processes are determinates. The metaphysical position that most readily accommodates this argument’s conclusion is a version of adverbialism. It should be understood as making a claim about the essence of attention. Some of the confusions in this area are shown to originate in the difficulty of glossing such a claim in modal terms. (shrink)

I defend a new conception of the particular-universal distinction based on considerations about what David Lewis calls ‘amphibians’. I argue, first, that given the possibility of amphibians, two recently popular conceptions of the particular-universal distinction, namely the repeatability conception and the duplicability conception, are both objectionable since they are biased in one way or another. I then propose a more flexible conception that solves this problem by regarding amphibians as belonging to a sui generis sort of property distinct from what (...) I call ‘strong universals’ and ‘strong tropes’. Finally, I respond to some objections directed at this new account. (shrink)

Dialethism is the view that there are sentences that are both true and false. Paraconsistent logics are those denying the principle of explosion (that is, they do not licence arbitrary conclusions...

Determinism is usually presented as the empirical and contingent thesis that every event has a causally necessitating condition. However, Stephen Maitzen holds it as an a priori and necessary truth...

This paper examines three approaches to the relationship between our moral reasons to bear costs for others’ sake before and beyond the call of duty. Symmetry holds that you are required to optimise your beneficial sacrifices even when they are genuinely supererogatory. If you are required to bear a cost C for the sake of a benefit B, when they are the only costs and benefits at stake, you are also conditionally required to bear an additional cost C, for the (...) sake of an additional benefit B, when enough other costs and benefits are at stake that both of your alternatives are presumptively supererogatory. Disconnection rejects the requirement to optimise when your options are presumptively supererogatory and maintains that you have an entirely free hand to choose as you will among them. Asymmetry holds that when acting beyond the call of duty you are entitled to a measure of additional freedom compared to when you are not taking on supererogatory costs—you can prioritise your own well-being and reasons to a greater degree—but places constraints on the options that you may permissibly choose. We defend a version of Asymmetry and explore its implications for recent debates on charitable giving. (shrink)

Dialetheists believe some sentences are both true and false. Objectors have argued that this makes it unclear how people can disagree with each other because, given the dialetheist’s commitments, if I make a claim and you tell me my claim is false, we might both be correct. Graham Priest (2006a) thinks that people disagree by rejecting or denying what is said rather than ascribing falsehood to it. We build on the work of Julien Murzi and Massimiliano Carrara (2015) and show (...) that Priest’s approach cannot succeed: given the same dialetheist’s commitments you may be correct to reject a claim that I correctly believe. We argue further that any attempt to solve the problem by identifying a new attitude of disagreement will also fail. The culprit, we claim, is the attempt to find a pair of attitudes that satisfy ‘exclusivity’—that is, attitudes such that both cannot be simultaneously correct. Instead of identifying disagreement by the kinds of attitudes involved, we propose dialetheists focus on the normative landscape and identify it in part by whether parties have reasons to change their attitudes. We offer our own normative theory of disagreement to help dialetheists with this challenge. (shrink)

The liar paradox is still an open philosophical problem. Most contemporary answers to the paradox target the logical principles underlying the reasoning from the liar sentence to the paradoxical conclusion that the liar sentence is both true and false. In contrast to these answers, Buddhist epistemology offers resources to devise a distinctively epistemological approach to the liar paradox. In this paper, I mobilise these resources and argue that the liar sentence is what Buddhist epistemologists call a contradiction with one’s own (...) words. I situate my argument in the works of Dignāga and Dharmakīrti and show how Buddhist epistemology answers the paradox. (shrink)

We have argued that the counterfactual comparative account of harm and benefit (CCA) violates the plausible adequacy condition that an act that would harm an agent cannot leave her much better off than an alternative act that would benefit her. In a recent paper in this journal, however, Neil Feit objects that our argument presupposes questionable counterfactual backtracking. He also argues that CCA proponents can justifiably reject the condition by invoking so-called plural harm and benefit. In this reply, we argue (...) that Feit’s lines of criticism are both unsuccessful. (shrink)

There is a strong intuition that we can listen to works of music, yet musical ontologies on which works of music are abstract objects, perhaps most notably, type theories of music, seem to imply that this is impossible. This problem has received relatively little attention in the literature. I here explore and develop a solution suggested by Julian Dodd and argue that it has at least two problematic consequences, namely (i) that some works of music cannot be listened to unless (...) one has already studied the relevant score or through a similar process learned roughly what the work requires of its performances and (ii) that it is possible for two people to listen to different musical works while listening to the same performance. (shrink)

In Digital Souls, Patrick Stokes brings together a thoughtful account of personal identity and death with a range of examples from literature and real life, to help us think about the dead online....

It seems to be impossible to draw metaphysical conclusions about the world merely from our concepts or our language alone. After all, our concepts alone only concern how we aim to represent the world, not how the world in fact is. In this paper I argue that this is mistaken. We can sometimes draw substantial metaphysical conclusions simply from thinking about how we represent the world. But by themselves such conclusions can be flawed if the concepts from which they are (...) drawn are themselves flawed. I propose that we can overcome these limitations by focusing on a special class of concepts: inescapable concepts. Combining arguments about what the world is like from considerations about our concepts alone, together with an argument that the relevant concepts are inescapable, leads to a novel method for metaphysics, which is broadly neo-Kantian. (shrink)

Attribution theorists assume that character information informs judgments of blame. But there is disagreement over why. One camp holds that character information is a fundamental determinant of blame. Another camp holds that character information merely provides evidence about the mental states and processes that determine responsibility. We argue for a two-channel view, where character simultaneously has fundamental and evidential effects on blame. In two large factorial studies (n = 495), participants rate whether someone is blameworthy when he makes a mistake (...) (burns a cake or misses a bus stop). Although mental state inferences predict blame judgments, character information does not. Using mediation analyses, we find that character information influences responsibility via two channels (Studies 3–4; n = 447), which are sensitive to different kinds of information (Study 5; n = 149). On the one hand, forgetfulness increases judgments of responsibility, because mental lapses manifest an objectionable character flaw. On the other hand, forgetfulness decreases judgments of state control, which in turn decreases responsibility judgments. These two channels cancel out, which is why we find no aggregate effect of forgetfulness on responsibility. Our results challenge several fundamental assumptions about the role of character information in moral judgment, including that good character typically mitigates blame. (shrink)

Robert Nola was born in Auckland, his father a Croatian fisherman who emigrated to New Zealand. Robert was the first in his New Zealand family to go to University, and after completing an undergrad...

Many have argued that certain statues or monuments are objectionable, and thus ought to be removed. Even if their arguments are compelling, a major obstacle is the apparent historical value of those commemorations. Preservation in some form seems to be the best way to respect the value of commemorations as connections to the past or opportunities to learn important historical lessons. Against this, I argue that we have exaggerated the historical value of objectionable commemorations. Sometimes commemorations connect to biased or (...) distorted versions of history, if not mere myths. We can also learn historical lessons through what I call repudiatory honouring: the honouring of certain victims or resistors that can only make sense if the oppressor(s) or target(s) of resistance are deemed unjust, where no part of the original objectionable commemorations is preserved. This type of commemorative practice can even help to overcome some of the obstacles objectionable commemorations pose against properly connecting to the past. (shrink)

In her creative new book, Mercedes Valmisa proposes that, in Chinese philosophy, efficacious agency should be understood as involving ‘adapting’ (yin因). She introduces a distinctive relational noti...

1 Some philosophers defend the thesis that women are adult human females. Call this the adult human female thesis (AHF). There are two versions of this thesis—one modal and one definitional. Accord...

Jimenez’s lucid, focused book is indispensable for those interested in social and emotional aspects of moral maturation. Arguing primarily that shame is central to Aristotle’s account of moral deve...

Many philosophical views have the surprising implication that, within the boundaries of each human being, there is not just one mind, but many: anywhere from two (the person and their brain, or the person and their body) to trillions (each of the nearly-entirely-overlapping precise entities generated by the Problem of the Many). This is often treated as absurd, a problem of ‘Too Many Minds’, which we must find ways to avoid. It is often thought specifically absurd to allow such a (...) multiplication of conscious subjects, even if we could accept it for physical objects. I consider metaphysical, phenomenological, and moral arguments for this asymmetry, and show that they all fail: many overlapping conscious minds is no more problematic than many overlapping physical objects. Theories that imply such a multiplicity may or may not be true, but they cannot be rejected simply for implying it. (shrink)

Many of our attitudes are non-culpable: there was nothing that we should have done to avoid holding them. I argue that we can still be blameworthy for non-culpable attitudes: they can impair our relationships in ways that make our full practice of apology and forgiveness intelligible. My argument poses a new challenge to indirect voluntarists, who attempt to reduce all responsibility for attitudes to responsibility for prior actions and omissions. Rationalists, who instead explain attitudinal responsibility by appeal to reasons-responsiveness, can (...) make sense of blameworthiness for non-culpable attitudes. In response, voluntarists could propose a revision of our actual practices. This would lead us into a quite different debate. (shrink)

Kant is said to be the first to distinguish between consciousness of oneself as the subject of one’s experiences and consciousness of oneself as an object, which he calls transcendental and empirical apperception, respectively. Of these, it is empirical apperception that is meant to enable consciousness of any empirical features of oneself; what this amounts to, however, continues to puzzle interpreters. I argue that a key to understanding what empirical apperception consists in is Kant’s claim that each type of apperception (...) corresponds to a distinct type of unity of apperception—that is, a distinct way in which representations can be related for a subject. Whereas transcendental unity of apperception requires that representations be actively combined by the understanding, empirical unity of apperception obtains when representations are passively combined by the reproductive imagination. In light of this, I develop a novel account of Kant’s two types of apperception, according to which they correspond to a cognitive subject’s consciousness of two essential aspects of herself—namely, her spontaneity and receptivity. (shrink)

Losing an arm to rescue a child from a burning building is supererogatory. But is losing an arm to save two children more supererogatory than losing two arms to save a single child? What factors make one act more supererogatory than another? I provide an innovative account of how to compare which of two acts is more supererogatory, and show the superiority of this account to its chief rival.

What are the conditions under which an agent has an aesthetic reason to stop appreciating something? In this paper, I argue that such a reason is dependent not only on the aesthetic properties of the object of appreciation but also on the hedonic state of the agent. Virtuous aesthetic agents who are responsive to aesthetic reasons need to be sensitive to hedonic changes in relation to the object and to recognise when these changes make it appropriate to sever one’s appreciative (...) focus. The resulting view has implications for how to understand aesthetic fittingness, aesthetic obligation, and the difference between aesthetic and moral reasons. (shrink)

I propose an account of possible worlds. According to the account, possible worlds are pluralities of sentences in an extremely large language. This account avoids a problem, relating to the total number of possible worlds, that other accounts face. And it has several additional benefits.

Janna Lea Thompson, one of Australia’s most distinguished philosophers, died on 24 June 2022, only a few months after being diagnosed with multiple brain tumours. She was, fortunately, largely free...

There was a brief interval, around the turn of the century, when philosophers of mind had converged around a bio-psycho-functionalist account of our ‘propositional attitudes’. Our beliefs and desir...

This paper embraces the view that we have substantial knowledge of the future and investigates how such knowledge fundamentally differs from knowledge of the past and present. I argue for a new source of context-sensitivity with respect to knowledge attributions arising from presuppositions about reliable belief-forming processes. This context sensitivity has important consequences for knowledge of the future, as well as the appropriateness of assertions about the future. I argue that not only is knowledge of future events typically brought about (...) by fundamentally different processes from those that bring about knowledge of past events, that this is the case is often presupposed in attributing knowledge. I argue that this new source of context sensitivity naturally extends to explaining the recent puzzle of `easy foreknowledge'. (shrink)

Serious actualism is the view that it is metaphysically impossible for an entity to have a property, or stand in a relation, and not exist. Fine (1985) and Pollock (1985) influentially argue that this view is false. In short, there are properties like the property of nonexistence, and it is metaphysically possible that some entity both exemplifies such a property and does not exist. I argue that such arguments are indeed successful against the standard formulation of serious actualism. However, I (...) also argue that we should distinguish a weaker formulation of serious actualism using the actualist distinction between truth in, and truth at, a possible world. This weaker formulation is then shown to be consistent with the existence and possible exemplification of properties like the property of nonexistence. I end with a novel argument for the truth of the weaker formulation. (shrink)

Theorists who advocate worldly (metaphysical or ontological) indeterminacy—the idea that the world itself is indeterminate in one or more respects—should address how we understand the signifying nature and function of language in light of worldly indeterminacy. I first attend to Sengzhao and Jizang, two leading thinkers in Chinese Sanlun Buddhism, to reconstruct a Chinese Madhyamaka notion of ontic indeterminacy. Then, I draw on the thinkers’ views to propose a provisional (non-definitive) understanding of the nature and use of language. Under this (...) understanding, an expression signifying a thing is provisional in that the expression connotes no determinate feature of the thing. (shrink)

In several passages, Frege suggests that successful communication requires that speaker and audience understand the uttered words and sentences to have the same sense. On the other hand, Frege concedes that, in many ordinary cases, variation in sense is tolerable. In a recent article in this journal, Michaelson and Textor (2023) offer a new interpretation of Frege on the tolerability of sense variation according to which variation in sense is tolerable when the conversation aims at joint action, but not when (...) the conversation aims at joint thought. We maintain, contra Michaelson and Textor, that whether sense variation is tolerable does not depend on the conversational purpose, whether it be theoretical or practical. Rather, whether sense variation is tolerable depends instead on the conversational background. This picture offers what we take to be a more plausible reconstruction of Frege’s own view. (shrink)

The standard objection to dualist theories of mind is that they seemingly cannot account for the obvious fact that mental phenomena cause our behaviour. On the plausible assumption that all our behaviour is physically necessitated by entirely physical phenomena, there appears to be no room for dualist mental causation. Some argue that dualists can address this problem by making minimal adjustments in their ontology. I argue that no such adjustments are required. Given recent developments in philosophy of causation, it is (...) plausible that mental phenomena cause behaviour in standard dualist ontologies. (shrink)