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  1.  65
    The Limits of Spinoza's Perfectionism.Leonardo Moauro - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11 (35):947-976.
    Spinoza is often described as an ethical perfectionist—one who accepts an account of the good centered on the development of our natural capacities. Perfectionists typically accept a perfectionist theory of value, in which the properties of good and evil are grounded in a normative property of perfection. Yet I argue that Spinoza rejects a perfectionist theory of value because he believes it conflicts with the doctrine of necessitarianism. This leads him to conclude that attributions of perfection in ethical contexts must (...)
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  2. A Defense of Aristotelian Justice.Dhananjay Jagannathan - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11 (33).
    Aristotle’s account of the virtue of justice has been regarded as one of the least successful aspects of his ethics. Among the most serious criticisms lodged against his views are (i) that he fails to identify the proper subject matter of justice (LeBar 2020), (ii) that he wrongly identifies the characteristic motives relevant for justice and injustice (Williams 1980), and (iii) that his account is parochial, i.e., that it fails to correctly recognize or characterize our obligations of justice to those (...)
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  3. On the Epistemic Value of Reflection.Pranav Ambardekar - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11 (30):803-832.
    Against philosophical orthodoxy, Hilary Kornblith has mounted an empirically grounded critique of the epistemic value of reflection. In this paper, I argue that this recent critique of the epistemic value of reflection fails even if we concede that (a) the empirical facts are as Kornblith says they are and (b) reliability is the only determinant of epistemic value. The critique fails because it seeks to undermine the reliability of reflection in general but targets only one of its variants, namely individual (...)
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  4. Measuring Ontological Simplicity.Noël B. Saenz - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11 (25):652-688.
    Standard approaches to ontological simplicity focus either on the number of things or types a theory posits or on the number of fundamental things or types a theory posits. In this paper, I suggest a ground-theoretic approach that focuses on the number of something else. After getting clear on what this approach amounts to, I motivate it, defend it, and complete it.
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  5. Healthy and Happy Natural Being: Spinoza and Epicurus Contra the Stoics.Brandon Smith - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11 (16):412-441.
    In this paper I aim to undermine Stoic and Neo-Stoic readings of Benedict de Spinoza by examining the latter’s strong agreements with Epicurus (a notable opponent of the Stoics) on the nature and ethical role of pleasure in living a happy life. Ultimately, I show that Spinoza and Epicurus are committed to three central claims which the Stoics reject: (1) pleasure holds a necessary connection to healthy natural being, (2) pleasure manifests healthy being through positive changes in state and states (...)
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  6. Moral Principles: A Challenge for Deniers of Moral Luck.Anna Nyman - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11 (7).
    On a common characterization, moral luck occurs when factors beyond agents’ control affect their moral responsibility. The existence of moral luck is widely contested, however. In this paper, I present a new challenge for deniers of moral luck. It seems that some factors beyond agents’ control—such as moral principles about blame- and praiseworthiness—clearly affect moral responsibility. Thus, moral luck deniers face a dialectical burden that has so far gone unnoticed. They must either point to a relevant difference between factors like (...)
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  7. Emotional Injustice.Pismenny Arina, Eickers Gen & Jesse Prinz - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11 (6):150-176.
    In this article we develop a taxonomy of emotional injustice: what occurs when the treatment of emotions is unjust, or emotions are used to treat people unjustly. After providing an overview of previous work on this topic and drawing inspiration from the more developed area of epistemic injustice, we propose working definitions of ‘emotion’, ‘injustice’, and ‘emotional injustice’. We describe seven classes of emotional injustice: Emotion Misinterpretation, Discounting, Extraction, Policing, Exploitation, Inequality, and Weaponizing. We say why it is useful to (...)
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  8. Subjectivity in Film: Mine, Yours, and No One’s.Sara Aronowitz & Grace Helton - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    A classic and fraught question in the philosophy of film is this: when you watch a film, do you experience yourself in the world of the film, observing the scenes? In this paper, we argue that this subject of film experience is sometimes a mere impersonal viewpoint, sometimes a first-personal but unindexed subject, and sometimes a particular, indexed subject such as the viewer herself or a character in the film. We first argue for subject pluralism: there is no single answer (...)
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  9.  26
    Transient Particulars.Julian Bacharach - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    We spend much of our adult lives thinking and reminiscing about particular events of the past, which, by their very nature, can never be repeated. What is involved in a capacity to think thoughts of this kind? In this paper, I propose that such thoughts are essentially connected with a capacity to communicate about past events, and specifically in the special way in which events of the past are valued and shared in our relationships with one another. I motivate this (...)
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  10.  39
    The Specter of Revealed Preference Theory.Lukas Beck - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    My aim in this paper is to argue that the recent philosophical defenses of revealed preference theory do not withstand scrutiny. Towards this aim, I will first outline revealed preference theory. I will then briefly present the two most common arguments that the received view offers against it. Afterwards, I will outline three argumentative strategies for rehabilitating revealed preference theory, and successively rebut each of them.
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  11.  23
    Ought-Implies-Can in Context.Darren Bradley - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    If you ought to do something, does it follow that you are able to do it? The Kantian thesis that ought-implies-can seems intuitive and is widely accepted. Nevertheless, there are several powerful purported counterexamples. In this paper I will apply an independently motivated contextualism about ‘ought’ to make sense of the intuitions on both sides of the argument. Contextualism explains why ought-implies-can seems compelling despite being false in many contexts. The result will be that philosophers cannot in general appeal to (...)
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  12. Aesthetic Judgments, Evaluative Content, and (Hybrid) Expressivism.Jochen Briesen - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    Aesthetic statements of the form ‘X is beautiful’ are evaluative; they indicate the speaker’s positive affective attitude regarding X. Why is this so? Is the evaluative content part of the truth conditions, or is it a pragmatic phenomenon (i.e. presupposition, implicature)? First, I argue that semantic approaches as well as these pragmatic ones cannot satisfactorily explain the evaluativity of aesthetic statements. Second, I offer a positive proposal based on a speech-act theoretical version of hybrid expressivism, which states that, with the (...)
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  13. The W-Defense Defended.Justin A. Capes - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    The W-defense is among the most prominent arguments for the principle of alternative possibilities (PAP). Here I offer some considerations in support of the W-defense and respond to what I see as the most forceful objections to it to date. My response to these objections invokes the well-known flicker of freedom response to Frankfurt cases. I argue that the W-defense and the flicker response are mutually reinforcing and together yield a compelling defense of PAP.
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  14.  10
    There is No Anima Mundi: Leibniz on the Impossibility of a Soul of the World.Filippo Costantini - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    The main source of perplexity raised by Leibniz’s (mathematical) argument against the soul of the world stems from the idea that it is the infinity of the universe that precludes it from having a soul. But if this is so, how is it possible that organic bodies, which, having infinitely many parts, are also infinite, are endowed with a soul? The present paper aims to provide a new solution to this puzzle. The solution explains the difference between the body and (...)
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  15.  42
    What's Wrong with Bullshit.Florian Cova - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    Past philosophical analyses of bullshit have generally presented bullshit as a formidable threat to truth. However, most of these analyses also reduce bullshit to a mere symptom of a greater evil (e.g. indifference towards truth). In this paper, I introduce a new account of bullshit which, I argue, is more suited to understand the threat posed by bullshit. I begin by introducing a few examples of “truth-tracking bullshit”, before arguing that these examples cannot be accommodated by past, process-based accounts of (...)
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  16. Hume’s Justice and the Problem of the Missing Motive.Ian Cruise - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    The task that Hume explicitly sets himself in 3.2 of the Treatise is to identify the motive that renders just actions virtuous and constitutes justice as a virtue. But surprisingly, he never provides a clear account of what this motive is. This is the problem of the missing motive. The goal of this paper is to explain this problem and offer a novel solution. To set up my solution, I analyze a recent proposal from Geoffrey Sayre-McCord and illustrate what it (...)
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  17.  26
    Musical Notation.Michael Dickson - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    The main goal of this essay is to propose and make plausible a framework for developing a philosophical account of musical notation. The proposed framework countenances four elements of notation: symbols (abstract objects that collectively constitute the backbone of a ‘system’ of notation), their characteristic ‘forms’ (for example, shapes, understood abstractly), the concrete instances, or ‘engravings’, of those forms, and the meanings of the symbols. It is argued that these elements are distinct. Along the way, several preliminary arguments are given (...)
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  18.  46
    What Kind of Non-Realism is Fictionalism?Nathaniel Gan - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    Fictionalists about a kind of disputed entity aim to give a face-value interpretation of our discourse about those entities without affirming their existence. The fictionalist’s commitment to non-realism leaves open three options regarding their ontological position: they may deny the existence of the disputed entities (anti-realism), remain agnostic regarding their existence (agnosticism), or deny that there are ontological facts of the matter (ontological anti-realism). This paper outlines a method of adjudicating between these options and argues that fictionalists may be expected (...)
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  19.  39
    The Logic of Contingent Actuality.Martin Glazier & Stephan Krämer - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    Current orthodoxy in modal logic and metaphysics has it that actuality is non-contingent in the following sense: for all p, if actually, p, then necessarily, actually, p. Call this thesis (Actuality) Necessitism and its negation (Actuality) Contingentism. Thus, according to Contingentism, there is at least one proposition p which is actually true but which could have been actually false. In another paper, one of us (Glazier 2023) has recently defended Contingentism. The present paper explores the logic of actuality under Contingentism. (...)
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  20. Autonomy as Practical Understanding.Reza Hadisi - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    In this paper, I offer a theory of autonomous agency that relies on the re-sources of a strongly cognitivist theory of intention and intentional action. On the proposed account, intentional action is a graded notion that is ex-plained via the agent’s degree of practical knowledge. In turn, autonomous agency is also a graded notion that is explained via the agent’s degree of practical understanding. The resulting theory can synthesize insights from both the hierarchical and the cognitivist theories of autonomy with (...)
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  21.  63
    The Future of Double Consciousness: Epistemic Virtue, Identity, and Structural Anti-Blackness.Orlando Hawkins & Emmalon Davis - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    This paper considers two conceptual expansions of Du Boisian double consciousness—white double consciousness (Alcoff 2015) and kaleidoscopic consciousness (Medina 2013)—both of which aim to articulate the moral-epistemic potential of cultivating double consciousness from racially dominant or other socially privileged positions. We analyze these concepts and challenge them on the grounds that they lack continuity with their Du Boisian predecessor and face problems of practical feasibility. As we show, these expansions obscure structural barriers that make white double consciousness and kaleidoscopic consciousness (...)
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  22. Confrontation or Dialogue? Productive Tensions between Decolonial and Intercultural Scholarship.Matthias Kramm, David Ludwig, Thierry Ngosso, Pius M. Mosima & Birgit Boogaard - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    For several decades, intercultural philosophers have produced an extensive body of scholarly work aimed at mutual intercultural understanding. They have focused on the ideal of intercultural dialogue that is supported by dialogue principles and virtuous attitudes. However, this ideal is challenged by decolonial scholarship as one which neglects power inequalities. Decolonial scholars have emphasized the differences between cultures and worldviews, shifting the focus to colonial history and radical alterity. In return, intercultural philosophers have worried about the very possibility of dialogue (...)
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  23.  64
    Believing in Shmeliefs.Neil Levy - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    People report believing weird things: that the Earth is flat, that senior Democrats are subjecting kidnapped children to abuse, and so on. How can people possibly believe things like this? Some philosophers have recently argued for a surprising answer: people don’t believe these things at all. Rather, they mistake their imaginings for beliefs. They are shmelievers, not believers. In this paper, I consider the prospects for this kind of explanation. I argue that some belief reports are simply insincere, and that (...)
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  24.  60
    Accuracy-First Epistemology and Scientific Progress.Peter J. Lewis, Don Fallis & Branden Fitelson - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    The accuracy-first program attempts to ground epistemology in the norm that one’s beliefs should be as accurate as possible, where accuracy is measured using a scoring rule. We argue that considerations of scientific progress suggest that such a monism about epistemic value is untenable. In particular, we argue that counterexamples to the standard scoring rules are ubiquitous in the history of science, and hence that these scoring rules cannot be regarded as a precisification of our intuitive concept of epistemic value.
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  25.  40
    The Imperialism of Desert.Ofer Malcai & Re'em Segev - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11:861-889.
    What is the relation between desert and other values such as equality, priority for the worse off, and utility? According to the common (pluralist) view, desert and these other values reflect distinct concerns: some are about distributive justice, some about retributive justice, and some (most clearly, utility) are not concerned with justice at all. However, another (monistic) view holds that while desert is a basic value, other values are merely derived from it. This controversy is relevant, for instance, to allocative (...)
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  26.  31
    One “True” Meaning.Poppy Mankowitz - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    Some words express different meanings in different contexts, such as “bank” and “I.” Linguistic alethic pluralists claim that “true” is another such word. This is a surprising thesis that holds implications for debates about the nature of truth. Yet it is in need of careful elaboration and evaluation. I describe several versions of linguistic alethic pluralism, alongside tests that natural language theorists use to identify different types of meaning variation. I also consider empirical studies that have recently targeted the use (...)
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  27.  10
    (1 other version)Toward an Expressivist View of Women's Autonomy.Laura Martin - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    Feminists have disagreed about whether women can choose gendered subordination autonomously. Less attention has been paid, however, to the socio-ontological questions that underlie this debate. This article introduces novel cases of ‘thwarted autonomy,’ in which women pursue autonomy but in ways that reinforce gendered subordination, in order to challenge dominant proceduralist and substantivist views, as well as motivate an expressivist view of the social self as a promising foundation for an account of autonomy. On this view, which draws on the (...)
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  28. Kantian Animal Moral Psychology: Empirical Markers for Animal Morality.Erik Nelson - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11:716-746.
    I argue that a Kantian inspired investigation into animal morality is both a plausible and coherent research program. To show that such an investigation is possible, I argue that philosophers, such as Korsgaard, who argue that reason demarcates nonhuman animals from the domain of moral beings are equivocating in their use of the term ‘rationality’. Kant certainly regards rationality as necessary for moral responsibility from a practical standpoint, but his distinction between the noumenal and phenomenal means that he can only (...)
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  29. Hume's Constitutivist Response to Scepticism.Taro Okamura - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    In the concluding section of the Book One of the Treatise, Hume confronts radical scepticism about the standards of correct reasoning. According to the naturalistic interpretations, Hume resolves this scepticism by appealing to some psychological facts. A common criticism of this interpretation is that the alleged naturalistic epistemic norm seems to be merely Hume’s report of his psychology, and it remains unclear why this seemingly mere psychological description can provide a principled reason to overcome his scepticism. In this paper, I (...)
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  30.  16
    The Self-Knowledge of Combinatory States.Jared Peterson - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    A number of philosophers hold that some types of mental states are composed of two or more mental states. It is commonly thought, for instance, that hoping involves the desire for some outcome to occur and the belief that such an outcome is possible (but has yet to occur). Although the existence of combinatory states (CS’s) is widely accepted, one issue that has not been thoroughly discussed is how we know we token a given combinatory state. This paper aims to (...)
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  31.  18
    (1 other version)Non-Additive Axiologies in Large Worlds.Christian Tarsney & Teruji Thomas - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    Is the overall value of a world just the sum of values contributed by each value-bearing entity in that world? Additively separable axiologies (like total utilitarianism, prioritarianism, and critical level views) say 'yes', but non-additive axiologies (like average utilitarianism, rank-discounted utilitarianism, and variable value views) say 'no'. This distinction appears to be practically important: among other things, additive axiologies generally assign great importance to large changes in population size, and therefore tend to strongly prioritize the long-term survival of humanity over (...)
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  32. Perfection and Success.Hasko von Kriegstein - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    According to reductivist axiological perfectionism about well-being (RAP), well-being is constituted by the development and exercise of central human capacities. In defending this view, proponents have relied heavily on the claim that RAP provides a unifying explanation of the entries on the ‘objective list’ of well-being constituents. I argue that this argument fails to provide independent support for the theory. RAP does not render a plausible objective list unless such a list is used at every stage of theory development to (...)
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  33. Order-Based Salience Patterns in Language: What They Are and Why They Matter.Ella Kate Whiteley - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    Whenever we communicate, we inevitably have to say one thing before another. This means introducing particularly subtle patterns of salience into our language. In this paper, I introduce ‘order-based salience patterns,’ referring to the ordering of syntactic contents where that ordering, pretheoretically, does not appear to be of consequence. For instance, if one is to describe a colourful scarf, it wouldn’t seem to matter if one were to say it is ‘orange and blue’ or ‘blue and orange.’ Despite their apparent (...)
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  34.  38
    The Aesthetic Constitution of Genders.Nicholas Wiltsher - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    This paper presses the programmatic idea that it is fruitful to think of genders as constituted by aesthetic rational social practices; in particular, that doing so can illuminate the relation between social role and self-identity. The first part of the paper describes rational social practices, and then interprets two social-role approaches to genders in light of that description. The interpretation places the two approaches in different domains of reason, one epistemic, one practical; this makes apparent the conceptual space for a (...)
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  35. Receptive Publics.Joshua Habgood-Coote, Natalie Alana Ashton & Nadja El Kassar - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 11.
    It is widely accepted that public discourse as we know it is less than ideal from an epistemological point of view. In this paper, we develop an underappreciated aspect of the trouble with public discourse: what we call the Listening Problem. The listening problem is the problem that public discourse has in giving appropriate uptake and reception to ideas and concepts from oppressed groups. Drawing on the work of Jürgen Habermas and Nancy Fraser, we develop an institutional response to the (...)
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  36. Neutrality, Cultural Literacy, and Arts Funding.Jack Alexander Hume - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (55):1588-1617.
    Despite the widespread presence of public arts funding in liberal societies, some liberals find it unjustified. According to the Neutrality Objection, arts funding preferences some ways of life. One way to motivate this challenge is to say that a public goods-styled justification, although it could relieve arts funding of these worries of partiality, cannot be argued for coherently or is, in the end, too susceptible to impressions of partiality. I argue that diversity-based arts funding can overcome this challenge, because it (...)
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  37.  81
    (1 other version)Scripts and Social Cognition.Gen Eickers - 2024 - Ergo: An Open Access Journal of Philosophy 10 (54):1565-1587.
    To explain how social cognition normally serves us in real life, we need to ask which factors contribute to specific social interactions. Recent accounts, and mostly pluralistic models, have started incorporating contextual and social factors in explanations of social cognition. In this paper, I further motivate the importance of contextual and identity factors for social cognition. This paper presents scripts as an alternative resource in social cognition that can account for contextual and identity factors. Scripts are normative and context-sensitive knowledge (...)
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