2026 Open Sessions Timetable
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This paper offers a new argument for the claim that fit-making considerations are not normative reasons. Normative reasons are considerations that count in favour of attitudes or actions. Fit-making considerations - which determine whether an object merits a certain attitude - also count in favour of attitudes, but they provide a distinctive kind of normative support, or so I shall argue. If this is right, then normative reasons are not ""first"", and fittingness is irreducible to normative reasons.

Fit-making considerations are sometimes (erroneously) called the right kind of reasons. This is in contrast to the wrong kind of reasons. For example, if you threaten to hurt me unless I admire you, I have very good reason to admire you, but this does not make you admirable (the wrong kind of reason). On the other hand, the fact that you are a great philosopher does appear to make you admirable (the right kind of reason). Several authors, including Schroeder (2010), Howard and Leary (2022) and D’Arms and Jacobson (2023) have argued that fit-making considerations just are right-kind reasons.

I first reject two arguments for the claim that fit-making considerations are not right-kind reasons. Schultz (2025) argues that there are no reasons for affective attitudes, right or wrong, because we cannot deliberate to them due to emotional recalcitrance. I argue that recalcitrance shows only that emotional deliberation can fail, not that it is impossible. Maguire (2018) argues that fit‑making considerations lack the weights characteristic of normative reasons. I argue that fit-making considerations plausibly are weighted. This sets up my own argument: fit-making considerations are not normative reasons because while the weighing of reasons issues in three distinct normatively significant verdicts: required, permitted, or forbidden, the weighing of fit-making considerations only issues in two: fitting or unfitting.

The aim of this paper is to clarify some key questions in metanormative theory regarding the nature of normative reality and the structure of normative explanation, and to outline some theoretical options addressing them. These questions concern the way the normative realm is structured, how its domains relate to each other, the nature of the normative force they possess, and whether there exists an ultimate notion of authority – of what ought to be the case simpliciter, or all things considered. To do so, I first develop an account of the distinction between formal and authoritative normativity, and then I use it to raise some neglected questions, to systematize existing theories, and to introduce some novel views worthy of serious consideration.

You are a reliable person, which gives me a reason to believe you when you say you are in pain. Likewise, the fact that you are in pain gives me a reason to comfort you (let’s suppose). These are cases in which properties (e.g., being reliable, being in pain) provide us with reasons to respond to the world in various ways. This paper takes as a working assumption that the reason-providing feature of a property is a power of that property.

This assumption makes the reason-providing relation similar to causation in one respect, yet different in another. Consider a case in which a causally efficacious property—such as being negatively charged—confers on its bearer a power, e.g., the power to attract a positively charged particle. This is a causal power; its manifestation consists in a causal change. However, the powers with which this paper is concerned are non-causal powers: their manifestations do not consist in causal changes.

But what does the manifestation of such a power consist in, if not a causal change? I argue that, in relevant cases, these manifestations consist in instantiations of normative relations, such as justification or requirement, which I take to be examples of non-causal explanatory relations. On this proposal, when a property provides us with a reason for action, it confers on its bearers the power to justify or require that action. Importantly, just as a causal power can exist unmanifested (e.g., when it is interfered with), these non-causal powers can also exist unmanifested when the relevant reason is merely pro tanto or defeated.

The paper develops this account by exploring its implications regarding the metaphysics of normativity and value, particularly in relation to the ""buck-passing theory of value"" and the naturalism/non-naturalism debate in metaethics.

Many accept that we have moral responsibilities to future persons. For example, we ought not to leave a ruined planet for the persons who come after us for no good reason. Now, there are numerous first-order ethical explanations for why we ought not to do so. Many of these explanations rely on the assumption that future persons have a normative status.

However, since these future persons do not yet exist, the non-existence argument challenges this assumption. It does so by arguing on the premise that only actual existing things can have properties. Therefore, future persons cannot instantiate normative properties as they cannot have any properties. The aim of my talk is to reject the actualist premise and, based on an essentialist explanatory model, to argue that future persons have (normative) properties on the same grounds as actual persons.

According to essentialism, the essential properties of an entity explain what it is to be that entity. One important aspect of essential properties is their non-transient character. Given that F is an essential property of x, x must be F at all times, i.e., necessarily, for any stipulated times t₁ and t₂, if x is essentially F at t₁, then x is F at t₂. Furthermore, it will be argued for the essential role of normative principles (NP) in essence explanations, which have the form

□ ∀x (F(x) \(\rightarrow\) Nx)

connecting F and a normative property N.

On the basis of this essentialist position, I will argue that it must be true that every (actual and possible) x that is F necessarily is N. Referring to the non-transient character of essential properties, if p is necessarily true of x at t₂, then p is also true of x at t₁. Therefore, if it is the case at t₂ that a future person (x) that is F (e.g., has flourishing conditions) is also essentially N (due to NP), then it must be the case that x is N at t₁ (e.g., right now) too.

Drawing on resources from the analysis of knowledge, in this paper, I argue that ChatGPT is not safe—in the Pritchardian, modal sense. More specifically, I propose that due to inherent and necessary features of the system architecture of large language models involving an element of randomness (known as ‘temperature’), LLM output is analogous to beliefs about lotteries familiar from epistemology; the possibility of error is too modally close (even if probabilistically distant) to be compatible with knowledge. Thus, when asking ChatGPT a question, one can never know the answer solely on the basis of the LLM. I close by suggesting that this result generates something of a zetetic paradox; in order to eliminate the risk inherent in an LLM’s answer to your question, you need further evidence. The only evidence that can play that role, I submit, is already knowing the answer to the very question you ask it.

We perform requests for permission all the time. However, little attention has been paid to what we do with our words when we request permission. In contrast there is plentiful analysis, although considerable disagreement, on how we characterise responses to requests for permission and what we do when we perform simple requests such as ‘pass the salt’. This dichotomy is striking because permission requests are equally commonplace in everyday life, playing a rich role in ongoing debates about consent, refusal and the conditions for autonomy in people’s lives.

This paper offers a novel characterisation of permission requests. It argues that permission requests generate de novo, content-independent, discretionary reasons for action. That is, they directly generate reasons for the requestee to waive a claim-right, simply ‘because I asked’. The paper shows that analysing permission requests provides novel reasons to support the claim that all requests generate discretionary reasons, rather than obligations, for the requestee to act, and that there are valuable autonomy-related reasons for this.

Permission requests have been overlooked as an important normative phenomenon in their own right. Analysing these important illocutions also supports a more robust characterisation of requests as a whole, and provides a springboard for better understanding their socially-significant sequelae of consent and refusal.

"News reports frequently describe institutions as expressing dissent: Harvard refuses to implement directives from the Trump administration, or Apple refuses to comply with court orders demanding access to an iPhone linked to a terrorism case. Expressions of dissent are deliberate, conscientious, and principled acts voicing moral protest. But what does it mean to say that an institution expresses dissent? Are such attributions literal, or merely convenient shorthand for individuals’ actions within institutions?

Philosophical debates tend to assume either that (at least some) institutions count as full-fledged collective agents or that only individual members can express dissent. Both approaches, however, are incomplete. Attributing expressions of dissent to institutions risks mystifying them, as existing accounts of collective agency seem unfit to support morally demanding acts such as conscientious, principled protest, even if they suffice for ordinary coordinated action. Conversely, focusing on individual members overlooks that institutional action is the interrelated actions of rule-governed, embodied roles. While individuals are the units of assessment, coordination is essential for intelligible institutional action. Expressing dissent, moreover, presupposes capacities—judgment and moral discernment—that appear to reside only in members rather than the institution itself.

This paper examines, from an ontological perspective, whether institutions as collective agents can ever express dissent. It analyzes different accounts of collective agency and explores how the interrelatedness of role occupants can structure contexts in which dissent is institutionally intelligible, without invoking a mysterious collective consciousness. Focusing on the dynamics of roles and coordination clarifies how morally significant acts can emerge from institutions while remaining grounded in the capacities of individual members.

Drawing attention to these ontological subtleties, the paper shows why understanding interrelatedness and coordination is crucial for assessing which ethically and politically significant acts, such as expressions of dissent, can be attributed to institutions, and in which circumstances.

Research on aesthetic categories has long moved beyond the ‘beautiful’ and the ‘sublime’ to consider what has been called ‘minor categories’ such as ‘cuteness’ and its Japanese counterpart ‘kawaii.’ This is often defined as ‘baby schema’ with reference to rounded and sometimes voiceless characters such as Hello Kitty or Snoopy.

I argue ‘cuteness’ is far from just the saccharine and innocuous, as characterised by Walt Disney’s hecklers in the 1900s. It has also been used in official communication to downplay the dangers of nuclear pollution.

I provide a contemporary technology case study to demonstrate the epistemic role of this aesthetic category. It specifically infers domestication where domestication is biologically illogical. The epistemic consequences are the vanishing of safety concerns through inferential meaning.

I use this case study to demonstrate how an aesthetic category can be aesthetically magnetic and link empirical conditions to normative consequences. While a failed use of kawaii has led to public outrage, when wielded effectively it results in a soothing form of silencing.

Are Plato's Forms universals or particulars? Scholars disagree.

According to some, Forms are universals (see e.g. G. Fine 1993); according to others, they are particulars (or individual particulars, see Marmodoro 2021 and forthcoming). In these two different views, universals and particulars are characterised as follows:

• Universals are properties that are actually multi-located at once.
• Particulars are entities that are non-recurrent.

There is however a third option, that Forms are neither universals nor particulars. This view has an important pedigree for instance in Alexander of Aphrodisias, Boethius, Avicenna and Duns Scotus (see Sirkel 2011, Tweedale 1984, Lloyd 2004, Noone 2003), who endorses the thesis that:

• Neutrals are properties that are neither actually multi-located at once nor non-recurrent.

Intuitively, neutral properties are the properties in themselves, which are so called because they are not dependent from universals and particulars for what they are, and because they are neutral with respect to, or prior to, the distinction between universals and particulars. However, if peculiar features, such as actual multi-location at once or non-recurrence, are added to neutrals, the resulting universals or particulars entities are numerically distinct from the neutral properties.

My aim in this paper is to revive this view and argue that Plato's Forms are neutrals.

Appealing to passages from Plato's Middle and Late Dialogues – including the "Phaedo", "Republic", "Timaeus", and "Parmenides" – I contend that the intuitions outlined above can be articulated into a more refined account of Platonic Forms. My argument rests on textual evidence found in these passages for a distinction between forms as instantiated in particulars – the immanent forms – and Forms “themselves by [or in] themselves” (αὐτό καθ᾽ αὐτό) – the separate or transcendent Forms (Fine 1984, Devereaux 1994, Perl 1999, Lloyd 2004, Meinwald 2016).

Keywords: Forms, Universals, Particulars, Neutrals

References

• Devereaux, D. (1994). “Separation and Immanence in Plato's Theory of Forms”. In: Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 12, pp. 63-90.
• Fine, G. (1984). “Separation”. In: Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 2, pp. 31-87.
  — (1993). On Ideas: Aristotle's Criticism of Plato's Theory of Forms. New York: Oxford University Press.
• Lloyd G. (2004). “Platonism and the Invention of the Problem of Universals”. In: Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 86, pp. 233-256.
• Marmodoro, A. (2021). Forms and Structure in Plato's Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Marmodoro A. Parmenidean Essentialism (unpublished).
• Meinwald, C. (2016). Plato. The Routledge Philosophers. New York / London: Routledge.
• Noone, T. B. (2003). “Universals and Individuation”. In: The Cambridge Companion to Duns Scotus. Ed. by Thomas Williams. Cambridge University Press, pp. 100-128.
• Perl, E. D. (1999). “The Presence of the Paradigm: Immanence and Transcendence in Plato's Theory of Forms”. In: The Review of Metaphysics 53.2, pp. 339-362.
• Politis, V. (2021). Plato's Essentialism: Reinterpreting the Theory of Forms. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Sirkel, R. (2011). “Alexander of Aphrodisias's Account of Universals and Its Problems”. In: Journal of the History of Philosophy 49.3, pp. 297-314.
• Tweedale, M. (1984). “Alexander of Aphrodisias' Views on Universals”. In: Phronesis 29, pp. 279-303.

Contemporary debates about contempt typically proceed by asking whether it is fitting or virtuous to feel contempt. Defenders of contempt often emphasise its moral value (e.g., it evinces the vices of superiority and polices community-endorsed standards of behaviour). This paper asks a different question: can we preserve what is morally valuable about contempt without recommending that agents cultivate it as an emotion? One reason for resisting such cultivation is that contempt is prone to moral distortion and hardening of judgment. Furthermore, it is not evident that were humans not already disposed to contempt, a moral theory should seek to introduce it into our emotional repertoire.

The Mohists (481–221 BC), a consequentialist school in early Chinese Philosophy, are best known for their commitment to jianai, often translated as “impartial love.” This commitment has been taken to render Mohist ethics implausibly demanding, insofar as it appears to require agents to cultivate emotions that human psychology cannot sustain. Against this reading, jianai has also been understood as “impartial care.” I argue that not only is impartial care a more charitable interpretation but that the Mohists are suspicious of emotion as such, precisely because emotions reliably introduce partiality into moral judgment.

Yet Mohists repeatedly express negative emotions such as anger or contempt. I argue that this apparent tension is resolved by a distinctive Mohist strategy: emotions are to be performed rather than experienced. Anger and contempt function as publicly legible practices that coordinate behaviour, motivate correction, and sustain moral order, without requiring agents to cultivate affect. This interpretation would recast Mohist ethics as demanding in a practical rather than affective sense. What is required is not radical emotional transformation, but disciplined patterns of judgment, response, and performance. I then ask what, if anything, is lost when moral emotions are merely feigned.

Norms shore up our ability to do things with words. As Austin showed, linguistic conventions mesh with wider social institutions to enable action beyond communication. Speech continually shapes and reshapes our moral landscape (as when one says “I promise…” and thereby acquires an obligation). But how are the requisite norms upheld? And what happens when they break down?

I defend the view that linguistic norms are upheld through widespread compliance backed up by enforcement—and expectations thereof. Less well-recognised, though, are the implications of normative breakdown.

I show how the collapse of linguistic norms diminishes our scope for action. In a world where promises are not kept, not enforced, and not expected to be, there is no longer an institution of promising and no scope to make promises. Speakers of the language simply cannot commit themselves in quite the way we do. The analysis highlights the role of speech norms in empowering us—giving us the possibility to perform particular actions—as well as merely constraining what we can do with words.

There is an immediate practical upshot. For, we have serious reasons to worry about just such a breakdown in speech norms—not only because 21st Century communicative media massively expand the opportunity, reward, and reach of violations, but because artificial language generators, by definition, cannot comply. Large language models and the quasi-agentic tools they underpin fall outside the sphere of human normativity. They lack interests and cannot be sanctioned.

Yet, these tools are increasingly integrated into our communicative environment, often pretty seamlessly. So, if chatbots technically cannot keep a promise, what expectations should we have when they output “I promise…” ? Could we maintain different expectations for human agents and technologies, even as they produce words increasingly indistinguishably? If not, how might institutions like promising be preserved?

Contemporary debates on conceptual engineering treat as central the "implementation problem": the challenge of bringing about conceptual change. Responses vary: some argue that conceptual engineering is infeasible due to our lack of control over meaning (Cappelen 2018). Others claim we possess sufficient control (Nimtz 2021; Löhr 2021), meanwhile a different strand urges focusing on modest goals over which we exercise firmer control (Jorem 2021; Belleri 2025). Nonetheless, it is striking how much these responses share: all accept a common framing of the implementation problem as a matter of control over the uptake of engineered concepts.

This paper challenges this dominant framing and offers an alternative perspective on conceptual innovation. Rather than directly addressing the implementation problem, I argue that it is framed against a background picture that generates two gaps: between conceptual innovation and ordinary practice, and between the authority to prescribe meanings and the power to secure compliance. In this picture, conceptual engineers evaluate, design, and prescribe meanings independently of everyday practice, and only subsequently confront the task of implementation.

To challenge this picture, I turn to Stanley Cavell’s alternative vision of language, centred on his notions of projection—our ordinary capacity to carry words into new contexts—and attunement—the fragile, ongoing agreement in forms of life that makes such extensions intelligible. By situating conceptual change within everyday conceptual life, Cavell’s perspective dissolves the gaps that give the implementation problem its apparent urgency. Projection reveals innovation as continuous with our ordinary ways of going on together with concepts, while attunement reframes the lack of control over uptake as the inherent ethical condition of sharing language. From this perspective, implementation is not a technical problem of enforcing compliance with fixed meanings, but the collaborative, ethical work of finding ways of going on with concepts within shared forms of life.

While culture has long been recognized as shaping emotional states, its influence on emotional processing has received far less attention. This paper argues that cultural background influences not only emotional experience but also emotionally charged perception itself.

To perceive emotionally charged objects can have different meanings from an empirical perspective [Kragel et al. 2019], raising questions about how the notion should be understood philosophically. On the one hand, it connects with debates on the scope of perceptual content [Siegel 2006, Crutchfield 2012]. On the other hand, it relates to discussions of cognitive penetration and top-down influences on perceptual processing [Vetter and Newen 2014, Nanay and Teufel 2017, Stokes 2021].

The first part of this paper clarifies the notion of emotionally charged perception by integrating insights from these two strands of literature.

The paper then turns to cross-cultural research on emotion perception. Prior to the pioneering work of Markus and Kitayama [1991] and Triandis [1989], research largely emphasized the universality of emotional processes, often neglecting cultural modulation. Today, the influence of culture on emotion is widely recognized [e.g., Mesquita et al. 1997, Manstead and Fischer 2002, Clobert and Tsai 2019]. Despite this progress, most research still focuses on how culture shapes the phenomenal experience of high-level emotional states.

In contrast, this paper examines neuroscientific evidence [Derntl et al. 2012, Iidaka and Harada 2016] showing that culture modulates activity in large-scale brain networks involving both sensory cortices and regions typically associated with emotional processing. The convergence of these neural findings with behavioral evidence suggests that cognitive states, influenced by cultural background, penetrate perception and alter how individuals represent external stimuli.

In conclusion, these findings support the thesis that emotionally charged perception is influenced by cultural background and invite reconsideration of the role cultural factors play in perception more generally.

References:

• Clobert M. and Tsai J. L., 2019, Cultural influences on Emotion, in Cohen D. and Kitayama S., 2019, Handbook of Cultural Psychology, The Guilford Press, New York.
• Crutchfield. P., 2012, Representing high-level properties in perceptual expe- rience. Philosophical Psychology 25 (2):279-294.
• Derntl, B., Habel, U., Robinson, S., Windischberger, C., Kryspin-Exner, I., Gur, R. C., 2012, Culture but not gender modulates amygdala activation during explicit emotion recognition. BMC Neuroscience, 13, 54.
• Iidaka T. and Harada T., 2016, Cultural Values Modulate Emotional Processing in Human Amygdala, in the Oxford Handbook of Cultural Neuroscience.
• Kragel P. A., Reddan M. C., LaBar K. S., Wager T. D., 2019, Emo- tion schemas are embedded in the human visual system. Sci Adv. 2019 Jul 24;5(7):eaaw4358.
• Manstead A. and Fischer A., 2002, Culture and Emotion, Taylor Francis Inc., New York.
• Markus, H. R., Kitayama, S., 1991, Culture and the self: Implications for cognition, emotion, and motivation. Psychological Review, 98, 224–253.
• Mesquita, B., Frijda, N. H., Scherer, K. R., 1997, Culture and emotion. In P. Dasen, T. S. Saraswathi (Eds.), (pp. 255–297). Handbook of cross-cultural psychology, Vol. 2. Boston: Allyn and Bacon.
• Siegel. S., 2006, Which Properties Are Represented in Perception. In Tamar Szabo Gendler John Hawthorne, Perceptual experience. New York: Oxford University Press. pp. 481-503.
• Stokes D., 2021, Thinking and Perceiving: On the malleability of the mind. London: Routledge.
• Teufel C. and B. Nanay, 2017, How to (and how not to) think about top-down influences on perception. Consciousness and Cognition 47: 17–25.
• Triandis, H. C., 1989, The self and social behavior in differing cultural contexts. Psychological Review, 96, 506–520.
• Vetter P. and Newen A., 2014, Varieties of cognitive penetration in visual perception. Consciousness Cognition 27: 62–75.

Our perceptual system is attuned to detecting mismatches in the information carried by different senses. Most of the time, this mechanism operates unconsciously. But this is not always the case. Sometimes, we are consciously aware that the senses do not match. Just consider the experience of watching a movie where video and audio are temporally out of sync. Here, it seems, we are not simply aware of certain visual and auditory events occurring at a given time. We are also aware that what we see does not match what we hear.

Though the functioning of the subconscious mechanism of mismatch detection has been widely studied in the empirical and philosophical literature very little attention has been given to the conscious experiences of the mismatch itself. This presentation aims to fill this gap by offering the first systematic discussion of the nature of these kinds of experiences.

The presentation will be divided into four parts. The first introduces those experiences where the senses don’t match via the discussion of some phenomenal contrast cases. The second presents three different accounts of what the experiences of mismatch essentially involve: a cognitive account, an affective account, and a perceptual account. The second part discusses some challenges to the cognitive and affective account and defends the perceptual account. Finally, the third part introduces two interpretations of the perceptual account, one situating the mismatch at the level of the content, the other situating it at the level of the mode, and assesses their merits.

When our choices will transform who we are, whose preferences should guide us: ourselves making the choice, or ourselves after the transformation? Richard Pettigrew's Aggregate Utility Solution, responding to this challenge posed by L. A. Paul, answers that a rational agent should act on a weighted average of the utilities of all their past, present and future selves. I argue that this proposal, even if otherwise compelling, cannot accommodate hard choices: cases of incommensurability in which one prefers neither option yet is not indifferent. Pettigrew's own two tentative repairs both fail, and more generally no aggregate solution can solve the problem of incommensurability. Personal transformation and incommensurability, I conclude, are entangled challenges.

Within the large literature on degrees of belief, the amount of attention devoted to analysis of the very idea of degrees of belief – as opposed for example to questions of how the degrees of belief of rational agents should be structured and how they should be formally modelled – is relatively small. This paper first argues that the task of philosophical analysis of the concept of degree of belief is important and then goes on to propose a new elucidation of the notion.

According to Kris McDaniel, if a property is analogous, there are multiple ways of having that property. If, for example, being is analogous, it fragments into different modes of being. In this essay I discuss a serious concern for proponents of this view: that analogy is curiously similar to, or perhaps just is, the determinable–determinate relation. Significantly, both are ontological unities that involve specification. Notwithstanding their similarities, I argue that analogy is a distinct kind of connection. First, I show that analogous properties must bear the feature of being disjunctive (e.g., existence is absolute being or being-in). In contrast, determinates may form continuous ranges, say, as shades of a colour. Second, I demonstrate that analogates don’t have to specify a generic property, whereas determinates always do (a scarlet object is necessarily red). Given these distinctions, among others, my conclusion is that analogy is unique and deserves more attention in the contemporary metaphysics literature.

Consider the following experiences; a poignant story stays with you, a diagnosis illuminates your deepest struggles, and a politician eloquently describes how immigrants are ruining your country. I argue that what is in common across these experiences is that an idea resonates with the listener. In this talk, I argue that something resonates when it illuminates pre-existing existential feelings in the listener.

Specifically, ideas resonate and illuminate existential feelings by identifying, explaining, justifying, and/or expressing those feelings. In turn, this better enables agents to manage and navigate those feelings. These existential feelings include one’s sense of possibility, of reality, of one’s place in the world, of belonging, and of interpersonal connectedness (Ratcliffe (2008). Resonating is not a feeling itself, but in illuminating one’s feelings, provides a tantalising ‘a-ha’ moment of clarity (Nguyen 2021), hermeneutical enlightenment (Fricker 2007), and a deep sense of satisfaction that goes beyond the merely cognitive (Gopnik 2000).

Resonating constitutes an under-explored mechanism of belief formation, whereby some propositions are believed precisely in virtue of resonating so strongly. As Williams (2022) highlights, we believe in certain ways in order to signal our values to others. Resonating can also explain the maintenance of many irrational beliefs; beliefs may not appropriately update in the light of evidence because the updated belief no longer resonates, leaving the agent with feelings they cannot explain. In extreme cases such as delusion, only very bizarre ideas can possibly make sense of one’s highly anomalous feelings.

I provide some reasons to adopt ‘resonating’ over ‘motivated reasoning’, whereby agents are biased in the evidence they attend to. How do agents know, pre-reflectively, which evidence to attend to? I propose that we attend to what resonates. If one’s feelings can change, then the belief may update, and this insight ought to inform interventions for better belief.

The distinction between epistemic generation and transmission has been debated recently. (Senor 2007; Lackey 2008; Frise 2017; Wright 2019; Greco 2020) Arguments in this debate influence debates over which types of epistemic sources can generate knowledge, and which may only transmit it. (Lackey 2008, 2011; Fernández 2016; Robins 2016; Frise 2017; Senor 2017; Bernecker & Grundmann 2019; Malik 2023) This presentation contributes to the debate about epistemic transmission and generation, especially in the epistemologies of testimony and memory, initially, by introducing a new, clearer, and philosophically useful distinction between epistemic transmission, generation, and decay. It assumes the received, broadly, if not universally, accepted, elementary yet powerful, functional epistemic input-output model. (Quine 1969; Goldman 1979, 2014; Dretske 1981) It argues that ceteris paribus, when the epistemic grounds of outputs preserve the epistemic grounds of their inputs, there is transmission. When epistemic outputs haver stronger epistemic grounds than those of their inputs, when they are better justified, there is epistemic generation. When epistemic outputs have weaker grounds than their inputs, there is epistemic decay.

The ceteris paribus conditions, and the focus on epistemic grounds, rather than on beliefs or knowledge that supervene on them, allow the analysis to isolate epistemic generation, decay, and transmission from other factors that affect epistemic properties of outputs, such as contexts, background epistemic norms, epistemological frameworks, and embeddedness in epistemic networks. The input-process-output framework and the ceteris paribus conditions distinguish the generation and decay of knowledge from contextual changes that may appear to manifest or conceal knowledge.

Ceteris paribus, grounds for knowledge can be generated from inputs that have epistemic grounds that are too weak to justify knowledge claims. This epistemic analysis supports a more radical argument than simply that knowledge can be generated from non-knowledge. (Lackey 2008; Luzzi 2019)

Hope is often treated as epistemically suspect: at best a motivational aid, at worst a failure of responsiveness to evidence. Recent work in epistemology has sought to rehabilitate hope’s epistemic value by showing how it can be epistemically rational, by properly constrained by belief, probability, or sensitivity to how the world is (Bovens 1999, Rioux 2024, Vazard 2025). In this paper, I argue that these rehabilitative strategies mischaracterise the distinctive value of hope-especially in cases of oppression and moral rupture (Lear 2006; Stockdale 2021).

First, I argue that hope is epistemically irrational. It is not sensitive to the evidence in the right way. Second, I defend the claim that the epistemic irrationality of hope is not a defect but an essential feature of its value. On my view, hope is best understood as an attitude of moral imagination rather than as a belief-like or evidence-responsive state. Drawing on work by Iris Murdoch on imagination and James Baldwin on hope, I develop an account of radical hope as an imaginative capacity to orient oneself toward a better moral world precisely under conditions where one has decisive evidence that such a world is unlikely.

This account allows us to explain how hope shapes agency under oppression. Hope sustains moral agency by enabling agents to imagine possibilities that are not licensed by their current evidential situation. Against attempts to locate hope’s epistemic significance in its responsiveness to evidence and its role in rational deliberation (cf. Benton 2019), I argue that radical hope exhibits a distinctive direction of fit. It is not world-guided, nor does it aim at belief revision. Instead, it is self- and world-transformative, governing how agents imaginatively inhabit their circumstances and what forms of moral agency remain intelligible to them (cf. Lear 2006). In other words, hope matters, I argue, not because it tells us how the world is or will be, but because it makes possible forms of moral understanding and agency that would otherwise be foreclosed.

This paper examines whether the development of ectogenesis, the gestation of a foetus in an artificial womb, could resolve the moral conflict surrounding the permissibility of abortion. Proponents of ectogenesis argue that while pregnant individuals have a right to terminate the pregnancy, they do not have the right to the death of the foetus, and that emerging technologies could allow for the termination without foetal death (Kaczor, 2018). On this view, abortion should be replaced by foetal extraction once ectogenesis becomes viable. This paper argues that, while ectogenesis may be a valuable reproductive technology, it cannot resolve the abortion debate without unjustifiably violating bodily autonomy.

Focusing on partial ectogenesis, which would require the surgical removal of the foetus from the pregnant body, this paper challenges the claim that ectogenesis offers a morally preferable alternative to abortion. Drawing on Thomson’s (1971) defence of bodily autonomy and Hine’s recent analysis of partial ectogestation (2024), I argue that while the foetus may possess a right to life, it does not possess a right to demand invasive surgical intervention for its preservation. In particular, the foetus lacks a claim-right to procedures that significantly compromise the bodily integrity of the pregnant individual. I further argue that the pregnant individual has a right not only to end the pregnancy, but to choose how the pregnancy ends.

Mandating ectogenesis in place of abortion would therefore impose significant bodily burdens on pregnant individuals for the sake of foetal survival, constituting a violation of bodily autonomy rather than a morally neutral technological alternative. The paper concludes that ectogenesis cannot replace abortion without undermining reproductive autonomy, and that any future use of artificial womb technologies must prioritise the rights and choices of pregnant individuals rather than seek to eliminate abortion.

We traditionally think of there as being a sharp division between external space and our bodies. External space is ‘out there’, separated from our body, with the skin serving as the boundary between ourselves and the external world. The notion of peripersonal space overturns this traditional picture. A significant body of evidence from cognitive neuroscience suggests that our perceptual systems process external objects in the space in close proximity to our bodies (up to 30-50cm) in a distinctive way, and critically as different from far space, leading to an increase in relevant behavioural responses (e.g. better accuracy in shape recognition, faster reaction times to stimuli etc.) (See Rizzolatti et al 1981; see di Pelligrino et al. 1997; Bufacchi and Iannetti 2018; Blini et al. 2018). Broadly speaking, peripersonal processing is often thought to involve a remapping of external objects located in close proximity to our bodies in a somatosensory (i.e. tactile-bodily) frame of reference, typically making use of visual and auditory cues. Peripersonal space is therefore thought to function as a ‘buffer zone’ between the ‘external’ and the ‘internal’, that is, between the external world and one’s body (or a relevant part thereof). Given this characterisation, peripersonal processing is claimed to have two critical functions: (i) bodily protection (as the ‘margin of safety’), since objects represented as being in peripersonal space may soon come into contact with us (potentially harming us), and (ii) guiding immediate exploratory interaction with objects nearby the body. Indeed, objects represented by our perceptual systems as being in peripersonal space are those with which we can have immediate dealings in a way that we can’t with objects in extrapersonal or far space – it is, to put it broadly for now, the space of here and now action-possibility.

Philosophers of cognitive science and perception have increasingly taken an interest in peripersonal space, principally with a view to detailing the computational principles characteristic of peripersonal processing, and specifying kinds of representational contents that figure in non-conscious peripersonal perception (de Vignemont 2021; Klien 2021; Wu 2021; Ferretti 2022.) However, a vexed question concerns whether, and in what particular way, we experience peripersonal space as peripersonal, or put otherwise, whether we enjoy some form of awareness of peripersonal space as special, as a distinctive form of peripersonal spatial awareness (See Wu 2021 for scepticism; see Vignemont 2021 for the more positive picture.). Here I develop a tactile expectation view of peripersonal experience, such that our experience of peripersonal space is understood in terms of a proprietary form of modal spatial awareness, as what I call a sense of tactile possibility. I develop this notion of a sense of tactile possibility in terms of a recessive bodily phenomenology of action-and impact-readiness (more on all this later). The structure of the paper is as follows: Section 1 will overview reasons for scepticism that visual phenomenology marks the distinction, critical to deferential processing by the perceptual system, between far space and peripersonal space. Section 2 develops the notion of a phenomenology of proximity by reference to a central set of cases. Section 3 then considers Frederique de Vignemont’s account of peripersonal processing and peripersonal phenomenology. After raising problems with de Vignemont’s account of peripersonal phenomenology, section 4 develops the positive proposal outlined above and defends it from a significant objection. The resulting view offers a detailed and original account of the positive phenomenology of peripersonal space, as well as a refined conceptualisation concerning how we should think of peripersonal space and peripersonal perceptual experience more broadly.

"Chalmers (1995) has presented the hard problem of consciousness: we have no satisfactory explanation of why and how consciousness arises from the physical. A suggested way to solve the hard problem of consciousness is to endorse panpsychism (see Brogaard (2016), Chalmers (2016a, 2016b), Goff (2017), Seager (2016), Strawson (2008)). Some panpsychists have argued that the only way to close the explanatory gap between the phenomenal and the physical is to claim that macro-consciousness arises from micro-consciousness.

However, Nagasawa (2021) has argued that panpsychism faces an ingredient problem: we know nothing about any “phenomenal properties associated with the experiences of micromaterial objects. […] We do not have a transparent grasp of microphenomenal properties, and we cannot even imagine what microphenomenal properties are like” (p. 39). This shows that we know almost nothing about the nature of microphenomenal properties. As a result, we cannot refer to microphenomenal properties to explain how macrophenomenal properties arise.

I will propose an alternative theory of the mind that addresses how the ingredient problem and the hard problem of consciousness can be resolved. I call this theory ‘panmentalism’ because it claims that there is something mental at the micro-level. It claims that micro-objects possess an ability to be conscious, but they are not conscious because there is no mechanism to activate that ability. Because of that, we do not have the mystery of what it is like to be a conscious micro-object.

At the micro-level, there are microphysical properties and microabilities to be conscious, and these properties ground conscious experiences. Microphysical properties and microabilities to be conscious ground (sometimes or always) a macroability to be conscious. Microphysical properties sometimes ground mental content. When mental content is produced, sometimes or always, this mental content and a macroability to be conscious ground a conscious experience of this mental content.

Derek Parfit’s Reductionism holds that what matters in survival is not personal identity but Relation R — psychological connectedness and continuity sustained by the “right kind of cause.” Yet that cause has remained notoriously underspecified: Parfit’s candidates — the “normal,” “reliable,” or “any” cause — rest on no principled criterion, leaving it unclear which future being qualifies as a survivor. I argue that James Woodward’s interventionist theory of causation supplies the missing rigour. On this theory, a relation counts as causal to the degree that it is invariant under intervention — it continues to hold across a range of interventions on the relevant variables. Using this notion, I define the causal connectedness one entity bears to a future entity as such an invariant relation, its strength fixed by the degree of invariance, and causal continuity as overlapping chains of connectedness. On the resulting Interventionist Criterion of Survival, a subject survives just in case some future entity is strongly causally continuous with it. Because survival here tracks causal dependence, not bare resemblance, the mere existence of a coincidental duplicate does not constitute the subject’s survival.

This criterion in turn yields a unifying meta-theory. Because interventionist causation is defined over a chosen set of variables, applying this framework to a person requires modelling her as such a set, and different choices generate different verdicts. Building the model from psychological variables recovers a broadly Lockean criterion; from biological or organismic variables, animalism; from variables of material constitution, a bodily criterion. This model-dependence is not a defect but a resource: it lets us redescribe the major theories of survival as differing selections of variables within one framework. On this picture, their long-standing dispute looks less like a clash of rival metaphysics than a choice of what to model — locating “what matters” in a precise, naturalistic theory of causation.

In the Grundlagen der Arithmetik Frege claims that numbers are self-subsistent objects, i.e. object that exist independently of anything else. Frege’s Grundlagen §26 ends with the claim that what is objective is independent (unabhängig) of sensation, intuition and imagination but not of reason (Vernunft). Those who ascribe Idealism to Frege have taken this statement in support of the view that Frege believed that the existence of abstract objects such as numbers depends on reason. I suggest that this misunderstands Frege’s point. The same §26 clarifies earlier that to be grasped or understood (Erkanntwerden) is not to be created (Entstehen), which supports a Realist interpretation. The objectivity of the Earth axis is not fictitious or devised (erdacht) or created (entstanden) but simply thought (gedacht). Otherwise, Frege claims, we would not be able to assert anything about the Earth axis before it was thought of by us. While Frege does not speak explicitly of the independence (Unabhängigkeit) from being thought of the Earth axis, I believe his talk of not being created clearly denotes ontological independence of what is objective. When Frege speaks of the dependence on reason of what is objective, I suggest he does not denote ontological dependence but rather epistemological or semantic dependence. If what is objective were to depend ontologically on reason, it is hard to see how Frege can at the same time maintain that thought does not create what is objective. Rather, Frege wants to say that while what is objective does not depend on individual points of view or different ways of perception, any statement or thought that says something about number depends on reason since reason is necessary for the formation of a thought. I therefore suggest that Frege makes a trivial point at the end of §26 rather than an ontologically loaded one.

In the Ethics, Spinoza famously claims that ‘[t]he order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things’ (2p7). Interpreters agree that this proposition asserts the existence of a parallelism between thought and being. In the scholium to 2p7’s demonstration, the philosopher further adds that ‘a mode of extension [i.e., a being in the world] and the idea [i.e. thought] of that mode are one and the same thing, but expressed in two ways’ (italics mine). In light of these claims, Spinoza is often read as endorsing the strong thesis that thought is identical with being, and thus as anticipating a view traditionally associated with Hegel. Scholars debate how Spinoza motivates this identity. Michael Della Rocca has forcefully argued that the proof for 2p7 is driven by Spinoza’s uncompromising commitment to the Principle of Sufficient Reason (‘PSR’), according to which every fact must have an explanation. If so, no fact can be brute or unexplained. In this paper, after introducing the key ingredients of Spinoza’s proof of 2p7, I examine Della Rocca’s reconstruction on the basis of the PSR. I then argue that Della Rocca’s argument does not, in fact, establish the identity of thought and being that he and others attribute to Spinoza. A different claim follows instead, namely one of inseparability between thought and being, which I proceed to illustrate. Not only does this claim actually results from employing the PSR in the way Della Rocca proposes, but is also avoids a further brute bifurcation – ruled out by the PSR itself – to which Della Rocca seems committed. By elucidating this claim of inseparability, I finally suggest that Spinoza’s position is better understood as anticipating a view about the alignment of thought and world akin to that found, for instance, in (the later) Wittgenstein.

Naive non-cognitivism provides an account of moral psychology that deserves to be defended for its simplicity. According to this view, the basic evaluative attitude is a simple desire: an intrinsic first-order desire, without any further accompanying attitude being part of the basic evaluative attitude. However, naive non-cognitivists face the Problem of Dimensional Poverty: simple desires appear too dimensionally poor to be the basic evaluative attitude. It has been overlooked that the Problem of Dimensional Poverty can be distinguished into different versions. The formal version is concerned with schematic representations of mental attitudes. The substantial version is concerned with accounts of particular dimensions of an attitude. I propose two ‘moves’ (the ‘adverbialisation move’ and the ‘deflation move’) that naive non-cognitivists can appeal to when replying to what I call the ‘easier’ formal and substantial problems. I then develop a ‘harder version’ of both the formal and the substantial problem. I suggest that answering the harder formal problem requires adopting an attitude-based scholastic account of desire, according to which desires are attitudes of presenting-as-good. To answer the harder substantial problem, the naive non-cognitivist might appeal to a functional or phenomenological characterization of the dimensions of the basic evaluative attitude.

"In Intention (1957/2000), Elizabeth Anscombe defined intentional actions as those to which “a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application” (I, 9). Recently, Anton Ford (2017) has challenged her proposal to understand intentional actions in terms of the question ‘Why?’. Anscombe proposes to define intentional actions in terms of how they are explained (ibid., 219). This, Ford contends, threatens disastrous consequences for our understanding of human action: a focus on action explanation leads us to privilege the standpoint of those who observe, and demand explanation for, intentional actions; leading us to neglect the standpoint of the agent herself as she carries out her action, forcing us to objectify human agency (ibid., 228-230). As a corrective, he suggests that we focus on the question ‘How?’, rather than ‘Why?’, bringing into view an agent’s order of calculation about what to do, and revealing “the structure of what one thinks insofar as one is acting.” (ibid., 227)

I reply to Ford’s worry on Anscombe’s behalf. I draw on some resources from Anscombe’s account of practical truth to argue that, for Anscombe, we develop practical rationality by aiming to act in a way that is practically true; where acting in a way that is practically true is acting in a way that satisfies the description ‘doing well’ (PT, 152). To do that, I suggest, one must grasp why some action satisfies the description ‘doing well’, which means that a practically rational agent must be interested in why some action should be performed, as well as how to perform it. To that extent, the question ‘Why?’ does reveal the structure of what one thinks insofar as one is acting, for Anscombe; so, her focus on the question ‘Why?’ does not objectify agency. "

This talk explores connections between six philosophers: E. E. Constance Jones, May Sinclair, Karin Costelloe-Stephen, Hilda Oakeley, Susan Stebbing, and Margaret Macdonald. They worked within seemingly disparate movements - British idealism, Bergsonism, early analytic - yet I’ll use archival letters to show they belonged to criss-crossing philosophical networks. These letters are due to be published May 2026 (Letters of English Women Philosophers 1902-1951, OUP). Having briefly introduced all six figures, this talk will explore two issues arising from their correspondence: sexism, and shadow networks.

Challenges. All six figures faced significant challenges - including sexism. For example, when Jones writes to Bertrand Russell for permission to attend his all-male 1910 logic lectures, she was conscious of the need to bring a chaperone. In 1937, Macdonald reports she has not applied for a position at Swansea for the university council would not ‘contemplate appointing a woman’. In 1939, Gilbert Ryle commented on Stebbing’s suitability for a Cambridge chair, ‘Of course, everyone thinks you are the right person to succeed Moore, except that you are a woman’.

Shadow networks. Many of our six philosophers knew each other well, yet not a single letter has survived between them. This is probably because (unlike some of their male peers) their philosophic correspondence has not been preserved in a conscious way. Nonetheless, what does survive reveals shadowy personal links between them. They wrote each other employment reference, attended their talks, visited. Going beyond their correspondence, the records of the Aristotelian Society show many discussions through which they interacted. This talk will detail the personal connections between our six women and - going further - sketch the broader women’s networks they belonged to. We’ll see that these women philosophers used their interpersonal networks to address some of the challenges they faced.

"This paper offers a philosophical reconstruction of radical feminist debates about sexual liberation during the 1970s and 1980s, debates sometimes termed the “feminist sex wars”. The emerging picture provides an intervention in current feminist debates about sexual freedom. A recent wave of feminist work has criticized liberal notions of sexual freedom by recovering elements of antipornography feminism, an outgrowth of radical feminism. I argue that we should rather turn to early radical feminism and sex-radical feminism, another off-shoot of radical feminism, to develop a politics of sexuality beyond liberalism. Such a politics closely connects sexual liberation with the ambition to abolish gender as we know it.

To start, I show that various opposing parties within radical feminism, including both antipornography feminism and sex-radical feminism, shared a commitment to politicizing sexuality, rejecting a liberal sexual politics that assigned sexuality to the realm of the private. Sexuality, they all argued, was closely connected to gender: gender-conformity was stabilized by an imperative to sexual conformity, and sexual behaviour was policed regarding its gender-conformity. This entanglement of sexuality and gender implied that the abolition of gender was a condition for sexual liberation. Antipornography feminists drew the conclusion that sexual liberation would have to wait until ‘after the revolution’, leaving them without an effective sexual politics for the present. Sex-radical feminists, by contrast, went on to develop prefigurative strategies of disentangling gender and sexuality by locally decoupling sexuality from real-world power. Importantly, sex-radical gender abolitionist politics was emphatically inclusive of sexual minorities, contrasting with some antipornography feminism. During the 1980s, both sides eventually abandoned an analysis of sexual liberation that was connected to the ambition of abolishing gender, leaving this vision of sexual politics a path not taken. I argue that this development weakens feminist analyses of sexual liberation until today.

Strawson’s Challenge (Strawson 1963; Cappelen 2018) draws attention to one of the methodological issues in conceptual engineering: how to determine whether a conceptual revision preserves the original concept or instead amounts to changing the subject. Much of the recent literature locates conceptual continuity either in semantic content (Cappelen 2018) or in evaluative and functional aims (Queloz 2022; Köhler and Veluwenkamp 2024). This paper argues that neither strategy offers a fully satisfactory, non-arbitrary criterion of conceptual identity across conceptual change.

The paper develops an Austinian account of lexicalized concepts that shifts the focus of continuity from metasemantics to pragmatics (see Austin 1962). On this view, conceptual continuity is not grounded in stable meanings or prescribed functions, but in historically reproduced lineages of pragmatic roles enacted within norm-governed speech-act practices (Sbisà 2009; Witek 2015, 2022). Conceptual continuity is maintained when a revised concept continues to perform the same illocutionary role within these practices, even as interpretive practices, felicity conditions, or uses develop.

On this approach, Strawson’s Challenge is recast as a question concerning the persistence of social and institutional practices rather than one concerning the sameness of stable meaning. To illustrate its explanatory potential, the paper considers the legal concept of woman, showing how a historically sustained pragmatic lineage can support conceptual continuity through significant legal and social change. By contrast, the shift from invalid to disabled person is treated as a case of conceptual discontinuity, in which an established pragmatic lineage is deliberately disrupted, helping to clarify the distinction between conceptual revision and conceptual replacement.

The paper’s main contribution is a Pragmatic Continuity Criterion intended as a diagnostic tool for conceptual engineering. By providing a way of assessing whether a proposal concerns the same concept prior to normative evaluation, the account aims to clarify questions of conceptual identity while remaining neutral with respect to subsequent ethical and political assessment.

References

• Austin, J. L. 1962. How to Do Things with Words. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Cappelen, H. 2018. Fixing Language: An Essay on Conceptual Engineering. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/oso/9780198814719.001.0001
• Köhler, S., and H. Veluwenkamp. 2024. “Conceptual Engineering: For What Matters.” Mind 133, no. 530: 400–27. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzad064
• Queloz, M. 2022. “Function-Based Conceptual Engineering and the Authority Problem.” Mind 131, no. 524: 1247–78. https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzac028
• Sbisà, M. 2009. “Uptake and Conventionality in Illocution.” Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 5 no. 1: 33–52. https://doi.org/10.2478/v10016-009-0003-0
• Strawson, P. 1963. “Carnap’s Views on Constructed Systems Versus Natural Languages in Analytic Philosophy.” In The Philosophy of Rudolf Carnap, edited by P. A. Schlipp, 502–518. Open Court.
• Witek, M. 2015. “Linguistic Underdeterminacy: A View from Speech Act Theory.” Journal of Pragmatics 76, 15–29.
• Witek, M. 2022. “An Austinian Alternative to the Gricean Perspective on Meaning and Communication.” Journal of Pragmatics 201, 60–75. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2014.11.003

Suppose you write a book, which takes you two years, and later someone asks when you wrote it. You might say 'from 2011 to 2012'. And indeed, at some points in 2011 and in 2012, you were writing. At other times you were researching, making notes, editing, and negotiating with the publisher. But at some times in this interval you were eating, sleeping, driving, and doing all the other mundane things one must do. Writing the book took two years, but you didn't spend all of two years writing the book. Writing the book is what I call a 'divided' act. It is an act made up of multiple constituent acts (an hour of research, ten minutes of writing, etc.), each of which is disjoint from the others. Writing the book takes two years, even though no one of these constituent acts takes more than a few hours. Divided acts are very common: writing a book, getting a degree, learning a language, building a house, etc. are all divided acts. I claim that some speech acts are divided acts, and that considering them as such is more philosophically enlightening than as merely speech acts. In particular, taking certain speech acts to be divided explains how acts which can only happen over a long period of time, or with many agents' joint effort can still count as speech acts, though paradigm speech acts are signal utterances by single agents. I describe divided speech acts in more detail, and show that hinting is an example of speech which is best analysed as divided.

Various authors argue that illegitimate threats invalidate consent, whereas legitimate threats do not. I will not question this view. Instead, I ask what, precisely, distinguishes a legitimate threat from an illegitimate one. When is a threat illegitimate? When, if ever, is it legitimate?

Some argue that threats are never legitimate. Others hold that they are legitimate whenever the person who threatens has a right to perform the threatened act. Still others doubt that this is always the case, claiming that legitimacy attaches not to all permissible threatened acts but only to some of them. I argue in this paper that a threat is legitimate if and only if the threatened act is morally permissible, and that the threatened act is morally permissible only if it is an appropriate response to the threatened person’s refusal to perform the desired act. I further argue that it is an appropriate response only if the threatened person has a duty to perform the act in question.

Time seems to flow from the past to the future. We as conscious agents, persist through time; remember the past and make choices that effect the future. Science as a practice relies on this direction of time. We make observations; conduct experiments; and make predictions that test theories. Recent quantum physics has challenged this conception of time. In particular there is a hypothesis that time goes in two directions. (Cohen & Ridley, 2025). We use a model of three games of chess to explore how to conceive of two directions of time and what effect it might have on our scientific practice. In “Forward Chess”, we have time slices represented by positions, and choices represented by moves. The previous position determines the range of possible moves. The move determines the next position. In “Backward Chess” we reverse the direction of time by starting at the check mate position and working towards the starting position. We conclude that there are no significant problems with reversing the direction of time, although competition and co-operation are switched, as is ontological and epistemic interpretations of probability. We then consider “Two Time Chess”, where each player can switch directions in time as many times as they like during their go. In this game both directions in time are open, and neither are fixed. In Two Time Chess there would be no privileged sequence of events, meaning that the position at any time is not determined. This would collapse the distinction between memory and prediction, and between control and observation. However, it would avoid Grandfather paradoxes, (Adlam, 2024) by dropping the assumption of a fixed past. We will use this model to shed light on some famous riddles in Quantum mechanics, such as quantum uncertainty and action at a distance.

There has been a surge of recent interest in phenomenological approaches to quantum mechanics. But despite this interest, a striking passage in Merleau-Ponty's The Visible and the Invisible, in which he explicitly addresses quantum theory, remains underexamined. This paper offers a close reading of that passage, reconstructing Merleau-Ponty's argument and its implications for contemporary attempts to interpret quantum theory in the philosophy of physics. Extending his analyses, including a critique of Louis de Broglie (an early interpreter of quantum theory), I argue that many contemporary interpretations of quantum mechanics reaffirm a “perceptual faith”, which distinguishes sharply an “objective” domain of independently determined objects from a “subjective” domain of our representations of them in experience. This diagnosis helps to explain the current interpretative impasse in the philosophy of quantum theory, which features manifold incompatible interpretations with little theoretical or empirical basis for resolution. I also argue that Merleau-Ponty motivates a phenomenological reassessment of quantum reconstruction, an alternative research program in physics which aims to derive the quantum formalism from empirically indubitable and operationally defined physical principles. Specifically, his claim that we “must recognize as legitimate an analysis of the procedures through which the universe of measures and operations is constituted starting from the life world”, and that we must do so if “physics means to say what is”, promises a novel account of reconstruction according to which its operationalism need not entail instrumentalism, a worry that features prominently in the limited philosophical engagement with this program. In this light, quantum reconstruction appears not merely as a technical project, limited to clarifying formal structure and inter-theoretic relations, but as one that resonates with a deeper phenomenological reorientation of our understanding of nature.

This paper proposes a novel reading of Heidegger’s conception of idle talk (Gerede) as a form of misguided ontological discourse. Against pragmatist readings of Heidegger that construe idle talk in terms of a lack of skilful familiarity with entities, I argue that idle talk is instead situated at the level of the ontological commitments that underlie and structure our experience. Idle talk arises when these commitments disguise (verstellen) entities in inappropriate ontological terms – for instance, by treating human beings as mental substances, or organisms as mere physical entities. The paper proceeds in three steps. First, I reconstruct the pragmatist interpretation of idle talk and stress its inability to account for Heidegger’s claim that idle talk covers-over (verdeckt) entities. Second, I develop a conception of ontological disguise based on Heidegger’s account of semblance and untruth. Idle talk, I suggest, circulates ontological prejudices that have not been grounded in the entities they concern, and thereby contributes to a distorted understanding of them. Third, I foreground the systematic upshot that Heidegger both stresses the inevitability of ontological prejudices and expects epistemically responsible agents to continuously ground them in the entities to which they pertain.

James Ward was a major figure in English philosophy and psychology in the late 19th centuries. He is often credited with bringing about a paradigmatic shift in the study of the mind in England through his phenomenological-style psychology, though his work is now largely neglected.

Shortly after Ward’s death in 1925, Stout wrote that Ward’s theory of mind contained “much that is of permanent value […] which has not yet been assimilated” and that this was “a task which ought certainly to be undertaken soon”. A century later, no assessment of Ward’s philosophical psychology has been undertaken yet.

This paper takes a first step toward filling this gap by focusing on a central aspect of Ward’s phenomenological psychology: his theory of presentation. I argue that Ward’s psychology is grounded in a primitive and irreducible notion of presentation, defined as a twofold subject-object relation, and that his broader psychological theory systematically elaborates this basic structure.

Drawing on German sources (especially Kantian and Brentanian traditions), British empiricism (notably Locke), and contemporary scientific developments (including Darwinian biology), Ward developed a view of the mind in opposition to associationist psychology, with several interconnected theses: (i) a presentation-continuum, the idea that particular presentations are differentiated from a larger presentation, namely the field of consciousness; (ii) grades of consciousness, where the intensity of a presentation defines its vividness in consciousness with a threshold of subconsciousness; (iii) a mereological description of mental life, according to which presentation can be combined with attention and feeling to describe more complex phenomena.

By focusing on Ward’s theory of presentation, I reconstruct how his account generates a model of the structured organisation of consciousness – its field-like unity, internal differentiation, and complex composition.

Some of the most striking objections against structuralist type-free theories of properties and propositions are the Russell-Myhill paradox and Russell's paradox of non-self-applying properties. Drawing on approaches promoted by Fine, Linnebo and Roberts, I articulate a type-free approach in the λ-calculus that treats the ontology of properties as given, while the interpretation of their application as constructed in stages, by specifying its extension based only on properties that have already been individuated. I show that this construction is paradox-free, allows absolutely unrestricted quantification and universal properties, offering a promising environment for theoretical inquiry in metaphysics and formal semantics.

Parental relations loom large in Simone de Beauvoir’s writing. The relationships between children and their parents (especially between mothers and daughters) are explored in-depth across several chapters of The Second Sex, and her own familial relations—particularly her relationship with her mother—are laid out and examined throughout her autobiographical writing. Unsurprisingly, these analyses are overwhelmingly of parental relations undertaken inauthentically and mutilated by patriarchal situations. While Beauvoir does occasionally gesture towards authentic models of parenting, these references are scant. Furthermore, in the secondary literature, the question of authentic parental love has received less attention than that of authentic romantic love.

I begin by suggesting that the nature of parental love appears to be in tension with Beauvoir’s understanding of authenticity in three ways: i) While unilateral devotion is cautioned against in romance, it seems desirable within parental love; ii) Beauvoir’s idea that ethics requires a free appeal to the freedom of the Other seems to preclude the parent from authentic relations with their child if the latter is trapped within a ‘serious world’ of pregiven value and meaning; iii) The situation of the child as ‘serious’ and dependent might mean the parent cannot fully embody Beauvoir’s ideal of ‘generosity’.

I will then argue that we can mostly reconcile and diffuse these tensions. I do this, firstly, by sketching a distinction between devotion and commitment within Beauvoir’s thought; suggesting that they apply to inauthentic and authentic parental love respectively. Secondly, I argue that Beauvoir’s concept of ‘situation’ plays an important role in her understanding of parenthood, and that by centring it we can see hints at a radical future where parenthood can be an authentic project. However, I will close by considering whether, despite these reconciliations, the authenticity of parent–child relationships remain, for Beauvoir, ‘limited’ compared to adult loves.

G.E. Moore's Proof of an External World is generally regarded as an (infamously) bad response to the sceptic. I argue that this reputation is undeserved. First, the real anti-sceptical work of Moore's paper is done by his defence of his 'Proof', not the 'Proof' itself. So Moore's argument doesn't simply beg the question against the sceptic. Second, Moore's Defence - at least with a little rational reconstruction - offers an interesting and possible successful anti-sceptical argument: that the external world sceptic turns out to be committed to a more radical form of epistemological nihilism.

Many philosophers believe that some non-classical logic is correct. Nevertheless, they often rely on classical logic when arguing for their position and defining their (supposedly correct) logic. This may be unproblematic, supported by the idea that classical reasoning can somehow be recaptured inside the non-classical logic. This idea is made formally precise in the so-called classical recapture proofs, and we have such proofs for wide classes of non-classical logics. I show why attempts to justify using classical logic inside paraconsistent, dialetheic theories are bound to be circular – the proofs used to establish the recapture result rely on the very rules they try to justify. By distinguishing between persuasive and explanatory proofs, I argue that this circularity is not a problem in itself. However, this creates a dilemma for dialetheists: (1) either accept these recapture proofs as defeasible and embrace logical anti-exceptionalism, or (2) reject classical recapture altogether. This dilemma, to the best of my knowledge, has not been noted in the literature before.

Despite pain’s phenomenal, neuronal and functional idiosyncrasy, there have been recent attempts to identify a property or set of properties shared by all pains, in virtue of which they are considered pains. In this paper, I argue that such attempts should be rejected. Instead, I suggest that pain is a family resemblance concept constrained by pragmatic and moral considerations. On this view, pains share a range of phenomenal, neuronal and functional properties in a crisscrossing and overlapping manner, rather than a primal pain property or element. However, since many of these properties are also present in non-painful experiences, their presence alone cannot determine whether an experience is painful. I argue instead that pain categorization is guided by practical goals and ethical values. Accordingly, categorizing pain involves not only the identification of common properties, but also evaluating their importance. Pain research should therefore acknowledge that normative judgements are constitutive of pain.

What happens to trust among officeholders (for short ‘office trust’) when one of them deliberately violates institutional rules to secure what she regards as a higher value? This paper addresses a neglected dimension of Walzer’s dirty hands problem: its implications for intra-institutional trust relations. I argue that office trust remains warranted despite justified rule violation if and only if the officeholder acts from a 'pro officio' attitude—comprising role endorsement, norm acceptance, and office accountability. This thesis emerges from examining two competing conceptions of office trust. The reliable rule compliance view grounds trust in behavioral conformity secured by external constraints: monitoring mechanisms, incentive structures, and sanctioning practices that render deviation irrational. This view fails because it conflates trust with mere reliance and presupposes that rules always provide clear guidance—precisely what dirty hands scenarios deny. The judicious role fulfillment view offers a superior alternative by grounding trust in the officeholder’s internal stance toward her role. I establish necessity through three failure cases: removing role endorsement leaves motivational commitment detachable from institutional values; removing norm acceptance eliminates moral remainder and instrumentalizes discretion; removing office accountability renders judgment opaque and unevaluable. Sufficiency follows because these components jointly provide motivational, normative, and justificatory assurance that makes trust rational even under rule violation. An officeholder who manifests this attitude demonstrates stable commitment to institutional values, appropriate moral seriousness about violations, and publicly answerable reasoning that peers can recognize as responsive to institutional mandates. The framework handles hard counter-cases—sectarian officials, erosion by accumulation, adversarial offices—by specifying boundary conditions including minimal openness requirements and publicity tests. The analysis reveals a striking paradox: rule violation can sometimes strengthen rather than undermine trust, provided it manifests the very commitment to institutional values that trust relationships require.

Individuals experiencing impostor syndrome raise the puzzle of simultaneously possessing and lacking sufficient self-trust in the same domain. The three plausible claims below are in tension with one another:

I. Self-trust involves domain-specific confidence in one’s competence.

II. Individuals experiencing impostor syndrome lack sufficient self-trust in domains where neutral observers would expect them to possess it.

III. Individuals experiencing impostor syndrome exhibit sufficient confidence in the same domain, manifested through their confident negative self-assessment in that domain.

This paper argues that the best way to solve the puzzle is to move from an individualistic characterization of self-trust to a relational picture. §1 and §2 explain why the three claims in the puzzle are plausible. §3 refutes the strategy of rejecting Claim III to solve the puzzle. §4 examines the second type of solution proposed by Nadja El Kassar (2019): to describe individuals with impostor syndrome as having self-trust in their self-distrust. §5 turns to Katherine Dormandy’s (2024) approach to reject Claim I and argue that her account fails to explain self-doubt. §6 argues that the better solution is to endorse a relational picture of self-trust, where self-trust consists of an individual’s perception of their relation with their salient community of audience.

A. W. Moore has long argued that there is an interesting and philosophically important kind of mysticism which appeals to the existence of ineffable knowledge. (Moore, 1997; 2019) That mysticism is not confined to its most familiar religious context: it is the mysticism in play in e.g. (some readings of) Wittgenstein's Tractatus, too. According to Moore, the ineffable knowledge central to such mysticism is a kind of know-how (or know-how-related understanding). Silvia Jonas, who agrees that it is ineffable knowledge rather than any other kind of ineffability which is philosophically interesting and plausibly exists, demurs from Moore's suggest that it amounts to know-how, preferring to characterise it in terms of knowledge (of the self) by acquaintance. (Jonas, 2016)

But as Moore and Jonas have been quick to point out, things can be ineffable in very mundane ways (middle sized dry goods are not ineffable in any interesting sense, even though they cannot be said). I will suggest that only one characterisation of the ineffability of ineffable knowledge renders it really philosophically interesting, legitimating talk of ‘mystical insights' worthy of that grandiose description. And not only is that characterisation different from the ones offered by Moore and by Jonas; it appeals to something – ineffable truth – of which both reject the very possibility. Whereas Moore and Jonas believe that we must speak of ineffable knowledge instead of ineffable truths or ineffable propositions, I think propositional knowledge of ineffable truths might be the only kind of non-mundanely ineffable knowledge there could be. (cf. Shaw, 2013; Gäb, 2020) And thinking of mystical insight as knowledge of ineffable truths also affords us very natural accounts of the inferential and broader epistemic roles that mystical insight might be expected to (and has been claimed to) play – accounts which are natural in virtue of appealing to quite familiar general accounts of inference and epistemic significance.

The self-reference rule (SRR) holds that, in first-person thought, ‘I’ refers to the subject who produces the thought. It is often held that a genuine user of ‘I’ must also self-consciously know that she refers to herself. However, mere awareness that one is speaking does not explain why first-person thoughts are self-conscious. Traditional accounts often end up appealing to self-consciousness itself to explain this, which leads to circularity or regress.

O’Brien’s (2007) agency account aims to avoid circularity or regress by grounding self-conscious first-person reference through agent-awareness. On this view, a subject refers to herself by knowing, as an agent, that she is forming the thought. However, the account marginalises passive, non-agential cases, in which subjects still use ‘I’ in accordance with SRR despite lacking agent-awareness.

I therefore offer a self-trust account, where the meaningful use of ‘I’ is secured through Wright’s (2004) idea of default entitlement based on self-trust. This account captures both active and passive first-personal uses in a unified way, while avoiding circularity or regress. I suggest that our capacity for first-person thought rests not merely on agency, but on the deeper constitutive principle of self-trust that warrants us to take such thoughts as our own.

"Happy" has many meanings, but can sometimes be used to refer to a certain positive emotion: the one we express with a smile. In general, emotions seem to have fittingness (appropriateness) conditions. So we should ask: When it is fitting to be happy? This question is important, and our answer can guide one of the most important aspects of our mental lives. What is the answer? I say that it is fitting to be happy about all goods. This is attractive so far as it goes, but just how good does something have to be, in order to be a fitting object of happiness? This abstract question has great relevance in many real-world cases: Should you be happy with your salary because it could be lower, or unhappy because it could be higher? Likewise, whether you should be happy with your lunch, the weather, or your love life, might depend on what you compare actuality with. I defend a view on which fitting happiness depends on how things are going in nearby possible worlds. The resulting view is edifying, in various respects.

Democracy can only work with a consensus on the basic facts. However, such a consensus seems to be harder to reach than ever. With filter bubbles and echo chambers, epistemic vices such as epistemic closed-mindedness or gullibility are thriving. Since it is getting increasingly easy to deceive people and these manoeuvres of deception (fake news, AI-generated deepfakes, etc.) spread with an incredible speed, epistemic virtues such as epistemic open-mindedness, curiosity, diligence, tenacity, or courage are gaining in importance. To save democracy, we need to foster these virtues.

Fostering them individually, however, seems unrealistic in a hostile environment that by design is conducive to epistemic vices. Content that elicits emotions such as anger, hatred, or fear, is rewarded with wide reach, thereby promising recognition, power, and money. Therefore, the problem must be tackled structurally by improving the environment. While individual epistemic agents can initiate change, they must be supported politically. For example, one could devise incentives that reward epistemically virtuous behaviour (for carefully investigated reports, or the quick identification and removal of fake news) and sanction epistemically vicious behaviour (e.g., high fines for platforms that are careless in or do not conduct fact-checking at all). It is important to devise these measures in a way that the epistemic virtues developed do not only help people survive in epistemically hostile environments (which, depending on the degree of hostility, can be an impossible feat) but also enable them to actively shape their environments for the better. Ideally, this leads to a virtuous circle in which structural improvement leads to epistemic character improvement, which in turn leads to more structural improvement, and so on. Only by protecting our epistemic environment, can we save our political one, i.e. our democracy.

Neo-logicists, most notably Bob Hale and Crispin Wright, have wanted to build arithmetic on Hume's Principle (HP):

(HP) ∀F∀G(NxFx=NxGx↔F≈G)

When (HP) is added to a suitable second-order logic, clever definitions enable the derivation of the axioms of second-order arithmetic. The neo-logicists thus reduce arithmetic to logic plus (HP). Moreover, they argue that (HP) is an analytic principle and therefore arithmetic is ultimately analytic too.

But (HP) has the form of an abstraction principle, and many abstraction principles are unacceptable to the neo-logicist, for instance because they are inconsistent or because they are jointly inconsistent with (HP). What differentiates (HP) from these unacceptable abstraction principles? How can (HP) be analytic when its logical form is shared with inconsistent principles? These question, which capture the so-called bad company objection, have proved difficult to answer and continue to plague the neo-logicist programme.

In this paper, I draw on the philosophy of Rudolf Carnap to develop a Carnapian response. After explaining the bad company objection, I outline what I call Carnapian pragmatism. Central to Carnapian pragmatism is the idea that there is no single scientific, mathematical or logical frameworks which is absolutely correct, but instead different frameworks are possible and pragmatic reasons should determine with which frameworks we work. I then show how Carnapian pragmatism can deal relatively straightforwardly with the bad company objection: in short, the problematic abstraction principle, because they are inconsistent, are useless, whereas (HP) is actually a useful principle. The big question is of course: why is (HP) a useful principle to have in a scientific framework? I show that Carnap himself had an answer to this question: (HP) elucidates the way in which numbers and arithmetic more generally find application in describing the empirical world, thereby resolving a traditional philosophical puzzle.

This paper examines Aristotle’s discussion of the possibility of knowledge (epistêmê) in Posterior Analytics I.3. Here, Aristotle presents a school of skeptics who hold that since knowledge can only be obtained through a demonstration, knowledge is impossible. This is because were some proposition known, it would entail a vicious infinite regress of demonstrations. I provide a new interpretation of the argument with a focus on its logical form. There are two key moves in the argument: an infinite regress is derived from a set of premises, and the infinite regress is shown to be vicious. I argue that Aristotle presents these moves in light of his own logical theory. The argument works on the condition that demonstrations are properly distinguished from syllogisms. When Aristotle claims that “it is impossible to traverse the infinite” (72b 10-11), he means that an infinite demonstration cannot be syllogized. The upshot is that the infinite regress argument withstands two common objections. The first states that the argument is circular, for it must assume that there exists knowledge without demonstration in order to show that the infinite regress is vicious. The second objection states that an infinite regress of demonstrations is in fact benign, as is an infinite regress of integers. Insofar as Aristotle’s logical theory has the means to overcome these objection, it provides us a model for formulating successful infinite regress arguments.

According to the complaint model, morality is about avoiding acts that generate complaints. According to total utilitarianism, morality is about maximising aggregate welfare. In cases that involve creating new people, both of these popular views face at least one significant objection: the complaint model fails to get the right result in the Non-Identity Problem, whereas total utilitarianism violates the Procreation Asymmetry. In this paper, I develop an alternative view, which I call the complaint-gratitude model. This view combines the traditional complaint model with a novel view I call the gratitude model, according to which morality is about acting in ways that produce gratitude. Even though the gratitude model initially appears to coincide with the complaint model, I show that the view is distinct from both the complaint model and total utilitarianism. I then argue that combining the gratitude model with the complaint model results in a very appealing hybrid view, which gets the Non-Identity Problem right, accommodates some of the key judgements motivating the Procreation Asymmetry, and secures an intuitive, moderate priority for already-existing people over possible future people.

In this talk, I will argue that Kant’s concept of external freedom includes a notion of independence from the arbitrary will of others that can justify not only material forms of social welfare, but also broader measures aimed at preventing social, cultural, and economic conditions that undermine individuals’ independence. Interpretations of Kant’s political philosophy often oscillate between a negative conception of freedom as non-interference (LeBar 1999) and a broader account that includes the capacity of individuals to set and pursue their own ends (Ripstein 2009). Recent literature has also highlighted affinities with the neo-republican ideal of non-domination, particularly in the work of Philip Pettit (Kleingeld 2020; Love 2025). However, the implications of this conception for social welfare have largely been confined to material redistribution, such as taxation to alleviate poverty. Less attention has been paid to whether Kant’s framework can justify non-material measures, including education or policies aimed at preventing structural forms of dependence. I argue that if material deprivation counts as a form of dependence because it prevents individuals from choosing independently of others, then other conditions that similarly constrain this capacity, such as lack of education or restrictive cultural environments, must also be regarded as incompatible with right. Since coercion is legitimate when it prevents restrictions on freedom, measures aimed at securing these conditions can therefore be justified. I conclude that Kant’s conception of external freedom supports a broader account of social welfare than is usually acknowledged, extending beyond redistribution to include measures that secure the conditions for independent choice.

Why does an otherwise ordinary person sometimes stubbornly retain a belief in the face of independent counterevidence? Existing accounts typically explain this phenomenon by attributing some form of irrationality to the person: non-evidential factors are taken either to distort how the person gathers and assesses evidence or to function as direct, non-evidential reasons for the belief itself (Schleifer McCormick, 2020; Glüer & Wikforss, 2022; Simion, 2024; Flores, 2025). This paper advances an alternative framework that does not rely on such assumptions of irrationality. It argues that non-evidential factors can instead play a role in shaping and sustaining the person’s experiential seemings. In such cases, the person may face an epistemically dilemmic situation: she confronts independent evidence that tells against the belief, yet simultaneously suffers from a powerful seeming that, in various ways, presses her toward accepting it. Her persistence in the belief is explained by the fact that this compelling seeming outweighs the opposing evidence.

It has been argued that so-called wide person affecting views of population ethics cannot coherently account for sequential decision-making in certain kinds of non-identity cases. I show that one diagnosis of this problem is not unique to person-affecting views and also occurs with totalist views. The actual root of the problem is the possibility of making suboptimal permissible sequential decisions. I argue that this is a feature of the reasonable principle of avoiding sunk cost fallacies in situations where there is incomparability. Thus, there is, in fact, no problem to be overcome.

There are those who see wholeheartedness as a kind of agential ideal—that is, a state that agents should strive to achieve. One purported benefit is that the resolution of many internal conflicts comes from an agent unifying themselves behind a particular desire or motive. This sort of resolution could not be achieved by an ambivalent agent, and so the agent should strive for wholeheartedness. I consider D.J. Coates’ attempt to undermine this claim by thinking about the ability of ambivalent agents to exercise their normative competencies such as in the case of making promises to others and being beholden to the obligations that these promises issue. There is reason to be positive about Coates’ counter-position, but I conclude with a sceptical note about the extent to which it matters that an agent’s motives are genuinely their own, which motivates further scepticism about the general debate between ambivalence and wholeheartedness.

According to normative contextualists (NC) in vice epistemology (Battaly 2018, Kidd 2020, McKenna 2023), facts about your social context (e.g., your social position vis-à-vis that of your interlocutors) can determine whether your epistemic trait (e.g., close-mindedness) counts as a virtue or vice. Against this view, I raise two objections. First, I show that contrary to NC, the difference made by facts about one’s social context can be explained by a distinction between epistemic and prudential value. Second, in an epistemically inhospitable environment, NC verdicts often conflict with our intuitions about features of virtuous agents. Next, I show that proponents of NC can retain the advantages of their thesis — that it can explain the complexities of vice attributions — by accepting consequentialism about epistemic vices instead. Ultimately, I show that vice epistemologists should reject NC about epistemic vices.

Contemporary theories of distributive justice have developed sophisticated principles for distributing rights and resources while leaving the distribution of burdens theoretically under-specified. This paper argues that this reflects a structural asymmetry within post-Rawlsian justice theory. Although justice is commonly defined as concerning the distribution of the benefits and burdens of social cooperation, dominant theories have focused primarily on entitlements while neglecting questions about who must bear unavoidable risks, hardships, and sacrifices. The paper introduces the concept of primary burdens: the unavoidable costs that someone must bear for collective life to be sustained. It argues that where distributive justice remains silent, meritocratic reasoning often fills the gap, legitimising unequal exposure to social costs through appeals to capacity or desert. Drawing on theories of structural injustice and positional responsibility, the paper reconstructs duty as shared civic liability, equality as equality of exposure, and responsibility as positional rather than choice-based. It proposes three criteria for evaluating burden allocation under non-ideal conditions: unavoidability, substitutability, and asymmetry of exposure.

Special rights theories dominate debates about the ownership of cultural treasures, grounding property claims in particular historical actions such as discovery, preservation, or transfer rather than in general entitlements. Most discussions of repatriation—as well as debates over the ownership of archaeological finds and artworks with unknown or disputed provenance—are framed in these terms. Any defensible special rights account of original acquisition must incorporate a Lockean proviso, which permits appropriation only if enough and as good is left for others, intended to prevent appropriation from unjustifiably disadvantaging non-appropriators. This paper argues that the proviso must be interpreted pluralistically rather than monistically, rejecting the assumption that all goods contributing to human flourishing are mutually substitutable. It shows that many cultural treasures are irreplaceable, such that they cannot be substituted with any other good without loss, and that they therefore cannot satisfy a pluralistically understood Lockean proviso. The paper concludes that, even within a special rights framework, some cultural treasures cannot legitimately become property.

This paper proposes the necessary conditions for the consciousness to emerge from a physical being by stressing the importance of body-environment interaction in the physical as well as social aspects. Based on the conditions specified, the paper further argues against the possibility that there could be consciousness emerging in the large language model (LLM) so far; in fact, achieving human-level consciousness may not be necessary for building AI consciousness, considering that the purpose of developing AI is to facilitate human beings instead of creating more human-like beings.

When Felix Oppenheim posed the question on whether ‘freedom’ can become a concept of empirical science as dependent on the question on the existence of experiential data to which the concept of freedom can be linked, however indirectly (Oppenheim, 1961), he could perhaps not imagine how the answers to these questions would have been shaped by the subsequent millennium with the digitalization of society, businesses, and human interactions. Once undoubtedly considered philosophical arguments, today these questions are complex subjects of application for analytics applied to what common sense actually considers big data (Dumbill, 2013), and their use by artificial intelligence (AI) technologies. But what are the consequences of the potential and not hypothetical availability of “Big” experiential data for the concept of freedom? What type of knowledge these data ground and what are the relations with liberty? As for the knowledge, Big data ground and refer to what Russell (1910) argued as knowledge by description, connecting, through the intermediary of processes of inference, the truths (carried out by Big data, in our case) with things with which we have acquaintance through our direct experience with the world. As for the relations between this knowledge and liberty, the increasing relevance of big data and analytics is framed and at the same time enact the idea of determinism questioned by Berlin (1999), pointing out that “the growth of knowledge increases the range of predictable events, and predictability - inductive or intuitive - despite all that has been said against this position, does not seem compatible with liberty of choice” (p.182). Particularly interesting is the point by Berlin (1999, p. 186) that all determinism needs is that x can predict the overall behavior of y and vice versa, not disclosing their predictions to one another, and the consequent substitution of knowledge and understanding for attribution of responsibility, actually radically changing our view of what constitutes a person, an act, a choice (Berlin, 1999, p. 186). If to be free is to be able to make an unforced choice, and choice entails competing possibilities (Berlin 1999), the question is not only what choices are enacted or bounded by Big Data and analytics use by AI technologies, but also what impact their design has. In this discussion, a relevant argument is considering technology as representation. As pointed out by Kallinikos (1995), representation is technology in terms of “an overall world orientation concerned with the objectification of the natural and social worlds in ways which render them amenable to calculation and mastery.” Furthermore, the representations framing the access to data, such as e.g., classification schemes and their impact on social worlds they are supposed to serve, have been subject of studies in fields such as social studies of science and technology (see Bowker & Star, 2000). Yet, the question of what values and freedom are enabled, bounded, or enacted “by design” by technology, specifically big data and analytics for AI, remains little explored. Thus, in this contribution, we aim to analyze the concept of freedom in the technology and design of big data and AI analytics. To this end, we will start with the analysis of Isaiah Berlin (1969) and the subsequent debate on positive and negative freedom, as a theoretical background for clarifying the different conceptions of freedom at stake in the considered domain. Then determinism and pluralism of values in big data and analytics design for AI will be questioned for understanding their challenges particularly with regard to individual’s sovereignty and dissent as inseparable within a democratic society (Urbinati, 2009), and whether they enact individualism as solitude or autonomy, isolation, as atomism imposed by an external force, severing public relations, or eventually loneliness, when both private and public relations are severed (see also dimensions Arendt 1958, 1961).

The paper attempts to trace the historical correlations between intentionality and representationalism. The terminology of intentionality derives from medieval scholastic philosophy and was revived in 1874 by Franz Brentano in “Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint”. In this work, Brentano characterised intentionality in terms of ‘the mind’s direction towards an object’. He regarded intentionality as the distinctive mark of mental phenomena, which distinguishes them from physical phenomena. The early modern period is widely perceived by philosophers as not adding anything interesting to the problem of intentionality between the scholastics and Brentano. In the proposed paper, I will argue that Brentano combined both terminology (present in the late scholasticism), the concept (proposed by Brentano), and the problem of intentionality (elaborated by early modern philosophy). Moreover, I will suggest that Brentano’s understanding of the concept of intentionality would not be possible without the early modern discussion of representationalism in terms of the explanatory role of experience — discussion, that is, of how perceptual experience gives us cognitive contact with the mind-independent, external world.

In the context of this discussion, we find an explicit reshaping of the problem of intentionality in the sense proposed by Brentano, though without the terminology of intentionality. Post-Cartesian philosophers were gradually aware that there was a need to distinguish between acts and contents in the description of ideas as representations of things. The distinction was possible only in terms of an intentional relation between something on the mind’s side (act) and something on the world’s side (content). Brentano labelled the modern discussion about the explanatory role of experience in terms of intentionality. In the Brentanian proposal, the terminology and the problem gained a convergence which had been lost, but at the same time, the problem was shaped already by the early modern philosophy discussions about representationalism.

Spinoza is a panpsychist: for him, mentality is a fundamental and pervasive feature of reality. According to a widespread narrative, Spinoza’s commitment to the pervasiveness requirement of panpsychism is commonly understood in perspectival terms: each idea and its object are merely two ways of conceiving one and the same thing. In this paper, I challenge the perspectivist reading and put forward an objectivist interpretation of Spinoza’s panpsychism’s pervasiveness requirement under which, for Spinoza, an idea and its object are numerically distinct things whose sum constitutes a further thing. I argue that this proposal is compatible with Spinoza’s sameness claims and that it avoids the interaction problem without resorting to their numerical identity.

I begin by reconstructing two influential ways of reading Spinoza’s “one and the same thing” claims. On the Mode-Identity reading, if x is a mode of one attribute, then there exists, in each of God’s other attributes, one and only one mode numerically identical to x. On the Ideas–Things Identity reading, if x is an idea whose object is y, then x and y must themselves be numerically identical. I contend that both interpretations come at a significant cost. Mode-Identity leaves unexplained what grounds numerical identity across attributes, while Ideas–Things Identity appears to violate Leibniz’s Law. I then argue that Spinoza’s texts support a less radical account of the mind–body relation. Drawing on Karolina Hübner’s representational interpretation, I account for mind–body unity in terms of the union between an idea and its object. However, I depart from Hübner by denying that this union entails numerical identity. Instead, I argue that an idea and its object jointly constitute a third entity, numerically identical to their mereological sum and that Spinoza’s parallelism is structurally akin to the accounts of mind-body co-variation employed by Malebranche and Leibniz.

One of the major debates in Kant scholarship in the past two decades has concerned the relation between the understanding and intuitions. Roughly speaking, the disagreement is about the question: are acts of the understanding necessary to generate intuitions? Intellectualists claim that the answer is yes, whereas sensibilists claim that the answer is no.

The intellectualist-sensibilist debate has become intertwined with the question of where to locate the threshold of ‘phenomenal consciousness’ among these representations – e.g., are intuitions conscious? There is plenty textual evidence that suggests that Kant views empirical consciousness and self-consciousness as being dependent on acts of the intellect (e.g, A120, B160).

I argue here that i) outer intuitions are generated independently of acts of intellect, but that acts of intellect are constitutive of our state consciousness. In other words, I suggest that unsynthesized intuitions, though independent of the intellect, are not conscious states for the subject.

I argue that being related to inner sense is necessary for the conscious presentation of appearances. Here my argument relies on Kant’s claim that time is the form of inner sense (A34/B50) and on the phenomenological observation that all conscious outer representations that a subject like us can have are given in time. I argue that these jointly entail that an intuition cannot be temporal without being related to inner sense.

I then argue that only acts of understanding can relate representations given by outer sense to inner sense. Kant argues in both the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Analytic (B67-9, B154), that it is the active subject who affects itself with representations. I argue that we should understand part of this self-affection to consist in relating spatial manifolds given by outer sense to inner sense. Hence, I conclude that though not constitutive of intuitions, the intellect is constitutive of our consciousness.

In her recent book The Dynamics of Epistemic Injustice Amandine Catala sets out to theorize the nature and significance of what she calls ‘hermeneutical breakthroughs’, which people experience when something about themselves that was previously obscure to them suddenly becomes intelligible to them. Her central example is that of a woman whose neurodivergent traits suddenly become intelligible to her when she realizes that she is in fact Autistic. I aim to deepen our understanding of such first-order hermeneutical breakthroughs by contrasting them with what I propose to call second-order hermeneutical breakthroughs, which people experience when they realize that it should not matter quite so much whether something about themselves is intelligible to them. I illustrate this idea by picking up where Catala’s discussion of neurodivergence leaves off, drawing on Foucault, Barthes, Marx, contemporary disability studies and first-person accounts to identify some of the interpersonal, institutional, and political-economic factors tending to make it matter quite so much whether someone’s being Autistic is intelligible to them. I generalize from this example to argue that unrecognized by Catala, all genuine first-order hermeneutical breakthroughs in fact take place under a greater or lesser degree of hermeneutical pressure – where the more hermeneutical pressure someone is under, the more it matters whether something about themselves is intelligible to them. I compare the typical affective textures of first-order and second-order hermeneutical breakthroughs, arguing that while the former tend to bring relief the latter tend to bring resentment. Finally, I argue that whereas experiencing first-order hermeneutical breakthroughs will tend to motivate the pursuit of so-called interests-as-given strategies to tackle hermeneutical injustices, experiencing second-order hermeneutical breakthroughs will tend to motivate the pursuit of so-called interests-in-question strategies – reframing the latter as being aimed at lessening hermeneutical pressure.

"While accounts of care distinguish between caring action and caring attitudes, there’s no consensus as to whether an instance of care requires both a caring action and a caring attitude. In this paper, I argue that we ought to define caring actions in such a way that upholds this distinction and that recent attempts by Collins (2015) and Steyl (2020) conflate actions and attitudes, consequently requiring both for something to count as an instance of care. Through a central focus on the role of the concept of intention, I contend that a thick notion of intention, intention-to-φ, is too morally demanding and exclusionary of candidate cases of care. I propose a thinner notion of intention, intention-in-φ, as preferable in defining caring actions.

First, I briefly give some background to accounts of care, including the distinction between caring actions and attitudes. Then I present Steyl’s (2020) and Collins’ (2015) definitions of caring actions and critique them on the basis that they fail to capture role-based care, delegated care and instances of bad care as care at all (Engster, 2023). I then use resources from the philosophy of action (Anscombe, 1963; Paul, 2020) to motivate a distinction between thick and thin notions of intention. Finally, I argue that the thick notion is not necessarily required for an action to be an instance of caring, a thinner notion is sufficient to capture an action as caring. Intention-in-action rather than intention-to-act allows intentions to be conveyed by social roles or directed on behalf of the cared-for rather than originating in the caregiver’s own motivational states, upholding a clear distinction between caring actions and caring attitudes. This aligns with care ethics’ emphasis on responsiveness and the perspective of the care recipient and helps clarify the structure of caring action without over idealising or collapsing it into mere service.

Episodic memory has various features in humans. In the what-where-when-experiment it is tested whether scrub jays have some of those features (Clayton & Dickinson, 1998; Clayton et al., 2001). Scrub jays are able to cache their preferred food (worms) and less preferred food (peanuts) at different times. Later they can recover the food. Sometimes this will be when the worms are still good. So, for a successful completion scrub jays would need to recover the worms. However, sometimes they get to recover the food only after the worms have already degraded. In this case, the scrub jays should search for the peanuts. These experiments serve to show that scrub jays have some features of human episodic memory: they can remember what, where and when something happnened in an integrated experience that can be used flexibly (Clayton & Dickinson, 1998; Clayton et al., 2001). They have episodic-like memory.

In this paper, I explore whether episodic-like memory is as ethically significant as episodic memory. I consider two ethical theories: utilitarianism and the capability approach (Bentham, 1780; Nussbaum, 2023; Singer, 2024). I argue that for both theories having episodic memory is morally significant. This implies that a creature with this capacity deserves careful, moral consideration relating to their memory capacities. For episodic memory to be morally significant both theories demand certain features of episodic memory. However, episodic-like memory might not include those features, like the conscious re-experience which is not tested for.

Nevertheless, it would be too quick to conclude that creatures to which researchers only attribute episodic-like memory, should not be ethically considered as having episodic memory. Instead, I argue that a more precautionary conlusion is justified when considering animals that show various features of human episodic memory and are said to be conscious.

Modal rationalism is the claim that for all p, if it is ideally conceivable that p, then there is a metaphysically possible world, W, in which p is true. This will be true just if there are no strong a posteriori necessities ('strong necessities'), where a strong necessity is a proposition that is conceivably false, but which is true in all metaphysically possible worlds.

But are there any strong necessities? Various alleged examples have been proposed and argued over in the literature, but there is no consensus on whether any is genuine. I aim to move the debate forwards, and demonstrate the truth of modal rationalism, by proving the negative: that there are no strong necessities. In fact, I argue that it is not a merely contingent truth that there are no strong necessities, but a necessary one: strong necessities are impossible, and therefore modal rationalism is necessarily true.

But if modal rationalism is a necessary truth, then it must – by its own lights – be an a priori truth. I outline two arguments in support of this claim.

The first is a two-step argument to show that the very idea of strong necessities is ultimately incoherent. Strong necessities require us either to deny that ideal conceivability entails ideal epistemic possibility, or to deny that ideal epistemic possibility entails metaphysical possibility. But either move, I argue, leads to incoherence.

The second is a transcendental argument from the possibility of modal knowledge: if it were ideally conceivable that there are strong necessities, then it would be impossible for us to have any modal knowledge of the world. Given that we do have some modal knowledge of the world, it follows that strong necessities are not ideally conceivable, and therefore that modal rationalism itself is an a priori truth.

This paper presents and defends a novel objectivist position in the metaphysics of colour debate. Colour objectivism holds that colours are mind-independent properties which continue to exist unperceived. Two objectivist accounts of colour are colour physicalism and colour primitivism, which are typically taken to be inconsistent and hence in direct competition (e.g., Logue, 2016a, 2016b). Byrne and Hilbert (1997, 2003) defend a colour physicalism which maintains that colours are type-identical to (disjunctions of) surface spectral reflectances (SSRs). Primitivist accounts of colour such as Campbell’s (1993, 2006) explicitly reject type-identity relations between colours and their lower-level physical correlates, maintaining rather that our colour experiences are revelatory of the essences of colours, and that colours are sui generis properties ‘over and above’ their lower-level physical correlates such as SSRs. In this paper I reject this dichotomy by offering a middle-way objectivist position which endorses a primitivist account of colour that is explicitly consistent with an unorthodox kind of reductive physicalism. I appeal to recent structuralist definitions of theoretical reduction to show how the type-identity between primitive colours and SSRs can be denied, whilst maintaining that primitive colours are nevertheless higher-level physical properties amenable to reductive explanation. Influenced by Dennett (1991) on ‘real patterns’, Wallace (2022, 2026) defines theoretical reduction as a formal relation of instantiation between higher-level and lower-level mathematical models. I develop a structural account of primitive colour space inspired by Broackes (1992) to apply to Wallace’s (2022, 2026) structuralist definition of reduction. This results in a view I call 'colour structuralism', under which there exists a model of SSR structure which mathematically instantiates a model of primitive colour structure, and hence colour may be reductively explained whilst denying type-identity.

Some scientific representations – theories, diagrams, pictures – aid understanding better than others. I argue that a representation’s aesthetic qualities make a difference to how easily one can see how features of the target phenomenon are related and thus how successfully it can be used to understand a phenomenon. In other words, there is an aesthetic component to scientific representation and understanding. For example, the symmetry, simplicity, and figure-ground contrast of the magnetic anomaly map nicknamed The Zebra Pattern contributed to the breakthrough that led to the formulation of the theory of plate tectonics. Both the map and the theory are often described as beautiful and elegant (Oreskes (2003), Miyata-Sturm (2024)). In contrast, another of Mason and Raff’s (1961a) maps, where the positive and negative magnetisation was displayed with less visual clarity, did not capture the scientists’ imagination (Schindler (2007)).

Recently, a number of philosophers of science have argued that the aesthetic qualities of scientific theories and other representations can be conducive to non-factive understanding (Elgin (2020), Ivanova (2020), Kosso (2007)). I argue that this view cannot make sense of the epistemic value of aesthetics in science. In particular, it cannot explain how the aesthetic qualities of the Zebra Pattern could contribute to either the formulation or confirmation of plate tectonics. Non-factivists correctly claim that divergence from truth can make it easier to see patterns and causal dependencies that a more complete representation would drown in detail (Elgin (2020), Potochnik (2017)), but it is precisely the accurate representation of real-world patterns – not the way in which they diverge from the truth – which makes these ‘felicitous falsehoods’ epistemically valuable. Simply put, epistemic success comes from what science gets right, and aesthetic qualities can contribute to getting things right.

Most non-consequentialists reject the unrestricted interpersonal aggregation that consequentialists typically accept. Yet many share the intuition that one ought to save the greater number in ‘rescue dilemmas’ – cases where one can save one person or several others, with the options differing only in the number saved. I offer a novel account of the locus of the disagreement about aggregation, and on this basis suggest a new way for non-consequentialists to vindicate the intuition without abandoning their suspicion of aggregation.

Focusing on a case where one can save A, or B, or B&C, I first argue that the key issue is not whether the relevant reasons aggregate at all. Arguably, one ought to save B&C conditional on not saving A. Assuming an attractive, widely held view about how reasons determine deontic status, the best explanation is that the reasons to save B&C aggregate, i.e., are jointly weightier than each alone.

Second, I argue that aggregation alone does not entail that one ought to save the greater number, by considering a variant in which A is the agent herself. Here, saving B&C is plausibly supererogatory. This is consistent with aggregation if the reasons to save A and to save B are on a par, and likewise for the reasons to save A and to save B&C.

To vindicate the intuition that one ought to save the greater number, non-consequentialists should therefore reject parity between the reasons to save A and to save B&C when A is not the agent, and hold instead that the latter are weightier in this case. I conclude by sketching how the idea of the separateness of persons provides a rationale for the resulting view and by indicating how this view addresses familiar aggregation worries, including those arising from Scanlon’s Transmitter Room case.

Perdurantism posits that persons persist as four-dimensional mereological fusions of psychologically continuous temporal parts, viewing extended actions as sequences of shorter acts executed by distinct temporal parts. This conceptualization parallels collectives, where individual members contribute to collective actions. However, assigning moral responsibility becomes complex for perduring persons, as it does for collectives, because many temporal parts do not directly participate in extended actions, potentially leading to unfair outcomes when it comes to blame (and praise). This paper explores the Perdurantist Responsibility Gap (PRG), juxtaposing it with collective responsibility gaps. The goal is to bridge the PRG and provide a nuanced understanding of moral responsibility within Perdurantism.

Suppose that Silas ought to attend a faculty meeting, that Silas also ought to watch his child’s school play, and that Silas cannot do both. Such a situation, if it is possible, is an example of a deontic conflict. However, if one accepts a small number of plausible principles about the logical behavior of ‘ought’, admitting the possibility of deontic conflicts will lead to absurdity. Thus deontic conflicts cause trouble for standard systems of deontic logic, which accept those principles. So standard systems of deontic logic must find ways to avoid admitting deontic conflict. However, for those of us who are friends of deontic conflict, a range of what are called ‘conflict-tolerant deontic logics’ have been proposed. But ought, or ought not, we be friends of deontic conflict? In this paper, I ask whether the strategies deployed by standard deontic logicians to avoid deontic conflict have philosophical merit. My argument proceeds by considering cases of what I call ‘inter-individual deontic conflict’. These are cases in which one individual, A, ought to X, a different individual B, ought to Y, but it is impossible for both A to X and Y to B. Unlike cases of intra-individual deontic conflict (such as the case of Silas) it is (or at least it ought to be) uncontroversial that cases of inter-individual deontic conflict are possible. However, I claim that the resources which the standard deontic logician deploys in order to avoid intra-individual deontic conflict are too powerful: these resources inevitably make it impossible to give a plausible account of the possibility of inter-individual deontic conflict. I suggest that logicians must refuse to analyze ‘X ought to A’ as equivalent to ‘It ought to be that X A’s’. I conclude that any adequate system of deontic logic must befriend deontic conflict.

Right action motivated by the wrong reasons is not praiseworthy. While this much is uncontroversial, there remains significant debate over which motive grants moral worth. The plausibility of each candidate prompts some to adopt a pluralist position, holding that multiple motives grant right action moral worth. Nomy Arpaly recently objected to this view, claiming it entails a contradiction. I argue Arpaly’s objection fails for two reasons.

First, the objection conflates motivating concern for morality with mere belief about morality. These come apart, as when one believes their action is right but is motivated entirely by other considerations. Moreover, removing this conflation to secure validity makes the objection obviously false.

Considering the relationship between moral belief and motivation reveals the second and broader issue. Even if honest moral ignorance excuses, the belief that one’s action is right is insufficient to excuse wrong actions from blame. Instead, this belief must motivate the action. This takeaway undermines a crucial premise in Arpaly’s objection and has significant implications for the moral worth debate.

If I am right, pluralism about moral worth is unscathed by Arpaly’s substantial objection and better equipped to explain why one may be praiseworthy for an action one’s own beliefs condemn.

"Strawson’s Basic Argument says that we are endowed with reasons by the genes, upbringing and experience we chanced to have. We subsequently base our decisions upon these endowed reasons – and/or other reasons chosen by these endowed reasons. Therefore, we are not morally responsible for our decisions. I show how we can have moral responsibility (in the traditional strong sense that Strawson discussed) despite Strawson’s ‘Basic Argument’.

‘Capacity Accounts’ take a person to be responsible for doing act A1 if: he knows that it is wrong do A1 and had the capacity to not do A1 but still does it; or does not know doing A1 is wrong but had the capacity to learn that doing act A1 is wrong but chose not to learn. How though can these decisions – to learn and to act on what has been learnt – escape the clutches of Strawson’s Basic Argument?

First, I distinguish H-Learning (coming to think a certain way through copying, responding to reward and punishment, etc) from D-Learning (deepening understanding, appreciating and mastering ideas, increasing insight and wisdom etc.). Through D-Learning mathematics, science and ethics you acquire new reasons which are independent of your endowed reasons. 'Paradigm shifts' in physics are a particularly clear example of this; and arguably something similar happens in ethics, for instance when someone selfish learns sufficient to become someone who treats every person as an end.

Second, I argue that the most fundamental decision that you face is whether to, ‘Strive to D-Learn ethics and to act on what you have so far D-Learned’ (‘SLAL’). I show, through adopting the first-person perspective, that this decision cannot be conditioned or compelled by your endowed reasons or reasons chosen by or derived from them; and can be made non-arbitrarily. Therefore, you are morally responsible for this 'Foundational Choice'; and for any acts whose performance can be traced back to this choice. Notwithstanding this, those who are unable to SLAL are not morally responsible; and those who SLAL yet do a wrong act because they have not yet D-Learnt sufficient to know not to do it, are not morally responsible for it. "

Co-author: Jonathan D. Payton

Here are two attractive metaphysical views: a group is identical to its members; and a whole is identical to its parts. While these views have their defenders, both seem to be felled by simple objections, which draw on plausible assumptions about the semantics of plural partitives.

Plural partitives are expressions of the form [Det [of NP]], where the embedded noun phrase is plural. Two examples are ‘one of the players’ and ‘some of them’. It’s generally assumed that such constructions are extensional: whether ‘a is one of b’ is true, for instance, depends solely on the denotations of ‘a’ and ‘b’. But now consider these sentences:

(1) One of the players is Québécois.

(2) One of the teams is Québécois.

If the teams are identical to the players, then the standard approach to partitives suggests that (1) and (2) have the same truth-conditions. But this is false: if only one of the people making up the two teams is Québécois, then (1) is true while (2) is false. So, it seems, groups can’t be identical to their members. Byeong-uk Yi raises similar worries for the view that wholes are identical to their parts.

In this paper, we develop a theory of plural partitives — including a compositional semantics — on which arguments like these are invalid. Key to our approach is the concept of a generalized cover, which represents a way in which a plurality may be carved into subpluralities. The reason (1) can be true while (2) is false is not that ‘the players’ and ‘the teams’ denote different things, but that those terms induce different carvings, thus generating different truth-conditions for our sentences.

According to Salmon (Frege's Puzzle, 1986), a rational subject can believe and disbelieve the same Russellian proposition under different guises. Russellian propositions are structured entities constituted by individuals, properties, relations and operations. Guises are modes of presentation (whose nature and identity Salmon leaves open) that do not enter the semantic content of sentences but affect the truth conditions of belief reports.

In Overfitting and Heuristics in Philosophy (2024), Williamson similarly maintains that a rational subject can believe and disbelieve the same proposition under different guises (which, on Williamson's view, are mixtures of linguistic and perceptual types, whose identity remains indeterminate). Unlike Salmon, Williamson conceives propositions as intensions, i.e. sets of possible worlds, in order to avoid problems faced by neo-Russellians like Salmon, in particular the following. Let ⟨O,⟨p₁,…,pₘ⟩⟩ and ⟨O*,⟨p*₁,…,p*ₙ⟩⟩ be compound Russellian propositions, where O and O* are operations, and p₁,…,pₘ,p*₁,…,p*ₙ are component Russellian propositions. From FINEGRAIN, a principle attributed to neo-Russellians, Williamson derives unacceptable consequences.

FINEGRAIN: If ⟨O,⟨p₁,…,pₘ⟩⟩=⟨O*,⟨p*₁,…,p*ₙ⟩⟩, then O=O*, m=n, and pᵢ=p*ᵢ for 1≤i≤n.

My talk examines advantages and limits of Williamson's account compared with Salmon's. Against Williamson, I first argue that propositions are not sets, since they have truth values that sets lack. Second, it is unclear which worlds are relevant for constructing his propositions: metaphysical, conceptual … or logical, and in the last case, which logic would be involved? Third, if worlds - as many theorists maintain - aggregate states of affairs, and states of affairs are entities similar to Russellian propositions, then Williamsonian propositions would ultimately presuppose Russellian ones. Fourth, although Williamson offers an appealing argument against Salmon's view that guises affect the truth conditions of belief reports, it remains unclear what those conditions are in Williamson's view. Finally, I argue that Williamson's riticism of FINEGRAIN is not compelling.

Most assume that the bad cases of illusion and hallucination are not perceptions. What I call ‘Meinongian Theories of Perception’ disagree: in the good case, I stand in a relation to existing objects – MacBeth perceives the existing dagger – whilst in the bad case, I stand in a relation to non-existent objects – MacBeth perceives the non-existent dagger. My aim is to properly introduce Meinongian Theories of Perception, for they receive little notice in the literature. I distinguish between two versions of such theories, a psychological version, in which non-existent objects are intentional, and an apsychological version, in which non-existent objects are mind-independent. I argue that the psychological version collapses into disjunctivism, whilst the apsychological version remains a live but underexplored option. The broader lesson learned is that the ontological status of what is perceived matters for theories of perception.

Are visual experiences of total darkness illusory/hallucinatory or cases of veridical perception? I argue that they are neither. First, I argue that these experiences are not veridical because they do not fulfil the matching condition for veridically, i.e., that our experience matches what is there in the environment. Secondly, I argue that visual experiences of total darkness are neither illusory nor hallucinatory. I claim that they are not illusions because they do not misrepresent any property in the environment, and that they are not hallucinatory because they exhibit a strong dependency between the scene before our eyes and what we seem to see, something missing in all cases of hallucination. Instead, I argue that visual experiences of total darkness are indetermined visual experiences. This view, I claim, vindicates the intuitive idea that in seeing total darkness we seem to see something while failing to see anything.

I argue that agency does not require genuine alternative possibilities or ultimate control over action. While many philosophers maintain that agency exists only if agents can choose among multiple physically possible courses of action—choices that are “up to” the agent—I defend a compatibilist account on which agency is fully consistent with determinism. On my view, agency consists in flexible self-causation: an entity is an agent insofar as it can flexibly cause itself to pursue goals through internal macro-states. These macro-states may include mental states such as beliefs, desires, and intentions, but consciousness is not required for agency; even simple biological systems can qualify as agents.

I contrast this view with Helen Steward’s agency incompatibilism, which ties agency to an “open future” and to agents’ being ultimate causes of their own actions. I argue that neither everyday observation nor evidence from neuroscience supports the claim that agents ultimately settle among alternative possibilities. While organisms exhibit “two-way powers” in the sense that they can act or refrain from acting, empirical evidence strongly suggests that choices are produced by neural processes that precede conscious awareness and are themselves shaped by prior causes.

I also assess Kevin J. Mitchell’s appeal to quantum indeterminacy as a source of genuine alternatives that agents might harness. Even if indeterminacy introduces causal slack at the microphysical level, it does not follow that agents ultimately select among alternatives. The macro-states that constrain and guide action are themselves products of genetic, developmental, environmental, and social influences beyond agents’ control, as emphasized by work in the behavioral sciences.

I conclude that agents can be genuine causes of their actions without being ultimate causes or facing open futures. Agency, properly understood, is compatible with determinism, even if libertarian free will is not.

Assertion requires accountability. But what exactly does such accountability amount to? Recent debates surrounding AI assertion have brought this question into sharp focus. A prominent view ties accountability to sanctions – in order to assert, one must be the appropriate target of norm-related sanctions. In this article I argue that the sanctions view is too strong, ruling out not only AI assertion but plausible human instances as well. In its place, I propose a weaker view, which centres responsiveness, not sanctions. This view, I argue, captures assertion's norm-governed and social character without overgeneralising. The AI assertion pessimist faces a dilemma: maintain the sanctions view and risk ruling out plausible instances of human assertion; or adopt the responsiveness view and lose their grounds for excluding AI assertion. The result is a clearer picture of what norm-governance and accountability does and does not require of asserters.

In this paper, I will take a fresh look at a number of persistent epistemic regress problems, including Agrippa’s trilemma and problems of meta-justification, meta-awareness, and metaphysical explanation. Regress-problems must be divided into two groups, starting-problems that initiate a regress, and stopping-problems that attempt to end them. I will use this distinction to explore regress problems of justification, explanation, understanding, reasoning, argumentation, and belief. However, I will proceed by systematically investigating regresses of potential carriers of these epistemic phenomena – propositions, assertions, and beliefs – and the causal relations between them. I will argue that the metaphysical constraints on these regresses are substantially different. Proceeding in this way, we acquire a promising new classification of traditional epistemic regress problems and potential solutions. We can detect analogies between regresses of different epistemic phenomena with the same type of carriers but also distinguish between different regress problems for the same type of epistemic phenomena with different carriers. Moreover, asymmetries between regress problems of arguing and making someone believe and between explaining and making someone understand will be revealed.

Intuitively, it seems that no justification can be required from the moral agent who does not give one's life to save others. Omissions of supererogatory actions do not seem to require justification or guilt. Then why does the problem of supererogation demand a justification for omitting morally good deeds?

I argue that thinking about the problem of supererogation (i.e. asking how can we explain that excellent moral deeds are not obligatory) may lead to distinguishing between two ways of seeing morality and its normative force. The concept of supererogation often departs from the usual way of seeing the moral domain: it makes use of obligation and duty only to state that there is a moral realm beyond duty and the usual moral obligation. It strongly suggests, therefore, a different core of morality, one that is not moral obligation.

C. Korsgaard, J. Dancy and M.O. Little already walk along these lines when they speak about a normative force that is ”attractive” rather than ”compulsive”, or about ”non-deontic reasons” and ”enticing reasons”, respectively. My aim is to clarify the distinction and to show that a non- deontic normative force amounts to a different way of seeing morality altogether.

If developments in artificial intelligence continue, we may end up living in a post-scarcity society. Among the many questions that could be asked about what should be done in such a society is the following: How should we treat nonhuman animals? This paper focuses in particular on animal agriculture, asking whether we have any obligation to stop farming animals in a post-scarcity society. I argue that farming animals in a post-scarcity society could be plausibly done in a way that is morally permissible, even if the practice involves killing animals and consuming their flesh. To do this, I examine five types of objections to farming animals: welfare-based objections, wrongness-of-killing objections, respect-based objections, anthropocentric objections, and virtue ethics-based objections. I argue that these objections target contingent, rather than necessary, features of animal agriculture, suggesting that animal agriculture could be done in a way that avoids these objections. I conclude that while certain forms of animal agriculture in the future may be permissible, there are some significant associated risks that need to be addressed.

Many people hold that meaningfulness and well-being are distinct dimensions of the good life. But how do these dimensions of the good life relate? In this paper, I develop a novel account, according to which the meaningfulness of our lives depends on our attitudes to things that make our lives go better. More precisely, φ is meaningful for an agent A if and only if (i) φ contributes to A’s well-being, and (ii) A has an appropriate attitude to φ, where “appropriate attitude” can be spelled out as an attitude of care (Frankfurt 1998, 2004). The novel feature of this account is that meaningfulness depends on well-being: something that does not contribute to our well-being cannot be meaningful for us. I defend this view by addressing two objections. First, I claim that cases of self-sacrifice are not counterexamples to my view, arguing that cases of self-sacrifice are most plausibly understood as cases in which agents forego an opportunity to maximize their well-being (often in favour of increased meaningfulness). Second, I defend the idea that what is meaningful for an agent depends on the agent’s subjective attitudes by showing that my account, when coupled with an objectivist account of well-being, can accommodate a range of objectivist intuitions about meaningfulness. Finally, I argue that my view is superior to alternative views on the relationship between meaningfulness and well-being that have been proposed in the literature by Metz (2007, 2012, 2013), Woodard (2017), and Hammerton (2022). I argue that my view is not vulnerable to the challenge that meaning is merely a subset of well-being, rather than a distinct category; that it maintains the powerful intuition that meaningfulness possesses final (not merely instrumental) value; and is compatible with a variety of views on the nature of well-being.