The ontology of beauty has been relatively neglected in both metaphysics and aesthetics over the past century or more, and nowhere more than in the literature devoted to feminist critique of contemporary beauty ideals. Superficially, this is puzzling. In this paper, I explain why the omission makes sense, and I argue for the conclusion that beauty is a contextually conferred social property. Central

The temporal unity of multimodal audio–visual experiences seems to be stronger than their spatial unity. In particular, when one has an ordinary audio–visual experience, one is able to recognize that there is a non-visual part of space—behind one's head—but one is not aware of purely visual or auditory parts of time. This paper investigates the spatiotemporal unity of audio–visual experiences by applying

I argue that, despite the vast philosophical and art-historical literature on Duchamp's Fountain, close attention to historical evidence reveals that at heart of the practice of art around the 1910s lay an overlooked paradox—an apparently valid argument, with apparently true but overlooked premises, to the then apparently absurd conclusion that Fountain is a work of art. In response to it, I identify

Artificial moral patients (or AMPs) are those things successfully made to resemble moral patients, but are not. They are artificial both in the sense that they are made by us (artefacts), and that they are not a real instance of what they are made to resemble (artifice). ChatGPT, sex dolls, social robots, and non-player characters are all examples of AMPs. As these technologies start to resemble humans

Many philosophers agree that the distinction between lying and misleading is detected by reliable intuitions in some prototypical cases and a diagnostic test that accords misleaders, but not liars, a kind of deniability for the disbelieved information they communicate. In this paper I take the soundness of such intuitions for granted and provide a definition of lying that explains the deniability that

Seyyed Mohsen Eslami and Alfred Archer have argued for what they call the cautionary account of supererogation. According to this account, an action is supererogatory iff it involves exercising caution in doing the right thing in cases where the agent's self-interest gets into conflict with the interests of others. They argue that further to be interesting in its own right, this account can solve some

According to theorists of hermeneutical injustice, how we understand our social experiences is contingent on relations of hermeneutical power: the differential ability of groups to influence social meanings. On the prevailing understanding, privileged groups enjoy more hermeneutical power, at the expense of the marginalized. This paper argues that this obscures the sense in which we can possess different

This paper argues for a responsibilist account of knowledge: S knows that p iff S believes the truth that p (rather than one of the alternatives to p) because S forms/retains the belief in a way that is ultima facie epistemically responsible. This account implies that knowing that p requires neither having evidence that favors p over ∼p, nor possessing reliabilist virtues, nor exhibiting responsibilist

It is a widespread assumption that permanent philosophical dissensus indicates that none of the parties has philosophical knowledge. However, this assumption is based on the view that the philosophers’ community would recognize instances of individual philosophical knowledge if someone had such epistemic achievement. The problem is that it is challenging to justify this view because the idea that the

Protection rackets are used by criminal organizations to secure power, wherein “protection” is offered to individuals for threats coming from the criminal organization itself. In this paper, I put forth the concept of a moral racket as a type of structural racket wherein social dominants exploit moral reputation to perpetuate systems of domination. A moral racket occurs when individuals forcefully

Suppose we observe many emeralds which are all green. This observation usually provides good evidence that all emeralds are green. However, the emeralds we have observed are also all grue, which means that they are either green and already observed or blue and not yet observed. We usually do not think that our observation provides good evidence that all emeralds are grue. Why? I argue that if we are

Some philosophers have presented arguments that the all-things-considered-better-than relation admits of cycles. The most prominent arguments for this conclusion are spectrum arguments. Whether or not any spectrum arguments are sound is a topic of debate among value theorists. In this paper, I consider whether they are credible or incredible, i.e., whether or not there is anything of a distinctively

This paper provides a novel defence of the philosophical use of examples drawn from literature, by comparison with thought experiments and real cases. Such fictional examples, subject to certain constraints, can play a similar role to real cases in establishing the generality of a social phenomenon. Furthermore, the distinct psychological vantage point offered by literature renders it a potent resource

We care about whether the people around us can take a joke. And this care has a moral tinge to it: we're more likely to trust good-humoured people, and are prone to accusing humourless people of being ‘sanctimonious buzzkills’ who need to ‘get over themselves’. But are these moralized reactions justified? And what, if anything, justifies them? This paper discusses the moral value of humour in terms

It is essential that formal models come with interpretations: accounts of how the models relate to the phenomena. The traditional representation of degrees of belief as mathematical probabilities comes with a clear and simple interpretative story. This paper argues that the model of degrees of belief as imprecise probabilities (sets of probabilities) lacks a workable interpretation: The standard interpretative

Recent work in social epistemology has begun to make use of the behavioral-scientific concept of the nudge, but without sustained attention to how it should be translated from behavioral to epistemic contexts. We offer an account of doxastic nudges that satisfies extensional and theoretical desiderata, defend it against other accounts in the literature, and use it to clarify ongoing discussions of

In this paper, I aim to identify the wrong that is done by the hearer to the testifier in all cases of testimonial injustice. I introduce the concept of testimonial injustice, as well as the existing accounts of this characteristic wrong, and I argue that the latter don’t work. Then I present my favoured account, which adapts Rachel Fraser’s account of the wrong of aesthetic injustice. I argue that

Some people believe that advanced artificial intelligence systems (AIs) might, in the future, come to have moral status. Further, humans might be tempted to design such AIs that they serve us, carrying out tasks that make our lives better. This raises the question of whether designing AIs with moral status to be willing servants would problematically violate their autonomy. In this paper, I argue that

According to the standard Humean account of laws of nature, laws are selected as a result of an optimal trade-off between the scientific virtues of simplicity and strength. Roberts and Woodward have objected that such trade-offs play no role in how laws are chosen in science. We first discuss an example from automated scientific discovery which provides support for Roberts and Woodward’s point that

According to perspectivism, what I ought to do depends on my perspective. While recently popular, perspectivism faces a central puzzle. In some deliberative practices, facts outside our perspective are clearly relevant. In deliberation, we are concerned with acquiring new information. In advising, a better-informed adviser possesses relevant information I do not have. The latter case distinctly highlights

This paper advances an analytic philosophical approach to atmospheres. We start by outlining three core characteristics of atmospheres: holism (an atmosphere is a holistic entity that emerges through the combinations of various aspects of the environment), affectivity (atmospheres are grasped corporeally and affectively), and quasi-objectivity (atmospheres cannot be captured in solely objective or

Not all actions are intentional actions. What separates merely doing something from intentionally doing something? One point of separation seems to be luck. Too much luck, or luck of a certain variety, seems to undermine the possibility of acting intentionally. This naturally leads to the idea that intentional action presupposes reliable success. I argue against this idea. Taking inspiration from Gareth

The Curry–Howard correspondence, according to which propositions are types, suggests that every paradox formulable in natural deduction has a type-theoretical counterpart. I will give a purely type-theoretical formulation of Curry’s paradox. On the basis of the definition of a type $\Gamma (A)$, Curry’s reasoning can be adapted to show the existence of an object of the arbitrary type A. This is paradoxical

Is it possible to hear God, feel God act, or see that God is doing something in the world? Of course, if God does not exist, no such reports could be true. But some philosophers have argued that even if God exists, it is not possible for such reports to be true since God is supposed to be a maximally perfect immaterial spirit. Here I explore the issue by framing discussion in terms of three kinds of

It is standardly accepted that medical interventions can be permissibly administered to a patient who has decision-making capacity only when she has given her valid consent to the intervention. However, this requirement for valid medical consent is much less frequently discussed in relation to psychological interventions (‘PIs’) than it is in relation to bodily interventions (‘BIs’). Moreover, legal

Why postpone human extinction? The dominant view is utilitarian: postponing extinction matters if it maximizes the net sum of happiness that is ever enjoyed. But, many object, we have reason to make people happy, not to make happy people. Plus, the utilitarian view does not explain why failing to postpone extinction matters terribly if the future it would cost our species is utopian, but not if it

What do we owe those with whom we inquire? Presumably, quite a bit. Anything beyond what is necessary to secure knowledge? Yes. In this paper, I argue for a class of ‘zetetic rights.’ These are rights distinctive to participants in group inquiry. Zetetic rights help protect important central interests of inquirers. These include a right to aid, a right against interference, and a right to exert influence

Phenomenal Contrast Arguments (PCAs) are a prominent method in philosophy of mind for, among other uses, investigating how specific mental features shape the phenomenal character of experience. This paper identifies a general and underexplored obstacle to the success of PCAs: The necessity of demonstrating that the contrasts employed in these arguments are genuinely phenomenal, rather than merely cognitive

Two approaches to authenticity have gained currency in the recent analytic philosophical literature. The first takes authenticity to be a property of how people act (authentic agency). The second takes it to be a property of who people are (authentic self). This paper motivates both views, then argues that there is a dependency between the two: the exercise of authentic agency depends on the possession

The ‘containment view’ of pregnancy is widely held, but it has recently been subjected to sustained criticism by Elselijn Kingma. According to the containment view, human foetuses (among others) are animals in their own right, contained within their mothers. Kingma's alternative to this is the ‘parthood view,’ according to which a foetus is a maternal part. Despite the prevalence of the containment

According to the beneficiary pays principle (BPP), following an injustice that has produced damages, agents that have received benefits from it may incur a duty to redress the victim even if they are not at fault for it. In this paper, I do not offer either a full-blown defense or a refutation of the principle. Instead, I take issue with the common view, accepted by both sympathetic and critical authors

How is ethical knowledge possible? One promising answer is Moral Empiricism: we can acquire ethical knowledge through emotional experiences. But Moral Empiricism faces a serious problem. Our emotions are unreliable guides to ethics, frequently failing to fit the ethical status of their objects, so the habit of basing ethical beliefs on one's emotions seems too unreliable to yield knowledge. I develop

I argue that one ought not be epistemically akratic. Although this position may look self-evident, it is hard to pin down exactly what's wrong with the akratic subject. Indeed, some philosophers argue that epistemic akrasia is permissible. The standard anti-akratic response focuses on the weird downstream implications of this state for action and assertion. This approach, however, is unsatisfactory

Attention makes a phenomenal difference to visual experience, but the nature of this difference is controversial. There are three possibilities. The first is that the phenomenology of visual attention has deflationary content, which is to say that attention makes a phenomenal difference only by modulating the appearance of an attended object's visible features. Secondly, it has novel content—attention

Sally Haslanger's notion of ‘pure structural oppression’ is the idea of an institution or structure that is unjust independent of any and all agential wrongdoing, and for which no agent is liable. Haslanger argues that pure structural oppression is possible, but she does not defend it as a viable phenomenon in the actual world. The rough equivalent of ‘pure structural oppression’ in the racial domain

It is often said that consequentialism violates the separateness of persons. But what does this mean? Existing interpretations are often unclear, or let consequentialism off easy: because they target amendable parts of the consequentialist framework, they can be sidestepped by more subtle versions of the theory. Consequentialism's opponents, however, might hope for a stronger interpretation––one which

This paper offers two novel conceptual tools: one concerning the semantics of counterfactuals and what should be held fixed when assessing them (the modal moat), and the other concerning the pragmatics of counterfactual assertions and how to avoid the potential pitfalls of meaning more than we say (antecedent gluttony). These allow us to address existing issues with the assessment of backwards counterfactuals

Constitutivists often argue that agency is inescapable. This is supposed to, among other things, explain why norms that are constitutive of agency are forceful. But can some form of inescapability do that? I consider four types of inescapability—psychological, further factor, standpoint, and plight—and evaluate whether they manage to explain four necessary features of normative force: that it does

Conceptualism is the view that at least some perceptual representation is conceptual. This paper considers a prominent recent argument against Conceptualism due to Ned Block. Block's argument appeals to patterns of color representation in infants, alleging that infants exhibit categorical perception of color while failing to deploy concepts of color categories. Accordingly, the perceptual representation

Imagine that your lover or close friend has embraced a difficult long-term goal, such as advancing environmental justice, breaking a bad habit, or striving to become a better person. Which stance should you adopt towards their prospects for success? Does supporting our significant others in the pursuit of valuable goals require ignoring part of our evidence? I argue that we have special reasons––reasons

Facts about need play some role in our causal understanding of the world. We understand, for example, that people have basic needs for food, water, and shelter, and that people come to be harmed because those needs go unmet. But what are needs? How do explanations in terms of need fit into our broader causal understanding of the world? This paper provides an account of need attribution, their contribution

Until recently, many theorists defined domination such that it requires unequal power, and most others held that even if domination were not defined as requiring unequal power, a requirement of unequal power would nevertheless follow from the definition of what domination is. On these views, unless there is an imbalance of power between the two parties, there can be no relation of domination. However

A theory of reference attributed to Frege, Russell, and others holds that referring to an object requires the ability to uniquely individuate it. According to a famous story told around campfires on winter nights, a group of young revolutionaries, led by Kripke and Donnellan, was destined to tear down the Frege–Russell edifice of reference—and indeed, they did. Reflecting the spirit of the 60s and

Lucid dreams are a distinctive and intriguing phenomenon where subjects apparently possess, inter alia, conscious knowledge that they are dreaming while they are dreaming. I here develop and defend a new model of lucid dreaming, what I call the ‘Dyadic Model’, according to which lucid dreams involve the tokening of both dreaming and non-dreaming states. The model is developed to successfully defend

It is widely held that deontological moral theories are agent-relative because they include prohibitions on actions such as killing, or breaking promises, which cannot be understood as giving the same goal to different agents. They are thus thought to be inconsistent with consequentialism, in its traditional, agent-neutral form. However, the standard argument for this claim is incomplete, a problem

Romantic partnerships are typically among the most important goods in our lives. But love sometime ends, and so too do relationships. Divorcing partners are particularly vulnerable to being wronged and harmed. The aim of this paper is to develop an ethics of divorce, by establishing that divorce is a condition for the possibility of the distinct value of romantic partnerships. Different sets of rights

Castañeda, Perry and Lewis argued that, among singular thoughts in general, thoughts about oneself ‘as oneself’—first-personal thoughts, which Lewis aptly called de se—have a distinctive character that traditional views of contents cannot characterize. Drawing on Anscombe, Annalisa Coliva has argued that a feature she calls Real Guarantee marks apart de se thoughts—as opposed to others including Immunity

A novel theory of comparative risk is developed and defended. Extant theories are criticized for failing the tests of extensional and formal adequacy. A unified diagnosis is proposed: extant theories consider risk to be a univariable function, but risk is a multivariate function. According to the theory proposed, which we call the unified theory of risk, the riskiness of a proposition is a function

This paper generalizes the preface paradox beyond the conjunctive aggregation of beliefs and constructs an analogous paradox for deontic reasoning. The analysis of the deontic case suggests a systematic restriction of intuitive rules for reasoning with obligations. This proposal can be transferred to the epistemic case: It avoids the preface and the lottery paradox and saves one of the two directions

What sort of philosophical work are natural kinds suited for? Scientific realists often contend that they provide the ‘aboutness’ of successful of scientific classification and explain their epistemic utility (among other side hustles). Recent history has revealed this to be a tricky job—particularly given the present naturalistic climate of philosophy of science. As a result, we've seen an explosion

How might an agent's moral uncertainty affect what they ought to do? One approach posits principles independent of all first-order moral theories to provide impartial guidance to those uncertain about which moral theory is true; a popular candidate is the principle of maximizing expected choiceworthiness (MEC). Another approach focuses on what first-order moral theories themselves might say about the

Could you have taken precautions against a risk you were unaware of? This question lies at the heart of debates in ethics and legal philosophy concerning whether it's justifiable to blame or punish those who cause harm inadvertently or out of ignorance. But the question is crucially ambiguous, depending on what is understood to be inside or outside the scope of the ‘could’. And this ambiguity undermines

We defend a noetic account of intramathematical explanation. On this view, a piece of mathematics is explanatory just in case it produces understanding of an appropriate type. We motivate the view by presenting some appealing features of noeticism. We then discuss and criticize the most prominent extant version of noeticism, due to Inglis and Mejía Ramos, which identifies explanatory understanding

The meta-problem of consciousness is the problem of explaining why we believe that there is a hard problem of consciousness. A solution to the former promises to take us one step closer to solving the latter. While many hope for a physicalist realist solution to the meta-problem, I argue that the two prominent physicalist realist positions in the literature, orthodox Russellian and type-B physicalism

ionism is the view that Fregean abstraction principles underlie our knowledge of the existence of mathematical objects. It is often assumed that the abstractionist proof for the existence of such objects requires ‘negative free logic’ in which all atomic sentences with empty terms are false. I argue that while negative free logic is not indispensably needed for the proof of abstract existence, there

Philosophers have appealed to a wide variety of different factors in providing a metaphysics of race: appearance, ancestry, systems of oppression, shared ways of life, and so-called ‘racial essences’. I distinguish four importantly different questions about racial groups that one may be answering in appealing these factors. I then show that marking these distinctions proves quite fruitful, revealing

In this paper, we argue that Midjourney—a generative AI program that transforms text prompts into images—should be understood not as an agent or a tool, but as a new type of artistic medium. We first examine the view of Midjourney as an agent, considering whether it could be seen as an artist or co-author. This perspective proves unsatisfactory, as Midjourney lacks intentionality and mental states

This paper focuses on an underexplored challenge in infinite ethics. On realistic assumptions, if our universe is infinite, every nomologically possible history is actual and nothing we ever do makes a difference to the moral quality of the world as a whole. Call this thought Every History. This paper unpacks Every History and explores some of its ethical implications. Specifically, I argue that if

When accepting an axiomatic theory S, we are implicitly committed to various statements that are independent of its axioms. Examples of such implicit commitments include consistency statements and reflection principles for S. While foundational acceptance has received considerable attention in this context, the study of implicit commitments triggered by weaker notions remains underdeveloped. This article

This paper explores the form of persistence distinctive of intentional actions. Unlike entities whose progression through time is typically continuous, our actions often have parts separated in time by a gap in our own activity. The way in which their coherence is understood thus affects their attribution to us. I present a theory of agency at the gaps that accounts for such phenomena and passes two