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Philosophy is beginning to pay problems of linguistic justice the attention they deserve in today's heavily interconnected and migrant world. Contemporary philosophy itself, however, has a particular problem of linguistic justice that deserves metaphilosophical attention. At least in the philosophical tradition that is mainstream in much of the world today, viz., analytic philosophy, methodological and sociological mechanisms make it the case that the voices of non‐(native) Anglophone philosophers are substantially less heard. Among the mechanisms responsible for this situation, argues this paper, is the emphasis given by influential philosophical institutions to linguistic style and appearances as signs of clarity, precision, and rigour in the treatment of philosophical problems. Such an emphasis is not justifiable, in part because it deprives philosophy of a wider variety of perspectives. The paper concludes by presenting and motivating a recent initiative that aims to foster greater linguistic and cultural diversity within the profession. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All of us have personal ideals. We are committed to being good (enough) friends, parents, neighbors, teachers, citizens, human beings, and more. In this paper, I examine the thick and thin aspects of these ideals: (i) their substance (to internalize an ideal is to endorse a particular way of being) and (ii) their accountability to reason (to internalize an ideal is to assume that this is really a good way to be). In considering how these two aspects interact in the ideal of rational agency, I address two philosophical debates that are generally conducted in isolation of each other: (i) debates over the anti‐ideal of normative "fetishism" and (ii) debates over whether acting for a reason is acting "under the guise of the good." In the final two sections of the paper, I further explore the relations among the thick and the thin. I note the role that coherence constraints play in the process whereby our ideals gain determinacy. At the same time, I argue, our ideals constrain the possibility and desirability of coherence. This has implications for a third debate: the debate over the possibility of moral dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent literature on Stalnaker's Thesis, which seeks to vindicate it from Lewis (1976)'s triviality results, has featured linguistic data that is prima facie incompatible with Conditionalization in iterated cases (McGee 1989, 2000; Kaufmann 2015; Khoo & Santorio, 2018). In a recent paper (2021), Goldstein & Santorio make a bold claim: they hold that these departures light the way to a new, non‐conditionalizing theory of rational update. Here, I consider whether this new form of update is subject to a Dutch book. On the official, invariantist version of the theory, I show that the answer is "yes". On a competing, contextualist theory of indicative conditionals (Bacon, 2015), the answer is "no", for reasons that have familiar connections to the limits of textbook Bayesianism. After presenting a concrete case, I explore the dialectical ramifications. The upshot is some hard choices for theories that seek to save the linguistic phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper represents a philosophical reflection on the nature and value of philosophy itself. Georges Canguilhem somewhat scandalously argued that the fundamental value of philosophy does not lie in truth. He suggests that truth is a typical value of science because truth is what science says and what is said scientifically. Why would a philosopher depreciate his own discipline? And does he really do so? Or is there a different motivation: to help philosophy to become a much more self‐confident voice? And if truth is no longer a value of philosophy, what value fits it better? The article follows Canguilhem in his conception of truth, science, and philosophy. It is against the background of these considerations that the specific revised anthropology of the scientist or philosopher is formed. The main question is what this means for current philosophy and why it could be inspiring for philosophers today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All of us have personal ideals. We are committed to being good (enough) friends, parents, neighbors, teachers, citizens, human beings, and more. In this paper, I examine the thick and thin aspects of these ideals: (i) their substance (to internalize an ideal is to endorse a particular way of being) and (ii) their accountability to reason (to internalize an ideal is to assume that this is really a good way to be). In considering how these two aspects interact in the ideal of rational agency, I address two philosophical debates that are generally conducted in isolation of each other: (i) debates over the anti‐ideal of normative "fetishism" and (ii) debates over whether acting for a reason is acting "under the guise of the good." In the final two sections of the paper, I further explore the relations among the thick and the thin. I note the role that coherence constraints play in the process whereby our ideals gain determinacy. At the same time, I argue, our ideals constrain the possibility and desirability of coherence. This has implications for a third debate: the debate over the possibility of moral dilemmas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sartre directly addresses some of the core issues involved in the contemporary debate about the desirability of immortality. He thinks mortality can never be the source of life's meaning because death cuts us off before meaning can be determined, and because any meaning that survives is no longer our own. These claims already put Sartre at odds with immortality nay‐sayers who believe the limitations provided by our chronological finitude are essential to meaning, but he takes it further by arguing that the actual meaning‐generating limitations of our temporal situation would remain intact even if our lives never ended. Thus, Sartre seems like an obvious resource for anyone defending immortality. However, he does suggest one major reason to be wary. The possibility of ending up in a perpetually miserable situation makes truly indestructible immortality less attractive, and this diminished attractiveness suggests that we should not take the ability to die too lightly. With all of this in mind, I argue for a form of immortality involving indefinite life‐extension with the possibility to opt out in case existence becomes irreparably intolerable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers often rely on the notion of conceptual containment and apply mereological terminology when they talk about the parts or constituents of a complex concept. In this paper, I explore two historical approaches to this general notion. In particular, I reconstruct objections Bernard Bolzano puts forward against a criterion that played a prominent role in the history of philosophy and that was endorsed, among others, by Leibniz. According to this criterion, a concept that represents objects contains all and only the concepts that represent properties the objects must have in order to be represented by the former concept. Bolzano offers several counterexamples and arguments against the criterion. I argue that while some of them presuppose a strongly mereological understanding of containment, which Leibniz is not committed to, one of them also succeeds without relying on demanding mereological principles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophers vigorously debate the rationality of hedonic bias toward the future: a systematic preference for pleasurable experiences to be future and painful experiences to be past. The debate over future bias is distinctive in philosophy because arguments made on both sides concern descriptive and empirically tractable claims about patterns of preferences and the psychological mechanisms that could explain these patterns. Most notably, philosophers predict that this bias is strong enough to apply to unequal payoffs: people often prefer less pleasurable future experiences to more pleasurable past ones, and more painful past experiences to less painful future ones. They also predict that future‐bias is restricted to first‐person preferences, and that people's third‐person preferences are time‐neutral. These claims feature in arguments both for and against the rational permissibility of future bias. Thus, we aimed to test whether these claims are descriptively accurate. Among our discoveries, we found that the predicted asymmetry between first‐ and third‐person conditions is absent, and so cannot support arguments against the rationality of future‐bias. We also uncovered an asymmetry between positive and negative events that might ground a new argument in favour of time‐neutralism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Pay to publish and open access have been studied extensively, but less so in disciplines such as philosophy and ethics. This study examines the habits and perceptions of researchers from these two fields in Spain. The study draws on data from a survey (completed by 201 out of 541 researchers), a public debate with 26 researchers, and 14 in‐depth interviews. Our results offer some interesting insights into the criteria researchers apply when selecting publishers and journals, notably the value they place on the absence of publication fees. However, habits differ for publishing an article or a book, since payment to publish books is more widespread. The study finds contrasting views on the market for publishing books and journals: some respondents perceived what they consider to be the commercialisation of publishing in academic journals, while others provide arguments to support the Spanish book industry. Sceptical views were also voiced on pay to publish as a funding model. Finally, the study finds broad agreement among the researchers surveyed that publicly funded research should be free to read. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The figure of Socrates is ubiquitous in Rousseau's work and represents the role of philosophy as well as the place of the philosopher in the city. This article first examines Rousseau's various identifications with the Athenian philosopher in his Discourse on the Arts and Sciences and Discourse on Inequality via different topoi typical of the Socratic‐Platonic philosophy. Although Rousseau initially identifies with Socrates directly, he quickly begins to establish some distance. Later, Socrates and the philosophical pursuit of truth are set aside in favour of the figure of Jesus and a less rational truth. Some have seen this as the end of Rousseau's identification with the Greek philosopher. Here, however, we maintain that the identification with Socrates and the reflection on the role of the philosopher continue in Rousseau's autobiographical writings where he constructs a new identification, this time inverted, with the philosopher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I argue that debates over "phenomenal character" have suffered from fragmentation: philosophers who use the term have had in mind at least three (and probably more) radically different kinds of properties. This has occurred because the expression "what it's like" exhibits a particularly deep form of context‐sensitivity, and when this expression has been used to define phenomenal character, at least three very different contexts have been operating in the background. I then identify four important applications of this idea. First, there is a serious error in an important argument for skepticism about the hard problems of consciousness. Second, contrary to a common line of thought, Nagel's "what it's like" characterization of consciousness is not trivial, and is in fact very plausible. Third, an influential naïve realist argument against representationalism rests on a misunderstanding. Finally, and most excitingly, it is possible and indeed very attractive – for representationalists and naïve realists alike – to hold that a veridical perception and a matching hallucination are exactly the same with respect to one kind of phenomenal character, while being radically different with respect to another kind of phenomenal character. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With regard to the sociality of agency and the role that second‐person address plays, I propose to contrast and develop (1) a Fichtean‐Darwallian account that seems to tie agency to mutual recognition but tacitly presupposes a more fundamental agency independent of it that enables us to enter the circle of recognition. (2) A Brandomian account that although initially proposing a more robustly social account of agency, ultimately remains entrapped in a game of mirrors. (3) Hegel's own approach recasts the issue by giving up the idea that the sociality of agency can be understood in terms of what I call a game of recognitional tag. Instead, we are inhabiting a practice that involves a social struggle about the very form of this practice, and it is this that Hegel has termed a "struggle for recognition." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the scholarly discussion of identity formation and persona by focusing on the expulsion of the German philosopher Christian Wolff from Prussia in 1723, and on the wave of printed propaganda that surrounded the event. In these writings the Wolffian philosopher was depicted as a diligent practitioner in the service of the Prussian state and as a sage in the Socratic tradition. In this interpretation the tension between socio‐political reality and claims on sagehood is used to complicate the scholarly analysis of what it meant to be and live as a philosopher in the early modern period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Both philosophers of perception and analytic metaphysicians apply the tropes/universals distinction when considering the ontological status of visual properties. One way of arguing in favour of the trope interpretation of visual properties is to claim that the way in which we visually experience properties makes it plausible to characterize them as tropes. In this article, I argue for a different position, namely that the way in which we visually experience properties provides a serious challenge for the trope interpretation, but not for an interpretation in terms of universals. More specifically, I claim that the trope interpretations of visual properties have problems accounting for the fact that ordinary, veridical visual experiences can present the properties of two objects as strictly similar. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Can an identity be the proper subject of an explanation? A popular stance, albeit not one often argued for, gives a negative answer to this question. Building from a contentious passage from Jaegwon Kim in this direction, we reconstruct an argument to the conclusion that identities, to the extent in which they are necessary, cannot be explained. The notion of contrastive explanation, characterized as difference‐seeking, will be crucial for this argument; however, we will eventually find the argument to be unsatisfactory. On the contrary, the discussion provides enough resources to sketch a very simple framework for a non‐causal contrastive explanation of identities. Many instances will be provided, with different varieties of explanans, ultimately suggesting that certain entailment or biconditional principles involving identities (first and foremost, so‐called two‐level identity criteria) may indeed be taken to have an inherent explanatory value. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article offers a general framework for considering education's autonomy and its implications for the relationship between education and philosophy. In it, Doron Yosef‐Hassidim examines an initiative in Israel that calls for an autonomous secular public education and uses it as a context to clarify what education's autonomy means and to identify its major characteristics. To enhance the idea of education's autonomy, he further argues that education should not be subordinate to philosophy and that the question about being human must be kept open and educational. In particular, education's autonomy requires resisting the temptation of applying a philosophical framework about being human to education, even if the particular philosopher of education agrees with the philosophical framework. Finally, Yosef‐Hassidim proposes a strategy for treating the question about being human as one that involves both the work of philosophers of education and practitioners in the classroom. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Philosophy as a way of life" has its roots in ancient ethics and has attracted renewed interest in recent decades. The aim in this paper is to construct a contemporized image of Socrates, consistent with the textual evidence. The account defers concern over analytical/theoretical inquiry into virtue, in favor of a neo‐existentialist process of self‐examination informed by the virtue of what is called "moral seriousness." This process is modeled on Frankfurt's hierarchical account of self‐identification, and the paper suggests an expansion of Frankfurt's concept of a person to include "full" personhood, in which the apprehended "meaning" of one's "whole life" is taken as a necessary condition for eudaimonia (meaning of life) and is characterized by phenomenological transcendence. In addition, the importance of the informed scrutiny of a community of philosophers to the self‐examination process is discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do numbers exist? Carnap (1956 [1950]) famously argues that this question can be understood in an "internal" and in an "external" sense, and calls "external" questions "non‐cognitive". Carnap also says that external questions are raised "only by philosophers" (p. 207), which means that, in his view, philosophers raise "non‐cognitive" questions. However, it is not clear how the internal/external distinction and Carnap's related views about philosophy should be understood. This paper provides a new interpretation. I draw attention to Carnap's distinction between purely external statements, which are independent from all frameworks, and pragmatic external statements, which concern which framework one should adopt, and argue that the latter express noncognitive mental states. Specifically, I argue that "frameworks" are systems of rules for the assessment of statements, which are utterances of ordinary language sentences. Pragmatic external statements express noncognitive dispositions to follow only certain rules of assessment. For instance, "numbers exist" understood as a pragmatic external statement expresses a noncognitive disposition to use only rules of assessment according to which numbers do exist. Carnap can thereby be understood as proposing a distinctive form of noncognitivism about ontology that is in some respects analogous to norm‐expressivism in metaethics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper means to explore the relationship between Novalis's youthful engagement with the work of Fichte (with a nod to Kant's theory of practical postulates), on the one hand, and his late poetic work, the Hymnen an die Nacht, on the other. Against the grain of those who see in Hardenberg's development a promising young philosopher‐in‐the‐making who broke with philosophy in favor of mystical poetry, the present article hopes to show that Novalis's emerging views on such topics as reason, freedom, love, and the given (or Gegebenheit) in the Fichte‐Studien give rise to, or find themselves more adequately expressed in, the mature products of his late lyrical imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question of Heidegger's Nazism has been raised and reignited across the history of the philosopher's reception. Scholarly accounts of the relationship between Heidegger's philosophy and politics abound, but relatively few focus their attention on the substantial connection between Heidegger's reading of Hölderlin and the ideology that facilitated his choice to follow Nazism. Those who acknowledge this connection generally tend toward careless confusion of Heidegger's interpretation and Hölderlin's actual thought, despite ample evidence that Heidegger's reading amounts to a radical distortion of the poet's words. This essay accounts for Heidegger's misreading through the apocryphal poem "In lieblicher Bläue," which Heidegger mistakenly attributes to Hölderlin. This is followed by a critique of Heidegger's interpretation through an exposition of Hölderlin's theory of Greek tragedy and the poetics of his late hymns. Theory and praxis alike stand opposed to Heidegger's aesthetic enterprise, and they defy any attribution of proto‐Nazism to Hölderlin himself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It's time that philosophers read Gloria Anzaldúa as a philosopher. Scholars have been hinting at it for some time, but in describing her they still tend to choose the terms "theorist," "feminist," and "thinker" instead of "philosopher." Anzaldúa fits into all of these categories, but from her notes, we know that Anzaldúa also thought of herself as a philosopher. In 2002, for instance, she called herself a "feminist‐visionary‐spiritual‐activist‐poet‐philosopher fiction writer." This essay argues that we should grant Anzaldúa's wish to be considered a philosopher in addition to the other appellations, and focuses on works that she read and wrote in the first half of her scholarly career, including the publication of Borderlands/La Frontera in 1987. The evidence for the claim that Anzaldúa thought of herself as a philosopher is mostly archival, but some of it also appears in her published works. Once philosophers explicitly begin to recognize Anzaldúa as a philosopher, comparisons between her and other already recognized philosophers will become fuller and bear more fruit. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, Mason Marshall argues that Plato's views on Forms play a central role in his educational philosophy. In response to what certain commentators have recently written, Marshall contends that this interpretation not only is accurate but also is advantageous because of how it can help philosophy of education. He also addresses the view, proposed by one philosopher of education, that Plato believes that the most valuable sort of knowledge cannot be fully expressed in words and that the objects of this knowledge are something other than transcendent Forms. Preferable to that view, Marshall argues, is the idea that Plato wants knowledge of Forms which is nonrepresentational. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Martin Heidegger's philosophy is famous for being unusually rich. It ranges over technology, poetry, theology, history, and many other subjects. In this paper, I focus my attention on two topics which are particularly close to the hearts of analytic philosophers: logic and language. I show that Heidegger faces two different kinds of paradoxes: an ontic paradox and an ontological paradox. Moreover, for each one of these paradoxes, I give an overview of how both Heidegger and the philosophers who engage with his thought have tried to overcome them by challenging either a certain account of language or the authority of logic in philosophical discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Hegel frequently identifies ethical life with a "second nature." This strategy has puzzled those who assume that second nature represents a deficient appearance of ethical life, one that needs to be overcome, supplemented, or constantly challenged. I argue that Hegel identifies ethical life with a second nature because he thinks that a social order only becomes a candidate for ethical life, if it provides a context conducive to the development of what I call "real habits." First, I show that a criterion for a real habit can be found in Hegel's Anthropology, namely, that of liberation. Next, I explain how the state, as Hegel analyzes it in the Philosophy of Right, provides such an environment by enabling trust toward and within it. I then consider two literary examples of contexts that fail to be similarly supportive—Coates' Between the World and Me and Atwood's Handmaid's Tale—concluding with reasons for thinking that real habits are an integral part of ethical life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Contrary to Karl Leonhard Reinhold's theoretical critique of Kant's philosophy, his practical critique has been almost unknown. In my paper, I shall reconstruct Reinhold's practical philosophy after Kant. I will concentrate on the so‐called Reinhold's dilemma, which concerns the problem of moral imputability in the case of immoral actions in Kant. Also, I shall explain how Reinhold tried to escape this dilemma by introducing a new action theory and by sharply distinguishing between reason and will. Finally, I shall evaluate Reinhold's practical significance by relating his conception of individual freedom to recent theories of volitional self‐determination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Peter Singer's groundbreaking call to action in 1972, "Famine, Affluence, and Morality," drew philosophical attention to the topic of famine and the associated suffering or preventable death of many throughout the world. Yet despite the volume of philosophical work Singer's paper inspired, it would still be easy to suppose that global poverty is not a problem for philosophers to take seriously in itself but is rather a particularly stark illustration or instance of a more general problem, whether in ethics or in political philosophy. The aim of this paper is to argue that the philosophical landscape of global poverty is both sui generis and sufficiently complex that the topic should be considered not as an instance of a more general philosophical problem but as a distinct area of normative inquiry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a study of the Greek philosopher Aristotle's use of the term philosophia and its cognate forms with at least ten senses across his collective writings. Topics include an exploration of Aristotle's attitude toward the culturally specific practice of philosophy, the argumentative method used in his philosophical work "Protrepticus," and whether Aristotle believes philophia is an episteme.

This paper explores the underrepresentation of women and minorities in academic philosophy. Specifically, it focuses on why, given the relatively even male/female ratio at undergraduate level, women are underrepresented at every level above this. It addresses some of the misconceptions and myths surrounding women in philosophy, including those surrounding the discussion of the different‐intuition hypothesis. It also explores the ways in which feminist research in philosophy is subject to marginalisation as a result of systematic exclusionary practices typical of the dominant culture of justification within traditional philosophy. It argues for the necessity of an intersectional approach, and the importance of taking seriously the psychological and sociological analysis of underrepresentation, in order to improve both the experience and the representation of women and other minorities at all levels of professional philosophy, as well as of the discipline as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the ethical importance of philospher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s treatment of morality in the thesis, Elements of the Philosophy of Right. There has been rise in interest in Hegel's inner-outer thesis as a frame in which one can view Hegel's treatment of action and morality.

In certain philosophical quarters, a new metaphilosophical position is being discussed—antiphilosophy. Such a position seems to maintain that there is no distinction between philosophy and sophistry, reason and rhetoric, arguing and emoting. This paper examines antiphilosophy. Specifically, it aims to address three interrelated questions: Is antiphilosophy a possible metaphilosophical position? If it is, what characterizes it? And what ramifications would it have? The paper argues that antiphilosophy is possible and is best construed as an attempt to reconstruct philosophical discourse on noncognitive lines. Explicitly, "to assert" and the belief propositional attitude is replaced by "to convince" and a pro‐attitude desire to rhetorically talk someone into something. The paper examines one possible form such a position could take as well as various ramifications of it. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article reflects upon the state of the philosophical profession vis‐à‐vis a close reading of the hoax perpetrated against the International Journal of Badiou Studies in 2016. This hoax is not a subversive act of disciplinary criticism (as the hoaxers contend). Rather, it is a poorly disguised attempt to enforce a partisan and myopic conception of philosophy and to delegitimize an entire subfield of philosophical production—namely, continental philosophy. The hoax is symptomatic of a deeper problem that plagues the profession today: the willingness exhibited by many philosophers to police the boundaries of the discipline by engaging in what we call "acts of force." The prevalence of acts of force demonstrates that professional philosophy is shaped not only by the giving and taking of reasons but also by shopworn disciplinary tribalisms (for example, continental versus analytic) and asymmetrical power relations involving agents with unequal amounts of social, professional, and philosophical capital. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the book "Talking to Our Selves: Reflection, Ignorance and Agency" by John Doris is presented. Topics include the author's decision to make donations to charities and causes, the need for philosophers to tackle the influence of minor issues on important decisions, agency, and the factors affecting human civilization.

Philosophical analysis was the central preoccupation of 20th‐century analytic philosophy. In the contemporary methodological debate, however, it faces a number of pressing external and internal challenges. While external challenges, like those from experimental philosophy or semantic externalism, have been extensively discussed, internal challenges to philosophical analysis have received much less attention. One especially vexing internal challenge is that the success conditions of philosophical analysis are deeply unclear. According to the standard textbook view, a philosophical analysis aims at a strict biconditional that captures the necessary and sufficient conditions for membership in the relevant category. The textbook view arguably identifies a necessary condition on successful philosophical analyses, but understood as a sufficient condition it is untenable, as I will argue in this paper. To this end, I first uncover eight conditions of adequacy on successful philosophical analyses, some of which have rarely been spelled out in detail. As we shall see, even sophisticated alternatives to the textbook view fail to accommodate some of these conditions. I then propose the concept grounding view as a more promising account of philosophical analysis. According to this view, successful philosophical analyses require necessary biconditionals that are constrained by grounding relations among the concepts involved. Apart from providing a satisfactory account of philosophical analysis in its own right, the concept grounding view is also able to meet the challenge that the success conditions of philosophical analysis are problematically unclear. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

According to a widely held physicalist view, consciousness is identical with some physical or functional phenomenon just as liquidity is identical with loose molecular connection. To many of us, this claim about consciousness seems more problematic than the claim about liquidity. To many—including many physicalists—the identification of consciousness with some physical phenomenon even seems "absurd" (Papineau 2002) or "crazy" (Perry 2001). A full defence of physicalism should explain why the allegedly correct hypothesis comes across this way. If physicalism is true and we have reason to accept it, why does it seem "absurd"? One possibility is that this is fully explained by the fact that we have an erroneous understanding of consciousness or its physical basis. This explanation is embraced by few if any physicalists. It is rejected by many, including proponents of the "phenomenal concept strategy", which lately has become the dominant strategy for defending physicalism. But the "error explanation" is clearly the most plausible explanation that is available to physicalists. So this paper argues. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The question "What is philosophy?" is difficult to answer because it seems to presuppose answers to long‐standing and controversial philosophical questions. As answers to these questions affect one's metaphilosophy, apparently irresolvable philosophical disagreements are then converted into deadlock concerning the nature of the discipline. As this problem is unique to philosophy, however, this difficulty itself reveals something of philosophy's essential nature. As, under analysis, it turns out to arise from a definite way of posing problems, philosophy can initially be defined by a particular mode of problematisation. This essay establishes this argument and proposes a method for developing this insight into a fully realised, socio‐historical metaphilosophy. This involves stages of (a) hermeneutical analysis and (b) historical contextualisation, both of which increase the account's empirical adequacy. A conclusion discusses the extent to which philosophy is on trial here and argues that questioning the future of philosophy is not inherently philistine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: This paper is concerned with the paradox of decrease. Its aim is to defend the answer to this puzzle that was propounded by its originator, namely, the Stoic philosopher Chrysippus. The main trouble with this answer to the paradox is that it has the seemingly problematic implication that a material thing could perish due merely to extrinsic change. (For, intuitively, it is not possible for a mere extrinsic change to cause a material thing to cease to be.) It follows that in order to defend Chrysippus’ answer to the paradox, one has to explain how it could be that Theon is destroyed by the amputation without changing intrinsically. In this paper, I shall answer this challenge by appealing to the broadly Aristotelian idea that at least some of the proper parts of a material substance are ontologically dependent on that substance. I will also appeal to this idea in order to offer a new solution to the structurally similar paradox of increase. In this way, we will end up with a unified solution to two structurally similar paradoxes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Philosophers have recently wondered whether the value impact of the existence of God on the world would be positive, negative, or neutral. Thus far discussions have distinguished between the value God's impact would have overall, in certain respects, and/or for particular individuals. A commonality amongst the various positions that have been taken up is to focus on the goods and drawbacks associated with both theism and atheism. Goods associated with atheism include things like privacy, independence, and autonomy. I argue that it is better overall and for everyone to prefer a hidden God to no God. This is because it is possible to experience many of the goods attributed to atheism if God is hidden even if they do not really obtain, while also gaining many of the additional goods connected to theism. This amounts to a new solution to the problem of divine hiddenness: God might hide in order to increase or maximize the axiological value of the world. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: It has become increasingly common for philosophers to distinguish between objective and subjective rightness, and there has been much discussion recently about what an adequate theory of subjective rightness looks like. In this article, I propose a new theory of subjective rightness. According to it, an action is subjectively right if and only if it minimizes expected objective wrongness. I explain this theory in detail and argue that it avoids many of the problems that other theories of subjective rightness face. I end by responding to some objections. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Bernard Williams questioned whether impartial morality “can allow for the importance of individual character and personal relations in moral experience.” Underlying his position is a distinction between factual and practical deliberation. While factual deliberation is about the world and brings in a standpoint that is impartial, practical deliberation is, he claims, radically first‐personal; it “involves an I that [is] intimately the I of my desires.” While it may be thought that Williams's claim implies an unpalatable Humean subjectivism, the present article argues that this does not follow: That first‐person practical deliberation is directed both by the “I of my desires” and by the world. Drawing on Peter Winch's argument against the universalizability of moral judgments and D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, the article argues that practical deliberations involve discovering value in the world, but that what is revealed about the world depends constitutively on the first‐person deliberations and decisions of particular agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The distinction between the manifest and the scientific image of man‐in‐the‐world is widely seen as crucial to Wilfrid Sellars's philosophical work. The present essay agrees with this view. It contends, however, that precisely because the distinction is important, we should not hurry to a quick and superficial understanding of it. The essay identifies several oversimplifications that can be found in the literature on the topic and argues that they are at least partly rooted in too rigid a view of the role that the two‐image distinction plays in Sellars's philosophy. It shows that this rigid approach is quite common in the secondary literature, either explicitly or by implication. It then presents a more cautious, flexible approach to the problem of the two images and explains why this approach is fruitful on the basis of textual evidence, along with the overall advantages of interpreting Sellars's thought as a whole. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: Experiments on theories of reference have mostly tested referential intuitions. We think that experiments should rather be testing linguistic usage. Substantive Aim (I): to test classical description theories of proper names against usage by “elicited production.” Our results count decisively against those theories. Methodological Aim (I): Machery, Olivola, and de Blanc ( ) claim that truth‐value judgment experiments test usage. Martí ( ) disagrees. We argue that Machery et al. are right and offer some results that are consistent with that conclusion. Substantive Aim (II): Machery et al. provide evidence that the usage of a name varies, being sometimes descriptive, sometimes not. In seven out of eight tests of usage, we did not replicate this variation. Methodological Aim (II): to test the reliability of referential intuitions by comparing them with linguistic usage. Earlier studies led us to predict that we would find those intuitions unreliable, but we did not. Our results add to evidence that tests of referential intuition are susceptible to unpredictable wording effects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: According to Fine (among others), a nonbasic factual proposition must be grounded in facts involving those of its constituents that are both real and fundamental. But the principle is vulnerable to several dialectically significant counterexamples. It entails, for example, that a logical Platonist cannot accept that true disjunctions are grounded in the truth of their disjuncts; that a Platonist about mathematical objects cannot accept that sets are grounded in their members; and that a colour primitivist cannot accept that an object's being scarlet grounds its not being chartreuse. The Finean might try to defend these implications, but it generates further problems. Instead, the principle should be rejected. An important upshot is that the principle cannot be relied on to distinguish robust realism from anti‐realism about a propositional domain, for the principle obscures ways of taking features to be both real and fundamental. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports on certain substantial correspondence theories of truth that may pose fatal problems for any theory of truth which claims both that facts are non-linguistic entities. It refers to American philosopher Donald Davidson who introduced concerning substitution principles and the effect those substitutions have on the referent of any given sentence.

The article reports on the phenomenon of causal overdetermination, a partial cause which occurs when a single-observed effect is determined by multiple causes, any one of which alone would be sufficient to account for the effect. It is said that it should not be confused with causation in the presence of background conditions.

The article reports on some philosophers, such as, Michael Dummett, John Searle, Alvin Plantinga, David Lewis, Jason Stanley, and David Sosa, who have tried to explain away the attack to descriptivism from American philosopher Saul A. Kripke and others with wide scope names or rigidified descriptions. Dummett thinks that rigid names could be explained as the descriptions with wide scopes over modalities, if names were rigid designators.

The article reports on the theory of minds being clouded by advocacy of communism. It is said that the advocacy of communism way was the one that best fit the conception, although there are many ways a mind can be clouded. The aim of advocates of communism was essentially that to act rightly and give firm obedience to an informed conscience.

The article reports on the works of Jacques Derrida, who was a French Algerian-born philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic analysis known as deconstruction. Philosopher Christopher Norris in his paper "Truth in Derrida, provides an interpretation of Derrida in which Derrida is not a skeptic, and argues that his work is compatible with, indeed implies.

The article reports on the use of schemas in philosophy. It is said that denying the fact that quantification over everything is possible is One possible response to the set theoretic paradoxes. Philosophers have blamed impredicative definitions as the culprit of the paradoxes. There cannot be a quantifier which ranges over all types.

Abstract: The article extracts the most general principles established by Wittgenstein's private language arguments in Investigations §§243‐316 and investigates their general application both in philosophy and in the sciences of the mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]