哲学, 本领域期刊类期刊, -365足球

in general, otherwise permissible actions do not become wrong when agents act on bad attitudes. but cases of discrimination can be exceptions to this generalization. it could “be morally permissible for someone to rent her house to any one of several prospective tenants but not morally permissible to refuse to rent it to one of those people because of his race” (scanlon 2008: 71). these two claims

tarski and quine argue that it is meaningless to quantify into quotation, the referentially opaque context par excellence. building on frege's thesis that ‘the introduction of a sign for identity of content necessarily produces a bifurcation in the meaning of all signs’ (begriffsschrift, section 8), we challenge this view. we advance a semantics for first-order languages in which every expression has

beneficence—the part of morality concerned with promoting people's well‐being—is widely thought to be both agent‐neutral and impartial: it prescribes a common aim to all, and does not favor some individuals over others. this paper explores a problem for agent‐neutral, impartial beneficence from the perspective of “individualistic ethics” in the tradition of harsanyi. the problem reveals that if we

the british journal for the philosophy of science, volume 76, issue 3, september 2025.

there are better and worse ways to acquire epistemic virtues and more generally to be disposed to change or maintain one's epistemic dispositions over time. this is a dimension along which one might be better or worse as an epistemic agent that, we argue, cannot be explained with reference to current normative categories in epistemology but requires recognition of a new norm or virtue—namely, “epistemic

kantian ethics is traditionally seen as grounded in unchanging, universally binding, and a priori knowable principles. i argue that this picture is incomplete: kant grounds his ethics not only in categorical moral principles, but also in regulative moral ideas of reason. on kant's account, moral ideas contain metanormative moral content that outstrips agents' cognitive resources: they are unattainable

this paper introduces emergent moral non‐naturalism, which holds that moral properties depend on descriptive properties and normative bridge principles for their instantiation, where these principles specify instantiation conditions of moral properties in terms of descriptive properties. continuous with the non‐naturalist tradition in metaethics, this view takes moral properties to be noncausal properties;

imaginatively adopted attitudes and ways of thinking sometimes persist, bleeding into day‐to‐day thoughts and interactions. such imaginative contagion is often reported in the context of theatrical acting, and is also observed among videogame players and virtual reality users. a first question is how imaginative contagion occurs. this paper distinguishes immediate and delayed contagion, which differ

‘racial passing’ is a category of practice: a category that non-specialists use to understand the racialized world. should it also be a category of analysis adopted by race scholars? i argue that it should not. the use of passing as an analytic category requires that individuals have a real race underneath their apparent race. attempts to determine an individual's ‘real race’ seem to inevitably involve

social movements are central to our contemporary understanding of social change. accordingly, we should want to be able to say what it is that makes social movements special; that is, to say what it is that movements in their entirety have that random samples of people and organizations within the movement do not have. but i will argue that the prevailing analysis of social movements does not do this

the notion of social construction plays an important role in many areas of social philosophy, including the philosophy of gender and sex, the philosophy of race, and the philosophy of disability. yet it is far from clear how this notion is to be understood. one promising proposal in the recent literature is that social construction may be analyzed in terms of the notion of metaphysical grounding. in

regret compounds the pain of mistakes by making us ruminate on the past. is there any value in this compounded suffering? an intuitive and widely endorsed view, the learning view, states that regret has value because it helps us learn from our mistakes. this paper challenges the learning view. i show that we often learn from our mistakes without regret, through a process i call “belief‐driven learning

the nonverbal cues that accompany speech (for example, facial expressions, gestures, and eye gaze) can be as communicatively significant as the content of the speech itself. i identify what i argue is a very common—but largely philosophically unexamined—phenomenon: our tendency to allocate nonverbal cues in ways that are sensitive to conversational participants' levels of respective social power such

the actualist/possibilist debate concerns whether, when evaluating an agent's act, we should hold fixed what else they would freely choose to do. while this debate has shaped our deontic theories over the last several decades, it has not had a similar impact on theorizing about harm and benefit. as a result, the leading accounts of harm and benefit accept actualism. i argue that this makes them susceptible

retentionalism and extensionalism are theories of temporal consciousness. as such, they aim to explain how subjects are aware of temporally extended phenomena as succession. direct realism and representationalism are theories of general perception: they aim to explain what our perceptual experience consists of and what kinds of objects we perceive. the received view marries retentionalism with representationalism

what is the point of inquiry? some say that the aim of inquiring into some question is to come to know its answer; others, that the aim is to attain justified belief, epistemic improvement, or some other coveted epistemic status. still others eschew “aim” talk altogether, and instead formulate norms governing inquiry. however, virtually all extant work on inquiry has agreed on at least this much: the

caspar hare presents a compelling argument for “taking the sugar” in cases of opaque sweetening: you have no reason to take the unsweetened option, and you have some reason to take the sweetened one. i argue that this argument fails—there is a perfectly good sense in which you do have a reason to take the unsweetened option. i suggest a way to amend hare's argument to overcome this objection. i then

to deadname is to call a trans person by a name they have rejected. deadnaming has a visceral impact. why? this paper canvasses several possible answers. while deadnaming may sometimes evoke painful memories or communicate that the speaker is transphobic, i suggest that deadnaming is hurtful for fundamentally prohibitionist reasons. when a deadname is used, it violates a prohibition that has been enacted

a background assumption in much contemporary political philosophy is that justice is the first virtue of social institutions, taking priority over other values such as beneficence. this assumption is typically treated as a methodological starting point, rather than as following from any particular moral or political theory. in this paper, i challenge this assumption. to frame my discussion, i argue

the british journal for the philosophy of science, ahead of print.

there is a metaphysical difference between person a killing person b and a merely letting b die. there is also a metaphysical difference between a saving b and a merely letting b live. this paper argues that the metaphysical difference between saving and letting live gives rise to a moral difference. it then puts that moral difference to work: for example, it accounts for the long‐felt moral difference

according to commonsense and deontological ethics, it is impermissible to kill a person in order to save the life of another person, all else being equal. but why? this article suggests a justification of this restriction. it appeals to the idea of normative inertia—very roughly, to the idea that in practical decisions, changing course is harder to justify than staying on track. so, in a nutshell,

according to the wrong restriction, we are liable to defensive harm only when we threaten to wrong others. while attractive on a first pass, we argue that plausible philosophical claims make the wrong restriction difficult to accept. in its place, we offer the impermissibility restriction, according to which one is liable to defensive harm only if one would act impermissibly, all things considered

the modal ontological argument for god's existence faces a symmetry problem: a seemingly equally plausible reverse modal ontological argument can be given for god's nonexistence. here, we argue that there are significant asymmetries between the modal ontological argument and its reverse that render the latter more compelling than the former. specifically, the latter requires a weaker logic than the

christine korsgaard's oft‐quoted image of the reflective agent “backing up” from her desires has been criticized on the ground that it depicts desires as items external to practical reason which can, therefore, have no normative bearing on her rational activity. i argue that her critics have failed to recognize the possibility of a different explanation of the deliberative import of desires: that even

can we see only how things actually are, or are we also able to see how things could be? much work in philosophy of perception assumes that our visual perceptual experience is restricted to the actual world: we cannot directly interact with nor consequently perceive other possible worlds. contrary to this line of thought, this paper defends the claim that we can visually perceive modal properties.

a puzzling feature about the dispute over whether trans women are women is its apparent verbality: gender‐critical theorists assert a biological fact about trans women, and trans‐inclusionary theorists respond by asserting a social/psychological fact about trans women. but plausibly, both theorists’ assertions are compatible, and so there is no real disagreement. in this paper, i argue that the two

rehabilitating an argument originally proposed by leibniz, michael della rocca has offered a new argument for the principle of sufficient reason. a crucial element of this argument is that, for every x, the fact that x does not brutely fail to exist is an untrivial requisite of x’s existence. criticising this claim, i show that the new argument for psr fails.

andreas and günther have recently proposed a difference-making definition of actual causation. in this paper i show that there exist conclusive counterexamples to their definition, by which i mean examples that are unacceptable to everyone, including andreas and günther. concretely, i show that their definition allows c to cause e even when c is not a causal ancestor of e. i then proceed to identify

in light of the problem of logical omniscience, some scholars have argued that belief is question-sensitive: agents don’t simply believe propositions but rather believe answers to questions. hoek (2022) has recently developed a version of this approach on which a belief state is a “web” of questions and answers. here, we present several challenges to hoek’s question-sensitive account of belief. first

beliefs can be resistant to evidence. nonetheless, the orthodox view in epistemology analyzes beliefs as evidence-responsive attitudes. i address this tension by deploying analytical tools on capacities and masking to show that the cognitive science of evidence-resistance supports rather than undermines the orthodox view. in doing so, i argue for the claim that belief requires the capacity for evi

the british journal for the philosophy of science, ahead of print.

the british journal for the philosophy of science, ahead of print.

the british journal for the philosophy of science, ahead of print.

the british journal for the philosophy of science, ahead of print.

this article presents a model of an “open,” largely laissez‐faire political society in which open exit is the only legitimately enforceable principle, like a liberal archipelago. it assumes the possibility of widespread “soft closure” policies that limit mobility. if those policies sufficiently diminish mobility, the society is no longer properly characterized as open, and its members’ associational

we argue that some recent theories of attentional normativity license predictable misevaluations of neurodivergent cognizers. we suggest that this is because norms of attention have mostly been theorized without neuroatypical cognizers in mind. we argue that because these norms tend to focus on features that only correlate with positively evaluable cognition in neurotypical agents, they are very often

ontological nihilists repudiate ontology altogether, maintaining that ontological structure is an unnecessary addition to our theorizing. recent defenses of the view involve a sophisticated combination of highly expressive but ontologically innocent languages combined with a metaphysics of features—non‐objectual, complete but modifiable states of affairs invoked in natural language feature‐placing

social metaphysicians agree that to be socially constructed is in some sense to depend on social goings-on. it's now common to claim that the relevant kind of dependence is grounding such that to be socially constructed is in some sense to be grounded in social goings-on. nonetheless, grounding accounts of social construction are at risk of overgeneralizing, and, so, its's unclear what work grounding

on one way of interpreting it, arthur prior's “thank goodness that's over” argument aims to establish the truth of tense realism on the basis of two key assumptions: that tensed relief requires tensed propositions and that tensed propositions require tensed facts. relativists (like lewis) and absolutists (like perry) agree that prior's argument can be resisted but disagree on which of the two assumptions