This paper argues that Maimon’s metaphilosophy presents a distinctive view on what the scientific role and method of philosophy should consist in: in the production of fictions of systematicity. It shows how Maimon’s philosophy of science links to metaphilosophical views, and ultimately leads him to adopt the so-called “method of fictions” to transform philosophy into a proper science. By connecting

This paper develops an information-sensitive theory of the semantics and probability of conditionals and statements involving epistemic modals. The theory validates a number of principles linking probability and modality, including the principle that the probability of a conditional If A, then C equals the probability of C, updated with A. The theory avoids so-called triviality results, which are standardly

The development of Carnap’s views on knowledge of other minds from 1928 to about 1935 (with a brief envoy on later developments) is tracked here in order to clear up a widespread misunderstanding. Early on and well into the 30s their failure is undeniable but it has been badly misdiagnosed. I argue that Carnap was not only not a logical behaviorist but also (bracketing his mistaken analysis of disposition

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In this paper, I highlight the philosophical differences between Camus’s and Sartre’s notions of the absurd. “The absurd” is a technical term for both philosophers, and they mean different things by it. The Camusian absurd is a mismatch between theoretical reasoning and practical reasoning. The Sartrean absurd, in contrast, is our theoretical inability to explain contingency or existence. For Sartre

According to Madhyamaka Buddhist philosophers, everything depends for its existence on something else. But what would a world devoid of fundamentalia look like? In this paper, I argue that the anti-foundationalist “neither-one-nor-many argument” of the Indian Mādhyamika Śrīgupta commits him to a position I call “metaphysical indefinitism.” I demonstrate how this view follows from Śrīgupta’s rejection

The wrong kind of reason problem is a problem for attempts to analyze normative properties using only facts about the balance of normative reasons, a style of analysis on which the ‘Reasons First’ programme depends. I argue that this problem cannot be solved if the orthodox view of reasons is true --- that is, if each normative reason is numerically identical with some fact, proposition, or state-of-affairs

I begin by arguing that, for Kant, the pure category of substance has both a general content that is in play whenever we think of any entity as a substance (I call this the Subsistence-Power Conception of substance) as well as a more specific content that arises in conjunction with the thought of what Kant calls a positive noumenon (I call this the Inner-Simple Conception of substance). Drawing on

Many of the most important social institutions—e.g., law and language—are thought to be normative in some sense. And philosophers have been puzzled by how this normativity can be explained in terms of the social, descriptive states of affairs that presumably constitute them. This paper attempts to solve this sort of puzzle by considering a simpler and less contentious normative social practice: table

Qualifications with 'as' or 'qua' are widely used in philosophy, yet how precisely such qualifications work is poorly understood. While extant work on the topic is rife with revisionary assumptions about the nature of individuals, truth, and identity, this article shows that no baroque theory is required to account for such qualifications. I develop and defend a simple theory on which qua-qualifications

Triviality results threaten plausible principles governing our credence in epistemic modal claims. This paper develops a new account of modal credence which avoids triviality. On the resulting theory, probabilities are assigned not to sets of worlds, but rather to sets of information state-world pairs. The theory avoids triviality by giving up the principle that rational credence is closed under conditionalization