Experiences of urges, impulses, or inclinations are among the most basic elements in the practical life of conscious agents. This article develops a theory of urges and their epistemology. The article motivates a tripartite framework that distinguishes urges, conscious experiences of urges, and exercises of capacities that agents have to control their urges. The article elaborates the elements of the

Fitting Things Together defends the distinctive normativity of structural rationality, which requires one’s mental states to fit together correctly. More specifically, Worsnip argues that structural rationality is “[a] genuine, [b] autonomous, [c] unified, and [d] normatively significant” (x). (a) and (b) are part of his case for rationality dualism, “the view that structural and substantive rationality

The Fiery Test of Critique comprises a series of careful readings of Kant’s main arguments against traditional metaphysics in the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787). The book is attentive to the texts and philosophically sophisticated. It also provides a great deal of “historical context for the conceptions Kant employs” (31). This is not mere stage-setting or ornamentation:

The idea of an aristocracy of all has been enormously influential in politics and philosophy since the end of the Second World War. The idea is that all of us have the same inviolable dignity grounded in our shared humanity that affords us human rights, protects us from objectification, combats sexism and racism, and makes us worthy of respect. Despite its impact and intuitive appeal, attributing this

A theory of aesthetic value should explain what makes aesthetic value good. Current views about what makes aesthetic value good privilege the individual’s encounter with aesthetic value—listening to music, reading a novel, writing a poem, or viewing a painting. What makes aesthetic value good is its benefit to the individual appreciator. But engagement with aesthetic value is often a social, participatory

Mark Wilson’s “alternative history,” highly original, deeply informed, cogently argued, and elegantly written, aims to do more than chronicle the mistakes of the past. It presents a manifesto for the future, charting more profitable paths along which analytic philosophers might pursue their inquiries. Unlike some other reformers, Wilson does not take the rot to have set in fairly recently, with the

Over the course of the book Mumford defends what he calls “soft Parmenideanism.” Soft Parmenideanism has an ontological component and a methodological component. The ontological component: there are no negative entities (such things as absences or omissions or voids or nothings). The methodological component: we should not reject negative entities at all cost, but should rather accept negative entities

Character Trouble (2022) needed to be written. Doris’s earlier volume, Lack of Character (2002), framed a wide range of debates about the relationship between normative and descriptive theories of moral character. But the ground has shifted in the roughly two decades since its publication. Normative theorizing in philosophy began to engage more deeply with empirical psychology, ironically, just as

Foundations covers well-trodden ground in debates about Foundations covers familiar ground in debates about environmental economics, environmental ethics and climate justice. Its main value is in providing a stark, but sophisticated defense of a particular worldview, albeit with a specific twist and a few unorthodox suggestions of its own. While Heath’s position is controversial—even extreme—in various

Here is a picture of the relationship between natural-language semantics and pragmatics that many theorists would accept: semantics seeks to reverse-engineer the database of word meanings and composition rules by means of which we encode and decode the meanings of sentences. This is going pretty well, because our encoding-decoding algorithms are sufficiently discrete and well behaved that they can

Beyond Spacetime: The Foundations of Quantum Gravity is one of two edited volumes stemming from a three-year research project led by Nick Huggett and Chris Wuthrich on the philosophy of quantum gravity, with the goal of “explor[ing] the idea that attempts to quantize gravity either significantly modify the structures of classical spacetime or replace them—and spacetime itself—altogether” (1). The background

Awareness growth—coming to entertain propositions of which one was previously unaware—is a crucial aspect of epistemic thriving. And yet, it is widely believed that orthodox Bayesianism cannot accommodate this phenomenon since that would require employing supposedly defective catchall propositions. Orthodox Bayesianism, it is concluded, must be amended. In this article, I show that this argument fails

If no one is morally responsible, how should we respond to wrongdoing? Over the past twenty-five years, Derk Pereboom has grappled with this question with tremendous ingenuity, rigor, and generosity to his interlocutors. That responsibility skepticism is no longer regarded as a merely notional possibility, or the province of a handful of historical figures, is attributable to his efforts. In Wrongdoing

Thought experiments are a mainstay in philosophy. We think about how to apply philosophical concepts to hypothetical cases in an effort to draw conclusions about their application more generally. To take a familiar example, one way we might learn that justified true belief isn’t knowledge involves first having an intuition that a subject has a justified true belief that doesn’t rise to the level of

In the postscripts to “A Subjectivist’s Guide to Objective Chance,” David Lewis (1986: 118) wrote: “To the question how chance can be reconciled with determinism, …my answer is: it can’t be done.” But a number of philosophers have tried, in the past thirty years or so, to show that Lewis was mistaken. Motives for doing so are not hard to find. Classical gambling systems such as coin flips and dice

In Materialism from Hobbes to Locke, Stewart Duncan provides a lucid and judicious investigation of some central episodes in the history of materialism in seventeenth-century Britain. The book begins with an examination of Thomas Hobbes’s defense of materialism. Duncan then considers three significant critics of Hobbes’s materialism: Henry More, Ralph Cudworth, and Margaret Cavendish. Last, he turns

This superb book should help set the agenda for philosophical work on causation for years to come. Indeed, its impact deserves to be felt more widely: philosophers who don’t give a fig about causation will still profit a great deal by studying this book closely. It is not faultless: in particular, Woodward’s treatment in chapter 2 of his favored “interventionist” account of causation and its alternatives

It is common to distinguish two great families of representation. Symbolic representations include logical and mathematical symbols, words, and complex linguistic expressions. Iconic representations include dials, diagrams, maps, pictures, 3-dimensional models, and depictive gestures. This essay describes and motivates a new way of distinguishing iconic from symbolic representation. It locates the

Fair Opportunity and Responsibility sets forth an overarching normative vision of excuses, weds criminal law and moral theorizing, and provides both breadth and depth in its analysis. The early chapters articulate the underlying theoretical account, and the later chapters analyze specific potential excuses, such as insanity and structural injustice.Brink operates within a retributivist framework, arguing

In an apparent attempt to interpret Aristotle, Jan Łukasiewicz proposed that the idea that the future is open carries a semantic shadow: future contingents are neither true nor false, and connectives are governed by three-valued truth-tables. The view is suspicious, among other things, because it introduces violations of the law of excluded middle (LEM) that do not track intuition (when A is neither

Deflationists about truth hold that the function of the truth predicate is to enable us to make certain assertions we could not otherwise make. Pragmatists claim that the utility of negation lies in its role in registering incompatibility. The pragmatist insight about negation has been successfully incorporated into bilateral theories of content, which take the meaning of negation to be inferentially

From Frederick Douglass and Sojourner Truth to Malcolm X, James Baldwin, Toni Morrison, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks, the United States has a rich tradition of writers and activists who have drawn attention to anger’s value as a tool for resisting racism. “Racial hatred is real,” hooks (1995: 17) observed a quarter century ago, “and it is humanizing to be able to resist it with militant rage.” Myisha

For over two decades now, Robert Batterman’s work has been important reading for anyone interested in emergence and reduction in the natural sciences. In Batterman’s first book, The Devil in the Details, he identified a varied collection of patterns of inference that exhibit what he called “asymptotic reasoning”: systematically eliminating or abstracting away details from the full description of a

There comes a time in every metaphysician’s life when she finally thinks—sure, maybe I should learn more about woodworking. She might then find herself reading something like Christopher Schwarz’s The Anarchist’s Workbench. In a chapter titled “All The Mistakes” Schwarz (2020: 47) reflects on attempts to design “a perfect bench,” starting with the honestly named $175 Workbench: The poor bench has changed

Questions about idealizations in science are often framed along the lines of, How can science be so effective when it gets so much wrong? Rice’s book, Leveraging Distortions: Explanation, Idealization, and Universality in Science offers a refinement on this framing, where we need not commit to the premise that idealizations are, in fact, wrong, that they need to be contained to the irrelevant parts

Mark Schroeder’s latest book delves deeper into the topic of normativity and reasons, while moving his focus from ethics to epistemology. His central aims are, first, to argue that theorizing in normative epistemology profits from comparison with other normative domains (his “Core Hypothesis” [9]); and second, to defend a picture of epistemic normativity that puts reasons first: they can be used to

The question of how communities may author their own laws, thereby manifesting autonomy (“self-legislation”), arises throughout the history of political thought. In Democratic Law, her Berkeley Tanner Lectures, Seana Valentine Shiffrin offers a distinguished contribution to this long inquiry: she argues that law’s value within democratic societies rests on its communicative capacity, enabling citizens

Predictable polarization is everywhere: we can often predict how people’s opinions, including our own, will shift over time. Extant theories either neglect the fact that we can predict our own polarization, or explain it through irrational mechanisms. They needn’t. Empirical studies suggest that polarization is predictable when evidence is ambiguous, that is, when the rational response is not obvious

In Dark Matters, Mara Van Der Lugt attempts to rehabilitate pessimism as a moral stance. Critical to this task is the distinction between what she calls “future-oriented” and “value-oriented” pessimism (10). The former is what most people presently understand the word pessimism to mean: a gloomy view about the future, an attitude of premature defeat.Although this kind of fatalism can be found alongside

Kant’s formula of universal law (FUL) is standardly understood as a test of the moral permissibility of an agent’s maxim: maxims that pass the test are morally neutral, and so permissible, while those that do not are morally impermissible. In contrast, this article argues that the FUL tests whether a maxim is the cause or determining ground of an action at all. According to Kant’s general account of

Here is a fact about humans: we use our senses to pick up on things around us and our intellect to understand whatever is out there to be understood. In Mind and World in Aristotle’s De Anima, Kelsey argues that this fact is, in Aristotle’s view, in need of an explanation. He finds one in De Anima 3.8’s suggestion that “intelligence [is] form of forms, and sensibility form of sensibilia” (432a2–3;

In his impressive Leibniz on Time, Space, and Relativity, Ric Arthur manages to juggle a daunting array of tasks: tracking the chronological development of Leibniz’s views over more than half a century; explicating Leibniz’s groundbreaking mathematics; assembling texts—primary and secondary—in at least five languages; and, as if in passing, offering original translations and assessments of countless

Crafted within a knowledge-first epistemological framework, Mona Simion’s engaging and wide-ranging work ensures that both the Knowledge Norm of Assertion (KNA) and Classical Invariantism (CI) can be part of a viable and productive research program.Dissatisfied with current strategies on offer in the literature, she successfully counters objections to the pair sourced in “shiftiness intuitions”—intuitions

Consent covers certain actions but not others. If I lend you my new car, you are now free to use it to run errands but not to compete in a demolition derby. This is obvious enough, but determining exactly what I have permitted is much harder. Since you cannot read my mind, you cannot know for sure which uses of the car fall within the contours of my consent. But if you get this wrong, you use my car

Sustaining Democracy is Robert Talisse’s well-argued follow-up to his previous book, Overdoing Democracy. Talisse has argued that American political polarization endangers democracy. The problem occurs when Americans allow their politics to become their identity and, in doing so, lose crosscutting identities, religious, familial, and civic. We not only lose the intrinsic value of those identities;

Those who love philosophy books that present new, exciting, and complex theories have been given a gift in Barbara Herman’s The Moral Habitat. In my view, it is also a gift to Kant, since it develops a deeply Kantian account of deliberation as part of showing how perfect and imperfect duties can be seen as working together in a dynamic moral (eco)system of duties of right and of virtue. In the process

This paper argues that the theory of structured propositions is not undermined by the Russell-Myhill paradox. I develop a theory of structured propositions in which the Russell-Myhill paradox doesn’t arise: the theory does not involve ramification or compromises to the underlying logic, but rather rejects common assumptions, encoded in the notation of the λ-calculus, about what properties and relations

In Bernard Reginster’s account of On the Genealogy of Morality, Nietzsche’s genealogical exercise is ‘functional.’ Nietzsche aims, in his view, to expose the functional role of moral beliefs in serving particular emotional needs of agents. The focus on this theme is tight, to the exclusion of some traditional topics, including perspectivism or truthfulness, as Reginster himself notes. Chapters 3, 4

Cariani’s The Modal Future is a book about future language. At its heart is a challenge to the received symmetric picture of temporal language. Many think past tense and future auxiliaries are mirror images of each other: one simply has “later” where the other has “earlier.” The Modal Future aims to supplant this symmetric picture with an asymmetric one, where future thought and talk is modal, and

There have been philosophers who sought to preserve and ratify the dictates’ common sense, and there have been philosophers who were willing to overturn and correct those dictates. And then there was Averroes. His most notorious doctrine is not just counterintuitive. It commits him to something that seems self-evidently false, namely that there is only a single mind to which all human thought is related

Johnathan L. Kvanvig describes this book as an exercise in metatheology: an attempt to provide a framework for evaluating competing views about what is fundamental in theology. At the core of Kvanvig’s framework is the idea that ‘starting points’ for theologies ‘generate’ aspects of theologies, to which more must be added in order to arrive at adequate complete theologies.Kvanvig focuses on three starting

In this excellent book, Christoph Kelp and Mona Simion defend an etiological-functionalist account of the normativity of assertion. Specifically, the etiological function of assertion is to generate knowledge in hearers. Kelp and Simion argue that this functionalist thesis has two important implications: a) that epistemically good assertions are those that are disposed to generate knowledge in hearers

Perception solves computationally demanding problems at lightning fast speed. It recovers sophisticated representations of the world from degraded inputs, often in a matter of milliseconds. Any theory of perception must be able to explain how this is possible; in other words, it must be able to explain perception’s computational tractability. One of the few attempts to move toward such an explanation

In her introduction to a translation of the Statesman, Julia Annas remarks that as ‘stimulating as Plato’s political ideas in the Statesman are, it is not surprising that the dialogue has been relatively neglected by comparison with the Republic and the Laws’ (Annas and Waterfield 1995: x). A glance at Dimas et al.’s bibliography shows that the situation has improved since then, although the Statesman

Everybody knows (for the relevant value of ‘everybody’) that, for Thomas Aquinas, perfect happiness consists in intellectual contemplation of the divine essence, with the will’s delight or enjoyment being a necessary concomitant of that beatific vision but not, strictly speaking, part of the essence of happiness. Beyond this boilerplate statement, however, most of us would be hard-pressed to say much

Christine Swanton is, without question, one of the leading scholars in contemporary virtue ethics. Nevertheless, and somewhat surprisingly, her target-centered account of virtue ethics, which was developed in Virtue Ethics: A Pluralistic Account (2003) and a series of articles, has not garnered much support. Part of the reason has to do with the sheer popularity of Aristotelian virtue ethics, in particular

Logicians and philosophers have had a good 120 years to get used to the idea that not every condition defines a set. One popular coping strategy is to maintain that each instantiated condition does at least determine a ‘plurality’ (i.e., one or more items). This is to say that friends of traditional plural logic accept—often as a trivial or evident or logical truth—each instance of plural comprehension:

This excellent volume contains 14 chapters exploring the idea of fragmentation: the division of a belief state into parts (“fragments”) that can represent the world in distinct, jointly incoherent ways. For instance, I might know that sea cucumbers are a type of animal related to starfish when I am asked in a biological context, but when I am at a restaurant and see them on the menu, I think that sea

Michael Tye is perhaps best known for his defense of tracking representationalism, a view that combines representationalism (the view that an experience’s phenomenal character is determined by its representational content) with a tracking theory of representation (the view that mental representation is a matter of causal covariation, carrying information, or, more generally, tracking). In Vagueness

A new book by Ernest Sosa is always an event. In a philosophical age where much of the focus is on piecemeal issues, Sosa has forged ahead with a novel virtue-theoretic treatment of a range of core questions in epistemology that is self-consciously systematic. Note that ‘epistemology’ is here broadly conceived. Indeed, a key part of the Sosa project has been to enlarge the reach of mainstream epistemology

Most philosophers today know the thirteenth century as the age of Thomas Aquinas and debates about human nature and the rational soul; fewer are aware of the thirteenth century as an important turning point in western European attitudes toward non-human animals. The two themes are intimately connected, however—the same Aristotelian texts that, newly translated into Latin, were generating controversy

Brandon Look’s introduction to this long-awaited collection points to the range of Leibniz’s writings unknown to Kant and his contemporaries and to Kant’s general dislike of historical scholarship. Kant apparently owned not a single book authored by Leibniz, or for that matter by Spinoza or Locke, and only one volume of Christian Wolff, his Ontologia. Yet the name index of the Kant corpus renders Leibniz

This is a work of delightfully rampant interdisciplinarity. It draws “on evolutionary analysis, primatology, anthropology, moral psychology, analyses of complex systems, experimental economics, studies of norms, economic development, policy studies, analyses of governance and collective action, randomized control trials and much more” (ix). I am not expert in any of those fields, much less all of them

This essay considers Kant’s theory of modality in light of a debate in contemporary modal metaphysics and modal logic concerning the Barcan formulas. The comparison provides a new and fruitful perspective on Kant’s complex and sometimes confusing claims about possibility and necessity. Two central Kantian principles provide the starting point for the comparison: that the possible must be grounded in

Chance both guides our credences and is an objective feature of the world. How and why we should conform our credences to chance depends on the underlying metaphysical account of what chance is. I use considerations of accuracy (how close your credences come to truth-values) to propose a new way of deferring to chance. The principle I endorse, called the Trust Principle, requires chance to be a good

We offer a general framework for theorizing about the structure of knowledge and belief in terms of the comparative normality of situations compatible with one’s evidence. The guiding idea is that, if a possibility is sufficiently less normal than one’s actual situation, then one can know that that possibility does not obtain. This explains how people can have inductive knowledge that goes beyond what

“I couldn’t stand those books,” my friend Elena said with great vehemence; “all the characters were just horrible.” It was a sunny afternoon in August and, having hiked up Izaraitz Auzoa, we were luncheoning on the grass by a small Basque chalet serving wine to weary hikers. She was talking about My Brilliant Friend, the first book of Elena Ferrante’s quartet The Neapolitan Novels. Her sister, who

Metaphysicians, by and large, aim to be scientifically respectable in their theorizing. To what extent do they succeed? That’s an excellent question. But before we can answer it, we need to answer a more basic question: What does it mean to be scientifically respectable in your metaphysical theorizing, anyway?In this important and original book, Andreas Hüttemann puts forward a novel way of thinking

An underappreciated but core part of metaethical expressivism is a thesis about moral practice’s function as a tool for coordination. Neil Sinclair’s Practical Expressivism brings this thesis to the fore and demonstrates that functions can help expressivists a lot. It does so by developing “practical expressivism,” a view with three core commitments. First, the metasemantic view that the semantic function

What is the nature of conscious sensory experience? In The Metaphysics of Sensory Experience David Papineau sets out to answer this question. He argues for the qualitative view: conscious sensory experiences are “intrinsic qualitative properties of people that are only contingently representational” (6).This book is instructive, engaging, original, full of argument, straight-talking, and it defends