Several recent results bring into focus the superintuitionistic nature of most notions of proof-theoretic validity, but little work has been done evaluating the consequences of these results. Proof...

What norm governs how an agent should change their beliefs when they encounter a completely new possibility? Orthodox Bayesianism has no answer, as it takes all learning to involve updating prior b...

Andrić and Herlitz (2022) object to Timeslice Prioritarianism on the basis that it violates two purportedly uncontroversial properties: prudence and Weak Pareto. We will claim that their objection ...

This paper argues for a theory of natural rights on which they are explained in terms of reasons supplied by rational consent. When B has a claim-right against A that A φ, A’s non-consent is not a ...

Published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (Ahead of Print, 2024)

Can static pictures depict motion and temporal properties? This is an open question that is becoming increasingly discussed in both aesthetics and the philosophy of mind. Theorists working on this ...

The fear of death resists philosophical attempts at reconciliation. Building on theories of emotion, I argue that we can understand our fear as triggered by a de se mode of thinking about death whi...

This paper defends macroidealism: the thesis that physical truths metaphysically depend on truths about the phenomenal experiences of macroscopic subjects. I argue that macroidealism has explanator...

Published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (Ahead of Print, 2024)

Theorists of aesthetic value since Hume have traditionally aimed to justify at least some comparative judgments of aesthetic value and to explain why we thereby have more reason to appreciate some ...

Published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (Ahead of Print, 2024)

Published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (Ahead of Print, 2024)

For agents like us, the feeling of effort is a very useful thing. It helps us sense how hard an action is, control its level of intensity, and decide whether to continue or stop performing it. Whil...

I offer a qualified defence of Kant’s natural teleological argument, that is, his inference from the (un)naturalness of an act to its (im)morality. Though I reject many of Kant’s conclusions, I thi...

In this paper I identify a distinctive kind of gaslighting: communicative gaslighting. Communicative gaslighters intentionally misrepresent the communicative properties of an utterance—their own or...

In this journal, Jack Spencer argues that we should reject a decision rule called MaxRat because it is incompatible with this principle: if you know that you will choose x, and you know that x is b...

We often use language creatively, introducing new expressions on the fly. That we can successfully communicate with novel expressions without antecedent semantic knowledge has led many to a dynamic...

Herman Cappelen and Josh Dever (C&D) have recently argued that the ideal/non-ideal distinction is ‘useless’ in philosophy of language. This paper responds to C&D’s argument, develops an account of ...

Limited aggregationists argue that when deciding between competing claims to aid we are sometimes required and sometimes forbidden from aggregating weaker claims to outweigh stronger claims. Joe Ho...

According to traditional universalism, properties are instantiated by objects, where instantiation is a ‘tie’ that binds objects and properties into facts. I offer two arguments against this view. ...

Fair-play theories of political obligation hold that persons have a duty to obey the law based on the fact that they benefit from the law and have a duty of reciprocity to comply in return. These a...

This paper presents a new argument against the view that structural (or attitude-based) irrationality consists in failing to respond correctly to normative reasons. According to this view, a patter...

Moorean constructions are famously odd: it is infelicitous to deny that you believe what you claim to be true. But what about claiming that p, only to immediately put into question your evidence in...

Contemporary alternatives to belief-based accounts of knowledge include, among others, accounts of knowledge as a mental state, such as Williamson’s (2000), and ability-based accounts of knowledge ...

In this paper, I argue for Strong Eliminativism—the view that there are no reasons for emotions. My argument for this claim has two premises. The first premise is that there is a deliberative const...

This paper describes public reason communitarianism, a theory which is isomorphic to public reason liberalism. It contains the same internal diversity and debates, and the same fundamental structur...

This paper embraces the view that we have substantial knowledge of the future and investigates how such knowledge fundamentally differs from knowledge of the past and present. I argue for a new sou...

The strongest version of the dogmatism puzzle argues that, when we know something, we should resolve to ignore or avoid evidence against it. The best existing responses are fallibilist, and hold th...

In this paper, I raise a challenge to Gideon Rosen’s defence of moral contingentism against Jamie Dreier’s moral luck argument. Dreier argues that if moral contingentism is true, acting in a morall...

The goal of this paper is to argue that there is indeterminacy in causation. I present three types of cases in which it is indeterminate whether an event c caused another event e: (1) cases of abse...

This paper explores the notions of competitive and noncompetitive value and examines how they both affect meaning in life. The paper distinguishes, among other things, between engaging with competi...

Some arguments against David Lewis’s modal realism seek to exploit apparent inconsistencies between it and anthropic reasoning. A recent argument, in particular, seeks to exploit an inconsistency b...

A good deal of recent debate over the nature of pleasure and pain has surrounded the alleged phenomenon of unconscious sensory pleasure and pain, or pleasures and pains whose subjects are entirely ...

Suppose that, for reasons of animal welfare, it would be better if everyone stopped eating chicken. Does it follow that you should stop eating chicken? Proponents of the ‘inefficacy objection’ argu...

The Apaṇṇaka Sutta, one of the early recorded teachings of the Buddha, contains an argument for accepting the doctrines of karma and rebirth that Buddhist scholars claim anticipates Pascal’s wager....

In this paper I identify a distinct form of epistemic injustice and oppression which I call ‘hermeneutical sabotage’. Hermeneutical sabotage occurs when dominantly situated knowers actively maintai...

This paper considers the formulation of the moral requirement against hypocrisy, paying particular attention to the logical scope of ‘requires’ in that formulation. The paper argues (i) that we sho...

Published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (Ahead of Print, 2024)

The history of philosophy is a history of moral circle expansion. This history correlates with a history of expansionism about consciousness. Recently, expansionism about consciousness has exploded...

Bruno Whittle (2019) has recently extended Kripke’s semantical theory of truth to languages containing generalized quantifiers. There are reasons for axiomatizing semantical theories, and for regar...

Several philosophers have proposed Knowledge-Based Decision Theories (KDTs)—theories that require agents to maximize expected utility as yielded by utility and probability functions that depend on ...

We sometimes face personal choices that are so momentous they appear to give rise to an intrapersonal analogue to the non-identity problem. Where the non-identity problem presents as a problem for ...

When people simultaneously occupy multiple social identities, ascriptions of disadvantage and advantage, as well as our reasoning with them, need to be handled with care. For instance, as various U...

According to the so-called golden rule, we ought to treat others as we want to be treated by them. This rule, in one form or another, is part of every major religion, and it has been accepted by ma...

Many real-world agents recognise that they impose harms by choosing to emit carbon, for example, by flying. Yet many do so anyway, and then attempt to make things right by offsetting those harms. S...

How do we ascribe subjective probability? In decision theory, this question is often addressed by representation theorems, going back to Ramsey (1926), which tell us how to define or measure subjec...

In this paper, I reevaluate Kripke’s arguments for the necessary a posteriori contra a Kantian pure modal rationalism according to which modal cognition is a priori. I argue that Kripke’s critique ...

The standard objection to dualist theories of mind is that they seemingly cannot account for the obvious fact that mental phenomena cause our behaviour. On the plausible assumption that all our beh...

In this paper, I introduce the notion of ‘philosophy moves’: prominent tropes featured in contemporary academic philosophy. Moves are more than patterns—they are tools for advancing and enriching p...

This paper argues that the knowledge asymmetry (the fact that we know more about the past than the future) can be explained as a consequence of the causal Markov condition. The causal Markov condit...

Theorists who advocate worldly (metaphysical or ontological) indeterminacy—the idea that the world itself is indeterminate in one or more respects—should address how we understand the signifying na...

This paper defends the avowal view of self-deception, according to which the self-deceived agent has been led by the evidence to believe that ¬p and yet is sincere in asserting that p. I argue that...

We know our own intentional actions in a distinctively first-personal way. Many accounts of knowledge of intentionally doing something, A, assume that grounds for the knowledge would have to establ...

Serious actualism is the view that it is metaphysically impossible for an entity to have a property, or stand in a relation, and not exist. Fine (1985) and Pollock (1985) influentially argue that t...

Are we acquainted with the self in experience? It may seem so. After all, we tend to be confident in our own existence. A natural explanation for this confidence is that the self somehow shows up i...

Call ‘radical moral theorizing’ the project of developing a moral theory that not only tries to conform to our existing moral judgments, but also manifests various theoretical virtues: consistency,...

For the realist metaphysician, certain notions in metaphysics are objectively theory-guiding. But what makes them so? Echoing others, Dasgupta (2018) suggests that the realist metaphysician faces t...

A family of familiar linguistic tests purport to help identify when a term is ambiguous. These tests are philosophically important: a familiar philosophical strategy is to claim that some phenomeno...

Published in Australasian Journal of Philosophy (Vol. 102, No. 3, 2024)

I defend a new conception of the particular-universal distinction based on considerations about what David Lewis calls ‘amphibians’. I argue, first, that given the possibility of amphibians, two re...