What is epistemically required of the rationally hopeful? In this paper, I propose that, as a subject becomes hopeful that p, she also adopts an inquiring attitude toward the question of whether p. Moreover, remaining rationally hopeful requires maintaining an inquiring attitude toward those possibilities we are hopeful about. On top of being led by a particular practical goal (that of attaining p), I suggest that the hopeful agent is also led by the epistemic goal of knowing whether p. Adding the “inquiry” criteria to rational hopefulness helps explain our intuition that there is something wrong with being hopeful that p and not disposed to inquire into whether p. It also helps us further distinguish hopefulness from other positive attitudes we adopt in the face of uncertainty, such as optimism, and faith.

The most popular position in the moral luck debate is to reject resultant moral luck while accepting the possibility of other types of moral luck. But it is unclear whether this position is stable. Some argue that luck is luck and if it is relevant for moral responsibility anywhere, it is relevant everywhere, and vice versa. Some argue that given the similarities between circumstantial moral luck and resultant moral luck, there is good evidence that if the former exists, so does the latter. The challenge is especially pressing for the large group that exclusively deny resultant moral luck. I argue that rejecting resultant moral luck alone is a stable and plausible position. This is because, in a nutshell, the other types of luck can but the results of an action cannot affect what makes one morally responsible.

According to Charles Travis, Frege’s principle to “always to sharply separate the psychological from the logical, the subjective from the objective” involves a move called “the fundamental abstraction.” I try to explain what this abstraction is and why it is interesting. I then raise a problem for it, and describe what I think is a better way to understand Frege’s principle.

I argue that Charles Travis’s interpretation of Frege, in Frege: The Pure Business of Being True, as consistent with Travis’s conception of occasion-sensitivity does not in fact require any modal notions, and so is consistent with the amodalist interpretation of Frege I elaborate in Necessity Lost.

We argue that libertarianism (roughly, the thesis that we have indeterministic, libertarian free will) is compatible with God’s infallible foreknowledge. We use eternalism (roughly, the thesis that reality is a 4-dimensional block and that past, present, and future objects exist) as an explanatory stepping stone between libertarianism and God’s foreknowledge: eternalism entails that (and comes close to explaining how) an omniscient God would know what we decide in the future even if we have libertarian free will. This account also explains what is wrong with standard fatalist arguments for the incompatibility of free will and God’s foreknowledge.

Many theorists note the important role that wonder can play in our lives. Yet, little attention has been given to the associated character virtue; characterizations of it do not go much further than basic sketches that draw on Aristotle’s view about emotional dispositions that are proper to virtue. This paper fleshes out such sketches, which helps us understand what type of virtue this trait is. The account of virtuous wonder I develop here vindicates brief suggestions in the literature that this trait is an intellectual and aesthetic virtue and reveals in what sense it is a moral and environmental virtue.

This paper is a response to Hutchinson from Travis.

The Molyneux question asks: would a blind person, who knows spheres and cubes only from touch, be able to recognize these shapes visually immediately upon becoming sighted, without touching them? Molyneux himself answered no. Locke accepted Molyneux’s negative answer. However, Locke’s answer appears inconsistent with the doctrine of common sensibles, according to which some ideas are given in more than one sense modality. Motivated by alleviating this tension, philosophers have put forth several interpretations of Locke’s views on shape perception. Here, I motivate a novel interpretation of Locke that can better resolve the tension.

In legal proceedings, a fact-finder needs to decide whether a defendant is guilty, or not, based on probabilistic evidence. We defend the thesis that the defendant should be found guilty just in case it is rational for the fact-finder to believe that the defendant is guilty. We draw on Leitgeb’s stability theory for an appropriate notion of rational belief and show how our thesis solves the problem of statistical evidence. Finally, we defend our account of legal proof against challenges from Staffel and compare it to a recent competitor put forth by Moss.

This article argues that Hume’s epistemology changes in an important respect between the Treatise and the Enquiry: the degree to which these epistemologies are practical epistemologies. This article focuses on one particular aspect of this latter comparison, that is, Hume’s responses to skepticism in the Treatise and Enquiry. It argues that the Enquiry’s response to skepticism offers a practical epistemology that teaches us, in relatively concrete terms, how we can be wise. By contrast, the Treatise’s response to skepticism does not seem to share this aim, or at least realizes it to a diminished extent compared with its later counterpart.

In her groundbreaking paper “Having too much” Ingrid Robeyns introduces the principle of “limitarianism,” arguing that it is morally impermissible to have more resources than needed for leading a maximally flourishing life. This paper focuses on one component of limitarian theory, namely the nature of the riches threshold, and critiques Robeyns’ absolute threshold, that limits wealth above what is needed for satiating human flourishing. The paper then suggests an alternative, relative threshold for determining excessive wealth, and also argues that limitarianism is best understood as a set of wealth-limiting principles, each with its own threshold, justifications, and conditions for operation.

This article is a response to Shieh from Travis.

I argue that moral dialogue concerning an agent’s standing to blame facilitates moral understanding about the purported wrongdoing that her blame targets. Challenges to a blamer’s standing serve a communicative function: they initiate dialogue or reflection meant to align the moral understanding of the blamer and challenger. On standard accounts of standing to blame, challenges to standing facilitate shared moral understanding about the blamer herself: it matters per se whether the blamer has a stake in the purported wrongdoing at issue, is blaming hypocritically, or is complicit in the wrongdoing at issue. In contrast, I argue that three widely recognized conditions on standing to blame—the business, non-hypocrisy, and non-complicity conditions—serve as epistemically tractable proxies through which we evaluate the accuracy and proportionality of blame. Standing matters because, and to the extent that, it indirectly informs our understanding of the purported wrongdoing that an act of blaming targets.

A topic of recent interest involves the nature of theistic faith, and in particular, the boundaries of such faith. For example, philosophers have taken opposing positions on whether atheists and agnostics can have theistic faith. I consider a related question: whether anti-theists, who think God’s existence would be a bad thing, can have faith. I argue for a negative answer, although with several caveats.

According to many philosophical accounts, health is related to the functions and capacities of biological parts. But how do we decide what constitutes the health subject (that is, the bearer of health and disease states) and its biological parts whose functions are relevant for assessing its health? Current science, especially microbiome science, complicating the boundaries between organisms and their environments undermines any straightforward answer. This article explains why this question matters, delineates a few broad options, offers arguments against one option, and draws some modest implications for philosophical accounts of human health.

This paper seeks to challenge principles of culpability transfer as they appear in both criminal law and moral philosophy. I begin by discussing the legal doctrine of substituted mens rea, focusing on Section 33.1 of Canada’s Criminal Code. I argue that this doctrine violates the principle of contemporaneity, which there are sound philosophical reasons to accept. I then argue that the same reasons apply to tracing accounts of moral responsibility. Finally, drawing on the moral luck literature, I argue that cases of extreme intoxication are better analyzed in terms of harm-causation than culpability-transfer.

This essay defends a new interpretation of Kant’s account of the theoretical use of the ideas of reason based on the idea that reason is the faculty that delivers comprehension, i.e., cognition that essentially involves explanatory understanding. I argue that the ideas are conditions of the possibility of comprehension, just as the categories are conditions of the possibility of experience. In virtue of being constitutive of comprehension, the ideas are also regulative of experience. For experience is acquired not for its own sake but for the sake of comprehension.