For Kant, the human cognitive faculty has two subfaculties: sensibility and the understanding. Each has pure forms that are necessary to us as humans: space and time for sensibility; the categories for the understanding. But Kant is careful to leave open the possibility of there being creatures like us, with both sensibility and understanding, who nevertheless have different pure forms of sensibility

This article presents a new interpretation of the great Ming dynasty philosopher Wang Yangming’s (1472–1529) celebrated doctrine of the “unity of knowledge and action” (知行合一). Wang held that action was not unified with all knowledge, but only with an elevated form of knowledge, which he sometimes called “genuine knowledge” (真知). I argue for a new interpretation of this notion, according to which genuine

At the beginning of Plato’s Republic (327c), Socrates and Glaucon are waylaid on their way home by Polemarchus and friends. “Do you see how many we are?” says Polemarchus. “Of course, I do” responds Socrates. “Well then, you must either be stronger than we are, or you must stay here,” says Polemarchus. “Is there not an alternative, namely that we may persuade you to let us go?” says Socrates. “Could

‘Thought’ and ‘feeling’: the two terms aptly capture a contrast and a connection that lie at the heart of Aristotle’s moral psychology. Together they define the focus of a book that may serve the novice as a lucid introduction, and the expert as a reminder of the richness of relevant material. Though Aristotle’s tone is rarely one of hesitancy, his conception is ambivalent, and it is good to be alerted

This is an excellent book on an extraordinarily interesting topic: the flourishing of philosophical thought concerning free will during the golden century of medieval philosophy that begins around the middle of the thirteenth century.Over the last several decades, leading scholars in the field have produced careful studies of how one or another of the great figures of the era understands free will

Karen Ng has produced an original and ambitious book that aims to defend a novel understanding of Hegel’s “idealism.” Such idealism, in Ng’s view, does not deny that things exist outside the mind, but it maintains that life is what “opens up the possibility of rendering things intelligible” (64). This “naturalized” idealism is indebted to what Ng takes to be Kant’s idea, set out in the Critique of

Choosing brings change. A major life choice, a “big decision,” as Edna Ullmann-Margalit termed it, brings the possibility of changing who you are. Richard Pettigrew’s important new book, Choosing for Changing Selves, explores theories of decision-making for choices that change us, with a particular focus on life-changing decisions.Life-changing decisions are decision cases where a persisting agent

Linda Zagzebski has made wide-ranging and influential contributions in epistemology and philosophy of religion over her career. Within epistemology specifically, Zagzebski is rightly associated with her pioneering book Virtues of the Mind, which is a core classic in virtue epistemology (Zagzebski 1996). Importantly, though, Zagzebski has also carved out notable positions in a range of other areas of

Human groups across cultures and times have divided labor by gender. What explains this fact, along with related inequities in the division of resources? It may be tempting to assume that such divisions are to be explained by appeal to evolutionary biology—evolved differences in suitability or preferences for various tasks, innate sexist biases, and so on. But substantial cross-cultural diversity in

If there are fundamental laws of nature, can they fail to be exact? In this paper, I consider the possibility that some fundamental laws are vague. I call this phenomenon fundamental nomic vagueness. I characterize fundamental nomic vagueness as the existence of borderline lawful worlds and the presence of several other accompanying features. Under certain assumptions, such vagueness prevents the fundamental

Kant maintains that while claims to property are morally possible in a state of nature, such claims are merely “provisional”; they become “conclusive” only in a civil condition involving political institutions. Kant’s commentators find this thesis puzzling, since it seems to assert a natural right to property alongside a commitment to property’s conventionality. We resolve this apparent contradiction

In this stimulating book, Jessica Moss aims to show that Plato’s epistemological project is “radically different” (6) from what one might expect if exposed only to the contemporary epistemological scene. Moss’s main thesis has two distinct but related parts: first, about Plato’s key epistemological concepts; second, about the motivation behind Plato’s epistemology.In conceptual terms, Moss sees the

What is philosophy? This has been a contentious question for as long as the subject has existed. And how long is that? That too is far from obvious, even if we confine ourselves just to the Western tradition. The Greek thinkers standardly viewed as the first Western philosophers did not call themselves “philosophers”; it was largely through Aristotle’s retrospective view of them as having done something

This extensive text (517 pages of full text, 554 overall) is an invaluable new contribution to Kant studies by one of the most important commentators of the last half century. Allison’s ambitious goal here is to give a developmental and systematic account of Kant’s thoughts on free will, spanning nearly the entirety of Kant’s writing life. Not all the texts Allison discusses here explicitly address

At the core of Jamin Asay’s book is a distinction and a claim. The distinction is between two conceptions of truthmaker theory. On one of them, truthmaker theory aims at “ontological accounting”—that is, “properly coordinating our beliefs and ontological inventories”; on the other conception, it aims at “alethic explanation”—that is, “offering systematic explanations as to why true truth-bearers are

Amie Thomasson’s latest monograph, Norms and Necessity, defends a normativist position about metaphysical modality statements. As a deflationary approach to metaphysical modality, Thomasson’s brand of normativism is in full continuity with her previous meta-metaphysical endeavors—especially with her deflationary approach to the existence of objects, developed in Ontology Made Easy.Chapter 1 introduces

The material interpretation of the conditional is motivated by attractive principles of logic. As an account of the conditional in natural language, however, it is widely thought to suffer from two major drawbacks. One is that it appears to be in conflict with speakers’ judgments about the truth-value of many conditionals. The other is that its prospects for incorporation into a unified view of indicative

Attempts to account for the phenomenal character of perceptual experiences have so far largely focused on their sensory aspects. The first aim of this article is to support the claim that (perceptual) phenomenal character has another, significant, aspect—the phenomenal realm is suffused with valence. What it’s like to undergo perceptual experiences—from pains to supposedly “neutral” visual experiences—standardly

A raft of new philosophical problems concerning truth have recently been discovered by several theorists. These problems concern the question of how ascriptions of truth are to be grounded. Most previous commentators have taken the problems to shed light on the theory of ground. In this paper, I argue that they also shed light on the theory of truth. In particular, I argue that the notion of ground

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Sometimes, we face choices between actions most likely to lead to valuable outcomes, and actions which put us in a better position to learn. These choices exemplify what is called the exploration/exploitation trade-off. In computer science and psychology, this trade-off has fruitfully been applied to modulating the way agents or systems make choices over time. This article extends the trade-off to

Incongruent counterparts are pairs of objects which cannot be enclosed in the same spatial limits despite an exact similarity in magnitude, proportion, and relative position of their parts. Kant discerns in such objects, whose most familiar example is left and right hands, a “paradox” demanding “demotion of space and time to mere forms of our sensory intuition.” This paper aims at an adequate understanding

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Abstract not available

Is self-knowledge a requirement of rationality, like consistency, or means-ends coherence? Many claim so, citing the evident impropriety of asserting, and the alleged irrationality of believing, Moore-paradoxical propositions of the form < p, but I don't believe that p>. If there were nothing irrational about failing to know one's own beliefs, they claim, then there would be nothing irrational about

In the peer disagreement debate, three intuitively attractive claims seem to conflict: there is disagreement among peers on many important matters; peer disagreement is a serious challenge to one's own opinion; and yet one should be able to maintain one's opinion on important matters. This article shows that contrary to initial appearances, we can accept all three of these claims. Disagreement significantly

This article provides a theory of causation in the causal modeling framework. In contrast to most of its predecessors, this theory is model-invariant in the following sense: if the theory says that C caused (didn’t cause) E in a causal model, M, then it will continue to say that that C caused (didn’t cause) E once one has removed an inessential variable from M. The article suggests that, if this theory