The principle of sufficient reason (PSR) says every fact has an explanation. But van Inwagen argues the PSR is false—otherwise all facts are necessary facts. Consider the conjunction of all contingent facts, which we can call the Big Contingent Conjunction. If every fact has an explanation, then presumably the Big Contingent Conjunction had better have an explanation too. But what fact could explain its truth—is the Big Contingent Conjunction explained by a necessary fact or a contingent one? Trouble ensues either way. If the Big Contingent Conjunction is explained by a necessary fact, then it is hard to see why it should be contingent. (After all, if something follows from what is necessary, it too would seem to be necessary.) On the other hand, if the Big Contingent Conjunction is explained by a contingent fact, then the explanation appears circular since the explanans itself is among the facts it explains in the Big Contingent Conjunction. This paper explores an assumption of this argument rarely subjected to scrutiny—namely, the distribution principle, which asserts that if a fact explains a conjunction, then it explains each of its conjuncts. Though superficially plausible, close consideration of this principle reveals some reasons to reject it, potentially saving the PSR from van Inwagen’s challenge.

It is widely accepted that parents have a fundamental moral obligation to consider and treat their children as each other’s equals. Yet the question of what grounds the equality of status among children in the eyes of their parents has so far been largely neglected in the literature on the philosophy of childhood and the ethics of parenthood. This paper fills this gap by developing a novel theory of the basis of filial equality: it argues that parents ought to consider and treat their children as equals by virtue of loving them. Parental love is the basis of filial equality.

This article argues that Hume is committed to the cognitive phenomenology of believing. For Hume, beliefs have some distinctively cognitive phenomenology, which is different in kind from sensory phenomenology. I call this interpretation the “cognitive phenomenal interpretation” (“CPI”) of Hume. CPI is coherent with, and supported by, the textual evidence from A Treatise of Human Nature as well as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. In both texts, Hume talks about the distinctive “manner” of believing, and CPI provides us with the best explanation of Hume’s remarks on this distinctive “manner.”

According to certain views about human ontology, the way we seem is very different from the way we are. The appearances are a threat to such views. Here I take up and defuse the threat to one such view.

Pure immaterialism says that each of us is wholly immaterial. The appearances suggest otherwise. I argue that despite the fact that we might sometimes appear to be at least partly material, and that we can be perceptually justified in believing something solely on the basis of having a perceptual experience as of its being the case, none of us is ever perceptually justified in believing that we are even partly material (or that we’re not). Bottom line: we might be able to know whether we’re material, but we can’t know just by looking.

In A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume claims that causes must temporally precede their effects. However, his main argument for this claim has long puzzled commentators. Indeed, most commentators have dismissed this argument as confused, but beyond this dismissal, the argument has provoked relatively little critical attention. My aim in this paper is to rectify this situation. In what follows, I (i) clarify the argument’s interpretive challenges, (ii) critique two existing interpretations of it, and (iii) offer my own improved interpretation. More generally, I hope to throw new light on this puzzling aspect of Hume’s philosophy.

According to moderatism, perceptual justification requires that one independently takes for granted propositional hinges. This view faces the truth problem: to offer an account of truth for hinges that is not threatened by skepticism. Annalisa Coliva has tried to solve the truth problem by developing a new form of alethic pluralism. I argue that the resulting view cannot offer a coherent characterization of “skeptical switch scenarios” while providing an effective anti-skeptical strategy. In a more positive vein, I defend an approach that combines a correspondence conception of truth with epistemological disjunctivism.

Moral naturalists are often said to have trouble making sense of inter-communal moral disagreements. The culprit is typically thought to be the naturalist’s metasemantics and its implications for the sameness of meaning across communities. The most familiar incarnation of this metasemantic challenge is the Moral Twin Earth argument. We address the challenge from the perspective of analytic naturalism and argue that making sense of inter-communal moral disagreement creates no special issues for this view.

Menges (2022) seeks to identify the kind of blame that should be at issue in debates between skeptics and anti-skeptics about responsibility. Menges argues that such blame is constituted by responses that the target has a claim against, and by the blamer’s thought that they have forfeited this claim due to their bad action and state while engaged in that action. I identify a class of blame responses that Menges mistakenly excludes and offer an alternative, more general, account in which the distinctive feature of controversial blame isn’t claim forfeiture, but the defeat of reasons grounded in the target’s interests.

Joyce Havstad has argued in this journal that the argument from inductive risk is deductively valid and sound. As far as we know, this is the best reconstruction of the argument in the literature. Unfortunately, it suffers from a small flaw that renders the argument invalid. We identify this flaw, show that it is superficial, and show that a small amendment to the argument rescues the claim of its validity.

In this brief discussion of McKaughan and Howard-Snyder’s “How Does Trust Relate to Faith?” I call into question the authors’ finding that faith is necessarily resilient while trust is not. To do this, I demonstrate how the constraints of McKaughan and Howard-Snyder’s inquiry screen out a particular kind of trust, two-place trust, which does manifest resilience. Turning then to two-place trust, I offer two positive reasons—proportionality and the value of relationships—to think that trust may be essentially resilient after all. If this is correct, it takes us a step closer to understanding how trust relates to faith.