As a reader of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association, you might have wondered what measures are in place to ensure that submissions are evaluated impartially. The Journal deploys a ‘triply anonymous’ reviewing process. Editors handling papers do not know the identity of authors, nor do referees, and authors are not given referees’ names. And referees? Referees are selected on the basis of their expertise, with an eye toward the promotion of diversity to the extent possible.

I argue that there are, according to Aristotle, two importantly different kinds of goals or ends in the domain of human agency and that one of these two kinds has been frequently, though not universally, overlooked. Apart from psychological goals, goals that agents adopt as their purposes, there are also, I submit, goals that actions have by being the kinds of actions they are and, in some cases, by occurring in the circumstances in which they do. These latter goals belong to suitable actions whether or not agents adopt them as purposes and whether or not agents are aware of them. There is evidence both in Aristotle's ethical writings and in his discussion of chance and luck in Physics II.4–6 that he recognizes goals of this latter kind.

Rather than asking how what we are aware of in perceptual experience can give us knowledge of the independent world, this paper asks what conditions we as knowers must fulfill, what capacities we must have, and what the ‘objects of perception’ must be in the competent exercise those capacities, if we are to have any such knowledge. It is argued that we must be capable of perceiving that such-and-such is so and thereby knowing by perception alone what is so in the world as it is independently of us.

You hold in your hands—or perhaps are viewing online—the first of four issues of the inaugural volume of the Journal of the American Philosophical Association. The Journal was inspired by the idea that the time had come for the American Philosophical Association to sponsor a journal serving the interests of the philosophical community worldwide, a fully generalist journal dedicated to publishing philosophically compelling articles in a timely manner.

In this paper, I dispute what I call psychological internalism about moral responsibility, which comprises most classic accounts as well as newer neurobiological ones, and I defend psychological externalism about moral responsibility instead. According to psychological internalism, an agent's moral responsibility is determined solely or primarily by her intentional states. I argue that psychological internalism is empirically challenged by recent findings in social psychology and cognitive science. In light of the empirical evidence, I contend that moral responsibility depends on historical and environmental factors to a much greater degree than previously appreciated. Thus, moral responsibility is not just in the head: indeed, it is much less in the head than typically assumed.

Seventeenth-century Iberian and Italian Scholastics had a concept of a truthmaker (verificativum) similar to that found in contemporary metaphysical debates. I argue that the seventeenth-century notion of a truthmaker can be illuminated by a prevalent seventeenth-century theory of truth according to which the truth of a proposition is the mereological sum of that proposition and its intentional object. I explain this theory of truth and then spell out the account of truthmaking it entails.

The revival of analytic metaphysics in the latter half of the twentieth century is typically understood as a consequence of the critiques of logical positivism, Quine's naturalization of ontology, Kripke's Naming and Necessity, clarifications of modal notions in logic, and the theoretical exploitation of possible worlds. However, this explanation overlooks the work of metaphysicians at the height of positivism and linguisticism that affected metaphysics of the late twentieth century. Donald C. Williams is one such philosopher. In this paper I explain how Williams's fundamental ontology and philosophy of time influenced in part the early formation of David Lewis's metaphysics. Thus, Williams played an important role in the revival of analytic metaphysics.

Nietzsche's discussions of nihilism are meant to bring into view an intriguing pathology of modern culture: that it is unable to sustain ‘higher values’. This paper attempts to make sense of the nature and import of higher values. Higher values are a subset of final values and are distinct from foundational values. Higher values are characterized by six features: demandingness, susceptibility toward creating tragic conflicts, recruitment of a characteristic set of powerful emotions, perceived import, exclusionary nature, and their tendency to instantiate a community. The paper considers Nietzsche's arguments for the claim that we are committed to instituting some set of higher values. The cost of not doing so is vitiating our deepest aim and precluding a central form of happiness.

I show that Aristotelian physics is a correct and nonintuitive approximation of Newtonian physics in the suitable domain (motion in fluids) in the same technical sense in which Newton's theory is an approximation of Einstein's theory. Aristotelian physics lasted long not because it became dogma, but because it is a very good, empirically grounded theory. This observation suggests some general considerations on intertheoretical relationships.

Moral realism entails that there are metaphysically necessary moral principles of the form ‘all actions of nonmoral kind Z are morally good’; being discoverable a priori, these must be (in a wide sense) logically necessary. This article seeks to justify this apparently puzzling consequence. A sentence expresses a logically necessary proposition iff its negation entails a contradiction. The method of reflective equilibrium assumes that the simplest account of the apparently correct use of sentences of some type in paradigm examples is probably logically necessary. An account is simple insofar as it uses few predicates designating properties easily recognizable in many different kinds of paradigm examples. I illustrate how reflective equilibrium uses these criteria to discover logically necessary nonmoral propositions such as ‘if S remembers doing X, S believes that he did X’ and ‘if it is scarlet, it is red’. I then illustrate how exactly the same procedures can lead us from paradigm examples of apparently true sentences asserting that actions of some kind are good to discovering moral principles. I advance the contingent hypothesis that most contemporary humans, although they initially disagree about moral issues, have derived from different paradigm examples the same concept of moral goodness, which will ensure that the use of reflective equilibrium will lead to eventual agreement about moral issues. That strongly suggests that the moral principles eventually reached by reflective equilibrium are logically necessary ones.

This article reflects on some of the complexities in Williams' discussion of moral luck. It compares this discussion with previous work, especially by Adam Smith, and argues that Williams' fear that the phenomenon of moral luck threatens the coherence of our moral concepts is unfounded.

What, if anything, makes death bad for the deceased themselves? Deprivationists hold that death is bad for the deceased iff it deprives them of intrinsic goods they would have enjoyed had they lived longer. This view faces the problem that birth too seems to deprive one of goods one would have enjoyed had one been born earlier, so that it too should be bad for one. There are two main approaches to the problem. In this paper, I explore the second approach, by Anthony Brueckner and John Martin Fischer, and suggest that it can be developed so as to meet deprivationists’ needs. On the resulting view, metaphysical differences between the future and the past give rise to a corresponding axiological difference in the intrinsic value of future and past experiences. As experiences move into the past, they lose their intrinsic value for the person.

If for every portion of space-time there is an object composed of its contents, four-dimensionalism will be true of these objects. But ordinary objects—trees, stones, persons, etc.—are not among these objects (although the series of events that make up their careers will be). The properties of ordinary objects, including sortal properties, are temporally local and have causal profiles that incorporate transtemporal persistence conditions of the things that have them, and this supports a rejection of four-dimensionalism in favor of three-dimensionalism as an account of the nature of these ordinary objects. Also rejected is the stage theory that takes ordinary objects to be momentary stages (whose transtemporal sameness is not identity), and the argument (of Katherine Hawley) that holds that stage theory is supported by the fact that there can be cases in which it is indeterminate whether the same thing exists at different times.

This article aims to say what democracy is or what the predicate ‘democratic’ means, as opposed to saying what is good, right, or desirable about it. The basic idea—by no means a novel one—is that a democratic system is one that features substantial equality of political power. More distinctively it is argued that ‘democratic’ is a relative gradable adjective, the use of which permits different, contextually determined thresholds of democraticness. Thus, a system can be correctly called ‘democratic’ even if it does not feature perfect equality of power. The article's central undertaking is to give greater precision to the operative notion(s) of power. No complete or fully unified measure of power is offered, but several conceptual tools are introduced that help give suitable content to power measurement. These tools include distinctions between conditional versus unconditional power and direct versus indirect power. Using such tools, a variety of prima facie problems for the power equality approach are addressed and defused. Finally, the theory is compared to epistemic and deliberative approaches to democracy; and reasons are offered for the attractiveness of democracy that flows from the power equality theme.

A close philosophical analysis of the emotion of anger will show that it is normatively irrational: in some cases, based on futile magical thinking, in others, based on defective values.

Trope theory is an increasingly prominent contender in contemporary debates about the existence and nature of properties. But it suffers from ambiguity concerning the nature of a trope. Disambiguation reveals two fundamentally different concepts of a trope: modifier tropes and module tropes. These types of tropes are unequally suited for metaphysical work. Modifier tropes have advantages concerning powers, relations, and fundamental determinables, whereas module tropes have advantages concerning perception, causation, character-grounding, and the ontology of substance. Thus, the choice between modifier tropes and module tropes is significant and divides the advantages of trope theory simpliciter. In addition, each resulting trope theory is unstable: modifier trope theory threatens to collapse into realism, and module trope theory threatens to collapse into austere nominalism. This invites reflection on the stability of trope theory in general.

This paper defends Michel Foucault's notion of archaeology of knowledge against the influential and putatively devastating criticism by Dreyfus and Rabinow that Foucault's archaeological project is based on an incoherent conception of the rules of the discursive practices it purports to study. I argue first that Foucault's considered view of these rules as simultaneously implicit and historically efficacious corresponds to a general requirement for the normative structure of a discursive practice. Then I argue that Foucault is entitled to that view despite the charges to the contrary by Dreyfus and Rabinow. I also explain in detail how the argument by Dreyfus and Rabinow arises from a misunderstanding of Foucault's archaeological project as transcendental inquiry, while archaeology of knowledge is, in fact, a diagnostic project. The result is a novel understanding of the notion of archaeology of knowledge that enables a reassessment of Foucault's philosophical work in connection with current debates regarding the relationship between reflection and practice in the structure of thought.

This paper provides a multifaceted account of intuition. The paper integrates apparently disparate conceptions of intuition, shows how the notion has figured in epistemology as well as in intuitionistic ethics, and clarifies the relation between the intuitive and the self-evident. Ethical intuitionism is characterized in ways that, in phenomenology, epistemology, and ontology, represent an advance over the position of W. D. Ross while preserving its commonsense normative core and intuitionist character. This requires clarifying the sense in which intuitions are non-inferential and explaining how self-evident principles may be maintained without dogmatism, how intuition is significantly analogous to perception, and how rational disagreements can extend even to the self-evident. The paper distinguishes between two orders of normative disagreement, shows how intuition can contribute to resolving normative disagreements, and represents ethical intuitionism as capable of modified forms that depart from its traditional claims in being neutral with respect to both ethical naturalism and metaphysical realism.

Reflection on the history of skepticism shows that philosophers have often conjoined as a single doctrine various theses that are best kept apart. Some of these theses are incredible—literally almost impossible to accept—whereas others seem quite plausible and even verge on the platitudinous. Mixing them together, one arrives at a view—skepticism—that is as a whole indefensible. My aim is to pull these different elements apart and focus on one particular strand of skepticism that deserves sustained and respectful attention, which I will refer to as epistemic defeatism. Roughly, in its most global form, this is the view that, in the final analysis, we have no good evidence for the truth of any proposition. I do not attempt to argue for the truth of epistemic defeatism, but only to untangle it from neighboring views and in particular to establish its independence from questions about knowledge. Having thus established the view's autonomy, I turn to considering the options for self-consciously accepting defeat. One may despair or one may have faith. But I will ultimately propose that the most attractive option—the option that preserves the most of our epistemic integrity—is to have hope.

In the debate over the reality of race, a three-way dispute has become entrenched: race is biologically real, socially real, or simply not real. These three theses have each enjoyed increasingly sophisticated defenses over roughly the past thirty years, but we argue here that this debate contains a lacuna: there is a fourth, mostly neglected, position that we call ‘basic racial realism.’ Basic racial realism says that though race is neither biologically real nor socially real, it is real all the same. Our goal is to establish this theory's credentials and provide it with initial support. It appears to be in a strong dialectical position and to nicely capture what many want from a theory of race.