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.

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.

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.

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.

Situationists such as John Doris, Gilbert Harman, and Maria Merritt suppose that appeal to reliable behavioral dispositions can be dispensed with without radical revision to morality as we know it. This paper challenges this supposition, arguing that abandoning hope in reliable dispositions rules out genuine trust and forces us to suspend core reactive attitudes of gratitude and resentment, esteem and indignation. By examining situationism through the lens of trust we learn something about situationism (in particular, the radically revisionary moral implications of its adoption) as well as something about trust (in particular, that the conditions necessary for genuine trust include a belief in a capacity for robust dispositions).

Hobbes's own justification for the existence of governments relies on the assumption that without a government our lives in the state of nature would result in a state of war of every man against every man. Many contemporary scholars have tried to explain why universal war is unavoidable in Hobbes's state of nature by utilizing modern game theory. However, most game-theoretic models that have been presented so far do not accurately capture what Hobbes deems to be the primary cause of conflict in the state of nature—namely, uncertainty, rather than people's egoistic psychology. Therefore, I claim that any game-theoretic model that does not incorporate uncertainty into the picture is the wrong model. In this paper, I use Bayesian game theory to show how universal conflict can break out in the state of nature—even when the majority of the population would strictly prefer to cooperate and seek peace with other people—due to uncertainty about what type of person the other player is. Along the way, I show that the valuation of one's own life is one of the central mechanisms that drives Hobbes's pessimistic conclusion.

Some time ago I wrote a paper about conceivability and knowledge. An anonymous referee rejected it on the grounds that the result had already been established in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges. Intrigued, I looked for the story but found no mention of it in Louis and Ziche's extensive bibliography. I spent months consulting archives and electronic records to no avail. I had begun to doubt whether the story even existed when I had the curious good luck to encounter Sir Thomas Browne of Pembroke College, Oxford, who assured me of the piece's authenticity and introduced me to Brother Christian Rosenkreuz of Invisible College who in turn generously put me into correspondence with Borges himself. The literary defects in what follows reflect not a diminution of Borges's undoubted power as a storyteller, but merely my limited ability as an amateur translator. Whatever the translation's literary faults may be, I hope the story's philosophical interest—i.e., an argument that ideal conceivers have higher-order knowledge of necessary truths—remains. [Trans.]

The paper argues that grounding is neither irreflexive nor asymmetric nor transitive. In arguing for that conclusion the paper also argues that truthmaking is neither irreflexive nor asymmetric nor transitive.

Jan Łukasiewicz's treatise on Aristotle's Syllogistic, published in the 1950s, has been very influential in framing the contemporary understanding of Aristotle's logical systems. However, Łukasiewicz's interpretation is based on a number of tendentious claims, not least, on the claim that the syllogistic was intended to apply only to nonempty terms. I show that this interpretation is not true to Aristotle's text and that a more coherent and faithful interpretation admits empty terms while maintaining all the relations of the traditional square of opposition.

To compare the options in a decision problem, a common method evaluates for each option the world that would result if the option were realized. This paper argues that one evaluation of an option's world, intrinsic utility, is compositional given a division of an option's world according to the option's consequences and other events. The argument first justifies the norm that an ideal agent should be intrinsically indifferent between two options’ worlds given that she is intrinsically indifferent between the options’ consequences. Then it uses this norm and the existence of intrinsic utilities respecting intrinsic indifference to establish intrinsic utility's compositionality. The results regulate human agents when they approximate ideal agents in pertinent respects. The paper begins with a general explanation of compositionality; the related phenomena of interchangeability, complementarity, and independence; and the effect on compositionality of context and arrangement of a composite's parts. After arguing for intrinsic utility's compositionality, the paper explains its role in decision theory.

In this essay I attempt to refute radical solipsism by means of a series of empirical experiments. In the first experiment, I exhibit unreliable judgment about the primeness or divisibility of four-digit numbers, in contrast to a seeming Excel program. In the second experiment, I exhibit an imperfect memory for seemingly arbitrary three-digit number and letter combinations, in contrast to my seeming collaborator with seemingly hidden notes. In the third experiment, I seem to suffer repeated defeats at chess. In all three experiments, the most straightforward interpretation of the experiential evidence is that something exists in the universe that is superior in the relevant respects—theoretical reasoning (about primes), memorial retention (for digits and letters), or practical reasoning (at chess)—to my own solipsistically conceived self.