ABSTRACT Human speech is socially meaningful: Linguistic expressions and forms carry information about the social properties of the speaker and/or the discourse situation, independent of their at‐issue, truth‐conditional, compositionally determined contents. Further, speakers leverage these social meanings to perform conversational moves. In this article, we synthesize recent work that incorporates social meaning into the philosophy of language. We showcase similarities and differences among classes of socially meaningful speech and review some of the main theoretical challenges such speech raises. In particular, we contrast indexical, intentional, and neo‐inferentialist approaches to social meaning; ask whether and when socially meaningful speech should be treated as representing or as altering the world; and explore what semantic classifications and pragmatic functions to assign social meaning. We conclude by proposing some promising avenues for future research.
ABSTRACT This article provides a contemporary introduction to issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science that are studied within the emerging field of digital minds research. We explore the potential for AI systems to have mental states. Questions that we address include whether artificially intelligent systems can be phenomenally conscious and whether they can have propositional attitudes such as belief and desire. We also consider how digital minds might persist through time in a manner akin to how humans have personal identity through time. Along the way, we highlight methodological issues raised by these questions and examine how these questions relate to traditional issues in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science. We conclude by highlighting issues in this area that are ripe for further investigation.
ABSTRACT Recent literature in the history of twentieth‐century philosophy has centred on the historical and philosophical connections between four philosophers: G. E. M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch. The surge of interest in this so‐called “Wartime Quartet” is in large part due to the publication of two books, Benjamin Lipscomb’s 2022 The Women are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics and Clare MacCumhaill and Rachael Wiseman’s 2022 Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life . Much of the critical response to these books has called into question whether and to what extent the four focal figures are philosophically unified in some way. This paper explores and examines critiques targeted at the Quartet's unity. I show that critiques differ in their choice of “grouping concept”: the criteria and desiderata considered relevant and important to the construction of a philosophical group. By analysing one of the most common forms of objection to the Quartet's unity—that Mary Midgley is, in Jenifer Frey's words “the odd woman out”—I argue that the Quartet counts as a philosophical group relative to the purpose that grouping is meant to serve. If philosophical groupings are tools for organising philosophy's past, then Midgley's inclusion is a matter of what we want from the grouping. Although some critical questions remain, this paper shows that both books use the “Wartime Quartet” effectively as a tool to their chosen ends and that disputes over philosophical groupings are best advanced by first stating the desiderata against which a grouping is to be judged.
ABSTRACT Intellectual property (IP) law shapes how knowledge, culture, and innovation are created, shared, and valued, yet philosophical reflection on it has fallen behind its rapid development. Generative AI has made the gap visible: it opens policy vacuums that cannot be filled until the concepts beneath them are clarified. Rather than a historical overview, this article offers a systematic reconstruction organized around three questions that any IP regime must answer about itself. Why is the restriction IP imposes justified? Who may claim it? And what, exactly, does it protect? These are the questions of value, authorship, and ontology, and they are minimal: no regime can be stated without answering all three. I begin with value, distinguishing optimistic strategies that justify IP's liberty‐restricting privileges—consequentialist, deontological, and, more recently, virtue‐based—from global and local skeptical positions, including communitarian reframings that contest the terms of the question. I then turn to authorship, and to the pressure that collective and machine production place on the traditional individualistic and human‐centered assumptions of copyright. Finally, I discuss ontology, comparing descriptive type‐based models with revisionary accounts that ground IP in concrete artifacts.
ABSTRACT The following essay, which comes in two parts, examines three prominent readings of Fichte's normative ethics: a consequentialist reading, a deontological reading, and a hybrid reading that combines teleological and deontological features. An alternative to the current hybrid readings on offer is provided. The alternative hybrid reading endorses the view that Fichte's ethics (1) qualifies as a form of perfectionism, and particularly a form of normative perfectionism, (2) presents self‐sufficiency as an agent‐neutral value to be perfected, and (3) argues that his normative perfectionism accepts an agent‐centered restriction on how the agent‐neutral value of self‐sufficiency is promoted. Part 1 provides a brief overview of Fichte's major work on ethics, The System of Ethics , examines the distinction between teleological and deontological ethical theories, introduces the idea that Fichte's perfectionism qualifies as a form of normative perfectionism, and, finally, examines the consequentialist reading.
