ABSTRACT Free will scepticism about moral responsibility denies that human agents possess the kind of control required for basic desert moral responsibility. This position is often taken to have substantive normative implications, including the rejection of retributive punishment and support for reformist approaches to criminal justice. This paper challenges that assumption. We argue that scepticism about moral responsibility, considered in isolation, is normatively inert. While it undermines backward‐looking justifications of blame and punishment grounded in basic desert, it does not itself yield positive conclusions about how offenders ought to be treated. A central source of confusion is a category mistake: The rejection of basic moral responsibility is taken to establish moral innocence, when in fact it renders the distinction between such basic guilt and innocence inapplicable. We show how this mistake operates in pessimistic responses to scepticism, such as Smilansky's appeal to a ‘practical reductio.’ By contrast, so‐called optimistic sceptics such as Pereboom and Caruso avoid this error, yet still risk overstating the normative significance of scepticism by closely linking it to reformist proposals, including quarantine‐based models of punishment and limits on penal severity. While these proposals are defended on independent normative grounds—notably, self‐defence—we argue that they are not entailed by scepticism itself. Eliminating retributive desert removes one ground for punishment, but it neither constrains penal severity nor justifies offender‐focused detention except on forward‐looking and predictive bases. Any appeal to moderation or humanitarian restraint therefore depends on normative commitments and empirical assumptions, rather than on scepticism about moral responsibility alone.
ABSTRACT On one narrative, Berkeleyan idealism arises from Cartesian theorising: Descartes's discussion of dreaming in the Meditations leads first to scepticism, and through scepticism, to Berkeley's rejection of realism. In this paper, I consider how this move from dreams to idealism is supposed to work. I trace this narrative back to Andrew Baxter, one of Berkeley's earliest critics, and reconstruct Baxter's argument that idealism is self‐defeating, a criticism that anticipates some contemporary commentators' analyses. I then turn to Berkeley's text to show that Berkeley's own attitude towards dream scepticism is dismissive at best. This raises the question of how the narrative connecting dreams to idealism took hold; I argue that one place to look may be to Berkeley's perceptual relativity arguments. I suggest that understanding Baxter's criticism helps illuminate both how we should read those arguments, and also, more generally, how we should understand idealism's relationship to scepticism and dreaming.
ABSTRACT The article argues for a system of axioms that is meant to capture the logic of normative reasons for belief. The system concerns a primitive direct‐reason relation, a defined doxastic‐reason relation, and a primitive function for the revision of rational belief by reasons. Reasons are assumed to be facts that speak for belief with numerical strength, and the aggregation of non‐overlapping direct reasons involves the intersection of sets of possible worlds and the summing up of strengths. Rational belief is reconstructed as subjective probability, and ratios of new‐to‐old odds are normatively postulated to be a function of the strengths of reason. The resulting theory avoids problems that have been ascribed to the additive aggregation of reasons; it entails that reasons exert epistemic forces that conform to a vector‐like structure and that the rational impact of a reason on rational belief corresponds to a probabilistic Jeffrey/Field‐update. And although the theory differs from existing logics of reason, it is partially continuous with two of them. Its upshot is a systematic bridge between the philosophical theory of epistemic reasons and Bayesian formal epistemology.
ABSTRACT The paper aims to bridge the history of quantum theory with its philosophical implications. The focus is not only on the scientific underpinnings of quantum mechanics (these theories emerged as ‘ad hoc’ responses to experimental anomalies) but also on the philosophical ramifications of its probabilistic nature and indeterminacy, which differ from classical realism. The paper examines Dirac's, Bell's, and modern views, focusing on how quantum mechanics (QM) challenges traditional notions of causality, objectivity, and truth while embracing epistemological and metaphysical perspectives. Debates over collapse theories and hidden variables are discussed, as well as Putnam's philosophical outlook, which includes his trenchant involvement with realism, logic, and the measurement problem. Finally, the paper proposes that QM represents a philosophical revolution that renews our understanding of reality, knowledge, and scientific explanation, rather than simply serving as a physical theory for assessing the prospects of quantum philosophy by connecting it to broader aspects such as relativity, causality, and scientific realism.
In this article, I examine the structural parallels between Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science and Ludwig Wittgenstein's later thought, focusing on the idea of grammatical frameworks. My central claim is that Kuhn's concept of paradigm and its later, more language-centred forms in his philosophy can be read as a Wittgensteinian grammatical space. By approaching scientific revolutions as shifts within such spaces, I suggest that Kuhn's controversial idea of incommensurability is better understood not as a collapse of rational discourse but as a form of deep disagreement grounded in what Wittgenstein calls hinge commitments. This reading opens the way to a non-relativist account of scientific change that still acknowledges the historical and plural nature of scientific worldviews.
The traditional reading of saying and showing in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has two main features. Firstly, it claims that what shows itself helps us to grasp some metaphysical insights that transcend the limits of sense, such as the existence of simple objects, the truth of solipsism and the very essence of the world. Secondly, according to the traditional reading, the method of the work is based on the capacity of showing to reveal what cannot be said. In this paper, I demythologise the traditional reading of saying and showing. What shows itself reveals not some mysterious metaphysical properties of the world but rather mundane and familiar properties of language, such as the entailment between propositions, the logical forms of propositions and the sense possessed by a proposition. Moreover, the traditional reading falsely assumes that there is a single overarching concept of showing that unifies Wittgenstein's work. The topic of the paper is important because the resolute readings have so far focused on a critique of the traditional reading of saying and showing without a positive construal of the saying-showing distinction. My paper fills this gap: It provides a positive story about saying and showing that allows us to account for the crucial importance that Ludwig Wittgenstein ascribed to them.
ABSTRACT Neo‐republican political theory has revived the classical republican ideal of freedom as non‐domination, offering a powerful alternative to liberal accounts centred on non‐interference. At the same time, feminist theories of relational autonomy have emphasised that agency and autonomy are constituted through social relations of dependence, recognition and care. Despite important affinities, sustained engagement between these two traditions remains limited. This article revisits the relationship between neo‐republican freedom and relational feminist theory. It argues that dominant neo‐republican formulations, particularly in the work of Philip Pettit, conceptualise domination primarily in interactional terms, focusing on relations of discretionary interference between agents. While this framework captures certain paradigmatic forms of domination, it struggles to account for structural and constitutive dimensions of unfreedom emphasised by feminist theory. Building on insights developed by feminist philosophers on vulnerability, the article proposes a relational reconstruction of non‐domination. This reconstruction does not displace the republican framework's core commitments—its institutional orientation, its contestability norm and its unified criterion linking freedom and democratic legitimacy—but provides them with more adequate foundations. In doing so, it operates at a different and complementary level of analysis to feminist political theories of justice, supplying the normative‐political grammar within which relational and structural critique can be institutionally articulated and contested.
According to the idea of public reason, fundamental political questions should be resolved solely on the basis of considerations that all citizens can reasonably accept. While various rationales—such as the ideal of civic friendship—have been offered in support of public reason, most arguments assume ideal, well‐ordered conditions. Yet many real‐world societies are far from ideal, often dominated by unreasonable persons—sometimes even those in power. Emil Andersson addresses the question of how familiar rationales for public reason fare under such conditions. More specifically, he argues that the political community view—which grounds public reason in the ideal of civic friendship—faces serious challenges in non‐well‐ordered, asymmetrically divided contexts characterised by large numbers of unreasonable people. In this paper, I show that, while Andersson's critique of the political community view of public reason is on target, his argument against the most plausible construal of this view—namely the inclusive political community view—is unsuccessful, because the value of inclusion can be understood as carrying sufficient weight even in non‐well‐ordered contexts. I then argue that Andersson's alternative conception—namely Rawlsian political autonomy—does not convincingly address the rationale for, or the applicability of, public reason in non‐well‐ordered societies, especially when compared to the inclusive political community view.
According to defenders of the popular buck-passing account of value (the BPA of value), values should be understood in terms of reasons for pro- and con-responses. While much has been said about how to understand the normative component of the BPA of value, that is, how to understand 'reasons', including how to distinguish between reasons that imply value (the 'right' kind of reasons) and those that do not (the 'wrong' kind of reasons), less has been said about how to understand the response component, that is, how to interpret 'pro- and con-responses'. Contrary to common usage in the debate, we argue against understanding values in terms of reasons for attitudes and reasons for action. Briefly, we contend that including reasons for action is unnecessary, has undesirable consequences for the debate on the wrong kind of reason problem, and enables us to generate novel yet mundane cases of the wrong kind of value problem. An important upshot of the paper is that it supports an alternative, prima facie attractive picture of the hierarchy of the normative landscape, in which reasons for attitudes are explanatorily prior to value and to our value-related reasons for action.
This paper surveys six of Saul Kripke's highly creative ideas and results on G & ouml;del incompleteness, from when he was an undergraduate to last publications. These include his extension of incompleteness from sentences to predicates, his model-theoretic proof of incompleteness of arithmetic, his compelling analysis of incompleteness in terms of the heterological paradox rather than the liar paradox (cited by G & ouml;del) for a heuristic account of incompleteness, his ingenious demonstration that Hilbert's programme bore within itself the seeds of its collapse independently of G & ouml;del incompleteness, his revisionist point that there was incompleteness in mathematics well before the Paris-Harrington Theorem, and his demonstration, contrary to the common view, that direct self-reference need not be contradictory and can be used to obtain a G & ouml;del sentence containing a numeral for its own G & ouml;del number. Kripke published the work surveyed here with the exception of his model-theoretic proof of incompleteness, which he presented in a lecture in 1978. These ideas constitute mathematical results of great ingenuity and highly illuminating philosophical insights.
It is widely held that moral competence is a necessary condition for moral accountability. Although moral competence may be defined in various ways, a family of views can be classified as cognitive accounts insofar as they identify moral competence with either the possession of a true belief regarding the moral status of one's action or the capacity to form such a belief. I argue that cognitive accounts are untenable because they cannot adequately accommodate cases involving divergent agents who reach conflicting moral judgements. In their place, I defend a hybrid account of moral competence that understands such competence as consisting in a conjunction of cognitive and motivational capacities.
This study investigates how the expression 'critical thinking' (CT) is understood and used by the general public in the United States, using the tools of experimental philosophy. Based on responses from 288 non-philosopher participants, our findings suggest that CT is commonly associated with problem solving, decision making and logical analysis. This folk conception aligns more closely with psychological definitions than with philosophical accounts of CT. When compared with results from a parallel study conducted among French-speaking participants, notable cultural differences emerged, particularly regarding the emphasis placed on scepticism and metacognition. Furthermore, our analysis reveals that conceptual issues long identified in the academic literature-such as the conflation of CT with other notions (e.g., intelligence or rationality), and the reduction of CT to a single component-are also prevalent in lay conceptions. These findings underscore the need for a more coherent conceptual framework and for increased attention to the ways in which CT is understood and appropriated outside academic contexts.
Postmodernism, as a philosophical and cultural movement, is defined by its contradictions: it rejects foundational truths yet seeks definition, celebrates difference yet risks repetition and dismantles modernity while covertly relying on its frameworks. This essay examines postmodernism's inherent paradoxes through the lenses of key theorists such as Ihab Hassan, Jean Baudrillard and Ziauddin Sardar. It explores the movement's cultural amnesia, its deliberate detachment from modernist roots and its obsession with hyperreality, where the visible eclipses the sublime. Baudrillard's critique of anti-aesthetics and the disappearing body in postmodernity reveals a crisis of meaning, while Deleuze and Spinoza's counterarguments highlight the body's enduring agency. Ultimately, postmodernism's apocalyptic undertones, its erasure of depth, history and materiality raise urgent questions about its legacy.
Leibniz's concept of compossibility explains why not all possible substances are actualised, thereby resisting Spinoza's necessitarianism. Yet, the precise basis of incompossibility remains unresolved. The influential 'logical' interpretation-exemplified by the Hintikka-D'Agostino thesis-locates incompossibility in contradictions among relational predicates within complete concepts. While powerful, this account faces well-known difficulties. In this paper, I contest the thesis while retaining a logical conception of compossibility. I first assess Jeffrey McDonough's overlooked non-standard suggestion, which, though not fully successful, yields instructive insights. I then articulate what I call the Wilson-Sleigh interpretation, drawing on Margaret Wilson and Robert Sleigh, which identifies logically grounded routes to incompossibility not captured by the standard focus on relational predicates. I argue that this interpretation provides a better solution than the standard logical view.
A neo-sentimentalist theory of virtue holds that a trait is virtue if, and only if, it merits approval. Neo-sentimentalists tend to be sceptical about the prospect of such a theory because it seems unlikely that feelings of approval can be characterised without reference to the notion of virtue. I argue that that scepticism is uncalled for. My argument is grounded on an enactive approach to affectivity according to which meaning is enacted by autonomous systems and perceptions of affordances are affective responses that present their objects as meaningful. In line with this approach, I argued for two points. First, relationships are autonomous systems of patterns of interaction and the meaning of the evaluative distinction between qualities and defects of character is a matter of how character traits impact on the viability conditions of a relationship. Second, this evaluative distinction is experienced in the form of the perception of a family of affiliative or anti-affiliative affordances. As a result, feelings of approval can be characterised as perceptions of affiliative affordances that appraise their objects as traits that render one suitable for association as a social partner. This shows that a substantive and informative neo-sentimentalist theory of virtue is a viable position.
Social interactions rarely occur with persons in the abstract. Rather, we engage with parents, teachers, neighbours-that is, persons in various capacities, as occupants of social roles. If social interactions are role-mediated, then interpersonal trust must also be directed at persons in their roles. While Baier (1992) acknowledged that most trust is placed in individuals in their roles, she did not explore the mechanisms of role-mediated interpersonal trust. This paper takes up that task. I advance a role-mediated, motivational account of interpersonal trust: when X trusts Y to Phi, X trusts Y as an occupant of role R, expecting Y to fulfil trust expectations for the right reasons. Trustworthiness, consequently, requires Y meeting trust expectations as well as doing so with appropriate motives. The appropriate motives, as I argue, are also tied to the trustee's social role. This theory contrasts with Kelsall's (2025) recent account, which, while rightly emphasising the significance of roles in interpersonal trust, defends a motive-neutral approach. Although I share Kelsall's emphasis on the centrality of roles, I question his motive-neutral approach and propose a motivational alternative-one that also improves upon the mainstream motivational accounts.
