This article examines a document that the ChatGPT interface made available during an exchange about capacity for saved memories. The response presented the reorganisation of writing rules for a narrative project as already completed, although my request concerned capacity alone, and no recorded prompt requested a file or specified the proposed hierarchy. Earlier, I had copied every visible saved memory entry verbatim into another document, allowing comparison in both directions to identify corresponding formulations and changes in their placement or prescriptive force. The phenomenological account follows my remembered reading and remains separate from those findings. In the linked document, rules appeared within a hierarchy not specified in my request and reading those formulations in their new positions changed how I understood decisions. Available records establish the limited request and the sequence through which the organised file became available without identifying the operations that produced the file. In this case, I formulated the rules without articulating their comprehensive relations, and recognising my formulations did not mean understanding what their new placement asserted. ChatGPT presented the organisation as already complete, whereas a human collaborator could have presented the same arrangement together with reasons.
ABSTRACT In Chaoan He's “Farewell to the Modal Theory of Luck,” he constructs a Frankfurt‐style counterexample to modal theories of luck (LOTTERY*), and he argues that this counterexample obviates standard modalist responses to other prominent counterexamples in the literature. However, as I argue in this reply, the counterexample is not as decisive as He suggests. In section 1, I explicate (i) the modal theory of luck, (ii) He's counterexample, and (iii) a possible modalist response. In section 2, I argue that this response is a version of a strategy that He himself considers effective against non‐Frankfurt‐style counterexamples. If my argument succeeds, then the modal theory remains viable. I do not propose revising the modal theory; rather, I argue that, once we attend to the modal profile of the generating process, standard modal resources suffice to explain the intuition of luck in LOTTERY*.
ABSTRACT This paper examines René Descartes's engagement with the ethical tradition of eudaimonism, which considers happiness or flourishing ( eudaimonia ) the highest good. On the one hand, Descartes can be read as an eudaimonist because he is in rich dialogue with certain ancient thinkers (e.g., Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus and the Stoics) and shares with them an ethical concern with living a happy life. On the other hand, because Descartes is understood as rejecting perfectionism or the status of happiness as the supreme good, there is reason to doubt this reading. I, however, will argue that Descartes is indeed an eudaimonist because he shares with proponents of this ancient ethical tradition a fundamental commitment to a good that is (a) partly objectively grounded in facts about human nature; (b) partly subjectively grounded in the beliefs/feelings of a subject; (c) structurally stable; and (d) only intrinsically valuable. Through these formal features we gain greater perspective on Descartes's dialogue with ancient eudaimonists (as an advocate of a prior account or an original thinker) and contemporaries such as Benedict de Spinoza, G.W. Leibniz and Thomas Hobbes concerning the nature and relationship between the will and intellect, and the mind and body, in living a good life.
