What kind of entity is a committee, a book group, or a band? I argue that committees and other such social groups are concrete, composite particulars, having ordinary human beings among their parts. Thus, the committee members are literally parts of the committee. This mereological view of social groups was popular several decades ago but fell out of favor following influential objections from David-Hillel Ruben. Recent years have seen a tidal wave of work in metaphysics, including the metaphysics of parts and wholes. We now have the resources to rehabilitate the mereological view of social groups. I show how this can be done and why we should bother.

I argue that an unHumean ontology of irreducibly dispositional properties might be fruitfully combined with what has typically been thought of as a Humean account of laws, namely, the best-system account, made popular by David Lewis (e.g., 1983, 1986, 1994). In this paper I provide the details of what I argue is the most defensible account of Humean laws in an unHumean world. This package of views has the benefits of upholding scientific realism while doing without any suspect metaphysical entities to account for natural law. I conclude by arguing that the Humean laws-unHumean ontology package is well placed to provide an account of objective, nontrivial chances, a famous stumbling block for the Humean laws-Humean ontology package developed by Lewis.

What is it to have and act on a personal ideal? Someone who aspires to be a philosopher might imaginatively think ‘I am a philosopher’ by way of motivating herself to think hard about a philosophical question. But doing so seems to require her to act on an inaccurate self-description, given that she is not yet what she regards herself as being. J. David Velleman develops the thought that action-by-ideal involves a kind of fictional self-conception. My aim is to expand our thinking about personal ideals by developing another way of understanding them. On this view action-by-ideal involves a kind of metaphorical self-conception. I investigate some salient differences between these views with the aim of understanding the different perspectives they take on the rationality of action-by-ideal. Where the fiction view runs into problems of literary coherence, the metaphor view exploits the richness of poetic invention. But action-by-ideal is a complex phenomenon about which there may be no tidy story to be told. This paper is an attempt to clarify and understand more of this messy terrain.

What makes a choice hard? I discuss and criticize three common answers and then make a proposal of my own. Paradigmatic hard choices are not hard because of our ignorance, the incommensurability of values, or the incomparability of the alternatives. They are hard because the alternatives are on a par; they are comparable, but one is not better than the other, and yet nor are they equally good. So understood, hard choices open up a new way of thinking about what it is to be a rational agent.

Can fictional narration yield knowledge in a way that depends crucially on its being fictional? This is the hard question of literary cognitivism. It is unexceptional that knowledge can be gained from fictional literature in ways that are not dependent on its fictionality (e.g., the science in science fiction). Sometimes fictional narratives are taken to exhibit the structure of suppositional argument, sometimes analogical argument. Of course, neither structure is unique to narratives. The thesis of literary cognitivism would be supported if some novels exhibit a cogent and special argument structure restricted to fictional narratives. I contend that this is the case for a kind of transcendental argument. The reason is the inclusion and pattern of occurrence of the predicate ‘believable’ in the schema. Believability with respect to fictional stories is quite a different thing than it is with respect to nonfictional stories or anything else.

This paper examines intellectualism in the theory of action. Philosophers use ‘intellectualism’ variously, but few question its application to views on which knowledge of facts—expressible in that-clauses—is basic for understanding other kinds of knowledge, reasons for action, and practical reasoning. More broadly, for intellectualists, theoretical knowledge is more basic than practical knowledge; action, at least if rational, is knowledge-guided, and just as beliefs based on reasoning constitute knowledge only if its essential premises constitute knowledge, actions based on practical reasoning are rational only if any essential premise in it is known. Two major intellectualist claims are that practical knowledge, as knowing how, is reducible to propositional knowledge, a kind of knowing that, and that reasons for action must be (propositionally) known by the agent. This paper critically explores both claims by offering a broad though partial conception of practical knowledge and a pluralistic view of reasons for action. The aim is to sketch conceptions of knowing how and knowing that, and of the relation between knowledge and action, that avoid intellectualism but also do justice to both the importance of the intellect for human action and the distinctive character of practical reason.

In this paper, I argue for the counterintuitive conclusion that the same adaptive preference can be both prudentially good and prudentially bad for its holder: that is, it can be prudentially objectionable from one temporal perspective, but prudentially unobjectionable from another. Given the possibility of transformative experiences, there is an important sense in which even worrisome adaptive preferences can be prudentially good for us. That is, if transformative experiences lead us to develop adaptive preferences, then their objects can become prudentially better for our actual selves than the objects of their nonadaptive alternatives would now be. I also argue, however, that the same worrisome adaptive preferences might still be prospectively prudentially objectionable: that is, our pretransformation selves might be prudentially better off undergoing a nonadaptive alternative transformative experience instead. I argue that both claims hold across the range of the most broadly defended accounts of well-being in the literature.

Seneca twice argues that the wise person (sapiens) outstrips or surpasses (antecedat) God. On its face, this claim seems both starkly impossible and rankly impious, the kind of thought antithetical to Stoic wisdom. However, a case may be made that the thought is a natural outgrowth of Stoicism's value theory and is part of the broader Stoic aspirational ethical program.

The method of phenomenal contrast aims to shed light on the phenomenal character of perceptual and cognitive experiences. Within the debate about cognitive phenomenology, phenomenal contrast arguments can be divided into two kinds. First, arguments based on actual cases that aim to provide the reader with a first-person experience of phenomenal contrast. Second, arguments that involve hypothetical cases and focus on the conceivability of contrast scenarios. Notably, in the light of these contrast cases, proponents and skeptics of cognitive phenomenology remain steadfast in their views. I provide an explanation of the method's dialectical ineffectiveness by focusing on first-person performances of phenomenal contrast tasks. In particular, I argue that introspective judgments about phenomenology are regimented by the view initially held. Understanding the underlying mechanisms responsible for the dialectical standoff in the face of phenomenal contrast cases casts light on introspection-based arguments for phenomenology in general.

How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the ‘vivacity’ or ‘vividness’ of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use ‘vividness’ and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does not take much reflection to see that these terms are poorly understood. In this paper, I review both some relevant empirical literature as well as the philosophical literature in an attempt to get a handle on what it could mean, in an imaginative context, to talk of vividness. As I suggest, this notion ultimately proves to be so problematic as to be philosophically untenable.

In this paper I argue that Derrida's writings on education contain a profound rethinking of professorial authority. I first outline the sources of professorial authority and describe how they were traditionally conceived in France at the time when Derrida was working. I then show how Derrida challenges and transforms these sources, focusing in particular on a new relation to knowledge, a new relation to the state, and a new understanding of charisma that emerge from his work.

To explain the presence of the doctrine of hedonism in Plato's Protagoras (351b–8a), the hypothesis is advanced that the author may have been responding to a suggestion made by Eudoxus of Cnidus that pleasures can be measured in terms of size, number, and intensity. The peculiar ways that Socrates represents these dimensions may indicate that Plato did not fully grasp Eudoxus's suggestion or, conversely, that he saw at once that it was a dead end.

In this paper I mobilize the Heideggerian concept of poetic saying [Dichtung] to describe features that pertain to the accomplishment of an artwork in the institutional setting of an artworld. Following Binkley and Davies, I first describe performances generative of artworks as ‘piece-specification’. I argue that a condition of ‘artistic creativity’ bears upon piece-specification that is insufficiently accounted for by these authors and that Heidegger's concept of poetic saying can help flesh it out. To that end, I show that it is at least coherent with some of Heidegger's phenomenological insights to argue that (1) poetic sayings are not necessarily tied to the advent of ‘great artworks’ and that (2) poetic sayings thus lend themselves to an analysis that views them as the intentional accomplishment of a meaning-event [Sinnereignis]. I then use the intentional structure of poetic sayings to describe how one can intend to achieve piece-specification in a creative yet recognizable manner.

Expressivists have trouble accounting for disagreement. If ethical or other normative judgments are desire-like rather than belief-like, it is puzzling why we think people often disagree in those domains. While previous expressivists have proposed only straightforwardly descriptive conditions under which disagreement occurs, we argue that disagreement itself should be understood normatively: two or more people disagree just in case their diverging attitudes imply, given a common project of theirs, that at least one of them has reason to change his or her mind.

I argue for the view that envy and jealousy are distinct emotions, and the crucial difference between them is that envy involves a perception of lack while jealousy involves a perception of loss. I start by noting the common practice of using ‘envy’ and ‘jealousy’ almost interchangeably, and I contrast it with the empirical evidence that shows that envy and jealousy are distinct, albeit similar and often co-occurring, emotions. I then argue in favor of a specific way of understanding their distinction: the view that envy is a response to a perceived lack of a valuable object, while jealousy is a response to a perceived loss of a valuable object. I compare such a view with the most compelling alternative theories and show that it accounts better for paradigmatic cases. I conclude by showing how the lack versus loss model can handle complications: ambiguous cases, that is, when it is epistemically unclear whether one experiences lack or loss; hybrid cases, that is, when one seems to experience both lack and loss; and borderline cases, that is, when it is metaphysically unclear whether one experiences lack or loss.

Many ‘deep self’ theories of moral responsibility characterize the deep self as necessarily requiring that an agent be able to reflect on her own cognitive states in various ways. In this paper, I argue that these metacognitive abilities are not actually a necessary feature of the deep self. In order to show this, I appeal to empirical evidence from research on autism spectrum disorders (ASD) that suggests that individuals with ASD have striking impairments in metacognitive abilities. I then argue that metacognitive conceptions of the deep self are implausible insofar as they fail to give a satisfactory account of the responsibility of persons with autism.

This article offers two arguments for the conclusion that we should refuse on moral grounds to establish a human presence on the surface of Mars. The first argument appeals to a principle constraining the use of invasive or destructive techniques of scientific investigation. The second appeals to a principle governing appropriate human behavior in wilderness. These arguments are prefaced by two preliminary sections. The first preliminary section argues that authors working in space ethics have good reason to shift their focus away from theory-based arguments in favor of arguments that develop in terms of pretheoretic beliefs. The second argues that of the popular justifications for sending humans to Mars only appeals to scientific curiosity can survive reflective scrutiny.

The moral of Buridan's ass is that it can sometimes be rational to perform one action rather than another even though one lacks stronger reason to do so. Yet, it is also commonly believed that it cannot ever be rational to believe one proposition rather than another if one lacks stronger reason to do so. This asymmetry has been taken to indicate a deep difference between epistemic and practical rationality. According to the view articulated here, the asymmetry should instead be explained by the difference between rational intentions and rational actions. Thus, it turns out, cases such as Buridan's ass do not indicate an asymmetry between epistemic and practical rationality as such.

I contrast an ecological account of natural agency with the traditional Cartesian conception using recent research in bacterial cognition and cellular decision making as a test case. I argue that the Cartesian conception—namely, the view that agency presupposes cognition—generates a dilemma between mechanism, the view that bacteria are mere automata, and intellectualism, the view that they exhibit full-blown cognition. Unicellular organisms, however, occupy a middle ground between these two extremes. On the one hand, their capacities and activities are too adaptive to count as mere machines. On the other hand, they lack the open-ended responsiveness of cognitive agents to rational norms. An ecological conception of agency as the gross behavioral capacity to respond to affordances, I argue, does not presuppose cognition and allows for degrees of agency along a continuum, from the simplest adaptive agents, such as unicellular organisms, to the most sophisticated cognitive agents. Bacteria, I conclude, are adaptive agents, hence not mere automata, but not cognitive agents.

Current literature in moral and political philosophy is rife with discussion of adaptive preferences. This is no accident: while preferences are generally thought to play an important role in a number of normative domains (including morality, the personal good, and political justice), adaptive preferences seem exceptions to this general rule—they seem problematic in a way that preference-respecting theories of these domains cannot adequately capture. Thus, adaptive preferences are often taken to be theoretically explanatory: a reason for adjusting our theories of the relevant normative domains. However, as I shall argue here, the relentless focus on the phenomenon of preference adaptation is a mistake. While I do not take a stand on whether typical examples of adaptive preferences are or are not problematic, I argue here that if they are problematic, it cannot be because they are adaptive.