Loneliness, while a common human experience, is something to which people often respond quite differently. Here, I examine how an individual’s social position, as well as his socialization into a particular cultural milieu, can shape his response to the fact of his loneliness (as well as the features of human existence that loneliness makes salient). Specifically, I argue that in cases where the individual experiencing loneliness has been socialized to disvalue the features of existence that loneliness makes salient (e.g., our dependence on and vulnerability to others) and/or to feel entitled to the social goods that they are, or perceive themselves to be, lacking (e.g., recognition or intimate connection), loneliness may catalyze the vicious, extremist attitude of ressentiment. This analysis allows us to see how loneliness may play a role in catalyzing vicious, extremist attitudes—though I contend that loneliness never warrants such attitudes.

Both classical phenomenology and contemporary first-person realism accord a special metaphysical status to perspectives. Yet ‘inegalitarian’ forms of first-person realism are, I argue, vulnerable to Sartre’s response to the problem of other minds in Being and Nothingness. After discussing the special status Sartre accords to the first-person perspective (‘ipseity’) and signaling its affinities with first-person realism, I argue that Sartre’s description of encountering the other undermines Giovanni Merlo’s argument for metaphysical solipsism. I then show how a metaphysical notion of standpoint borrowed from the first-person realist literature irons out a wrinkle in Sartre’s transcendental argument regarding other minds. I close by suggesting a kinship between Sartre’s notion of a ‘detotalized totality’ and the ‘fragmentalist’ idea embraced by some first-person realists that reality does not form a coherent whole.

Political disagreements pose a range of philosophical challenges for citizens seeking to navigate politics. Epistemologists ask about the impact of peer disagreement on the justification of individual’s beliefs. Rawls’s Political Liberalism (2005) tackles the impact of reasonable disagreement on questions of justice and legitimacy in a political community, arguing for a turn to public reason when justifying political principles. Recently these two literatures have been brought together to develop epistemic foundations of and challenges to Rawlsian political liberalism. Against these recent trends, I will argue that there are good reasons for political liberals to remain epistemically abstinent about the impact of peer disagreement on citizens’ beliefs. I also extend the lessons from analyzing public reason and peer disagreement to suggest there are more general reasons for caution in applying the epistemology of disagreement literature to cases of political disagreement.

Deepfakes are AI-generated media. When produced competently, they are near-indistinguishable from genuine recordings and so may mislead viewers about the actions of the individuals they depict. For this reason, it is thought to be only a matter of time before deepfakes have deleterious consequences for democratic procedures, elections in particular. But this pessimistic view about deepfakes and their relation to democracy is flawed, whether it means to pick out current deepfakes or future ones. Rather than advocating for an optimistic view in its place, I outline the opposite: a nihilistic account of deepfakes and their relation to democracy. On the nihilistic view, the harms that deepfakes pose for democracy are significantly more serious than those implied by the pessimistic view. Nihilism says that the real threat that deepfakes pose for democracy is that their existence counts against reforming current politics to be more truth-oriented.

In discussions about the possibly ideological character of ideal theory in liberal political philosophy, one worry concerns the underlying social ontology and how it can serve to make important structural injustices less visible. More recently, similar concerns have begun to appear within social ontology itself, with several authors arguing for a shift from more traditional models to different forms of nonideal or critical social ontology instead. This article develops a conception of ideal theory applicable to both social ontology and political theory, and it is then argued we should take seriously worries about ideal theory playing an ideological role. One consequence of how the ideal/nonideal distinction is understood here, however, is that the line between ideal and nonideal theory is not sharp. What we have is rather a continuum ranging from the strongly ideal to the strongly nonideal, and where the balance then needs to shift away from the former.

An intuition about consciousness known as the ’Awareness Principle’ states: For any mental state M of a subject S, M is conscious only if S has an ’inner awareness’ of M. Some have recently defended this principle by revising the ’memory argument’ first offered by the sixth-century Buddhist philosopher Dignāga: from the fact that an experience can be episodically remembered, it should follow that a subject must have been aware of that experience. In response, I argue that defenders of the memory argument haven’t convincingly established the episodic memorability of experience, because they haven’t defused a countervailing claim that conscious perceptual experience is phenomenologically ’transparent’. This claim, if true, would suggest that what one can episodically remember is just how the (external or internal) world appeared through one’s ’outer awareness’, rather than how the past experience itself appeared through one’s inner awareness. I further argue that the memory argument can accommodate phenomenological transparency only at the expense of making the Awareness Principle trivial. The memory argument defender may then claim that there is some non-introspectible feature of a past experience that is episodically memorable, namely, that experience’s subjective character or phenomenal ’for-me-ness’. In response, I develop an objection from the tenth-century Śaiva philosopher Utpaladeva against the possibility of recalling a past experience’s subjective character as such. Overall, while the objections this article raises cannot falsify the Awareness Principle directly, they may motivate its proponents to recall their support for the memory argument.

Companion friendship is a paradigm example of a trusting relationship and is a central good in human life. These friendships are also complex; navigating this complexity carries risk. Philosophical work has largely overlooked questions about how friends might navigate this morally risky space in ways that protect and develop their relationship over time. More specifically, although it is generally accepted that friendship involves acting to promote the well-being of one’s friend, ethical analysis of such interpersonal action has not addressed questions such as: How does acting for a friend’s well-being follow from and affect the trust within these relationships? What are the risks of acting for a friend’s well-being? Do genuine but unsuccessful attempts to promote a friend’s well-being, that bring about a rupture to the trust, necessarily cause lasting damage to trusting relationships? If not, why not? We argue that getting it wrong when acting for a friend’s well-being can provide an opportunity to protect and develop the trusting relationship, even while it causes harm to one’s friend and temporarily damages the relationship.

Do we owe anything to our genetic relatives qua genetic relatives? The philosophical literature has primarily addressed this question in the context of procreation. But genetic matching databases raise the question of whether we owe anything to previously unknown genetic relatives. This article argues that influential philosophical arguments regarding moral claims to know one’s genetic origins (sometimes referred to as a ‘right to know’) in the context of gamete donation have implications for a broader set of claims. First, these arguments imply more than a claim to know the identity of a genetic relative; the interests which they invoke can only be satisfied through a relationship. Second, the scope of the claims is broader than tends to be acknowledged: even if procreators have special obligations towards their offspring, these arguments imply that weighty moral claims can be made against other genetic relatives in many different contexts.

It has been proposed by several scholars that Hegel’s political philosophy can be utilized as a foundation for welfare theory. This article argues that to comprehend the principles, objectives, and limitations of a Hegelian welfare state, we need an account of the theory of justice underlying his political philosophy. This requires an analysis of how Hegel conceptualizes and assesses different kinds of inequality. This article identifies the three kinds of natural, societal, and market inequality and elucidates their interaction and transformation. An examination of the inner workings of the market through the lens of Hegel’s economic theory reveals how these inequalities impede citizens’ freedom. For a Hegelian theory of justice, inequalities pose a problem to the extent that they impede the citizens’ possibility of self-actualization. Consequently, the objective of a Hegelian welfare state is not to actualize an abstract notion of justice, but rather to ensure this possibility of self-actualization.

The ad hominem appears to be the simplest fallacy form—one criticizes speakers instead of their statements or arguments. It is regularly taken to be a fallacy of irrelevance, in that who is speaking does not bear on the truth of what is said. But three puzzles attend this analysis. (1) Given that the fallacy is simple and seemingly obvious, how could it be effective in practice? (2) Are there not cases when who is speaking is relevant? How do we sort those cases from those where it is irrelevant? (3) Isn’t there another level to the ad hominem, one where we observe it, know it is a bad argumentative move, and make inferences about the argumentative circumstances and arguers in light of it? Accusing another of committing the ad hominem, on this line of thought, has broader implications about the reasoner and their reasons. This article is an attempt to tell a coherent story of the ad hominem that makes sense of these three puzzles and shows how the observed preponderance of the argument form should trouble us as reasoners.

Some metaphysically interesting notions fall outside of the realm of the mind-independent, and as such will erroneously be considered unworthy of our attention by any view that thinks only of realist metaphysics as substantive (Taylor, 2023). In this article I propose two ways of conceiving of substantive metaphysics that includes some mind-dependent phenomena. The first is to understand substantivity in terms of carving at the joints, but to take where the ‘joints’ are to depend in part on our own interests, preferences, and conceptual schemes (the joints are ours, not nature’s). The second is to think of ‘reality’ as a system of explanatory dependence that includes some suitably embedded mind-dependent phenomena, and thus to deny (if we continue to characterize realism in terms of mind-independence) that we should be realists about all of ‘reality’.

The starting point for this article is Holton’s (2017) claim that there are no anti-factive attitude verbs (in Indo-European languages). In a first step, I argue that the German verb “wähnen” (as used by Frege and his contemporaries) is a counter-example. However, it seems as though anti-factives are rarer than factives, which raises the question of how to account for that observation. Since Holton’s explanation, as well as a seemingly promising neo-Gricean explanation, turns out to be unsuccessful, I turn to the question of whether the rarity of anti-factives needs to be explained in the first place. I argue that, on closer inspection, anti-factives are not as special as they may appear, and I also argue that the comparative rarity of anti-factives can be explained via the principle of charity.