This article argues that the traditional taxonomy of doxastic attitudes leaves out an important alternative. That is the attitude of rejecting the question. Sundry examples of the phenomenon are presented and their unifying features are identified. One rejects a question when one treats it as if none of its answers were true. One can reject not only non-polar questions, but also polar ones (questions of the form whether p). The stance of rejecting a question is further distinguished from interrogative attitudes in general, and from the third stance of the traditional taxonomy in particular.

By allocating their attention to pieces of content, algorithmic filtering shapes the daily behavior of billions of users when they interact with a digital platform. Beyond conditioning what we do, can recommendation algorithms influence who we are? This article suggests that they do. Specifically, I contend that recommender systems affect users’ capacity to be their authentic selves in both positive and negative ways. I start by offering an account of authenticity that builds on two central concepts: volitional alignment and self-understanding. I then explain how algorithmic filtering works and impacts authenticity. While recommender systems frustrate users’ second-order desires by relying on uninformative behavioral signals, they also facilitate self-understanding by inciting users to question their identity. I end by discussing how controllable and explainable recommenders would best enable users to be authentic.

This article explores the place of non-human animals in Catharine Macaulay’s understanding of moral education. Other Early Modern writers instructed parents and governors to discourage children from mistreating animals in order to prevent the development of cruelty or callousness, but said little else. Macaulay’s views run deeper. Focusing on her Letters on Education (1790), I show that Macaulay centers her view on the development of the natural capacity for sympathy, through which we discover the principle of equity, and thereby cultivate the crucial virtue of benevolence. I then show that Macaulay repeatedly connects sympathy and benevolence to the early associations formed through one’s relations to sentient creatures, revealing how her associationistic psychology grounds her views on morality and moral education.

Much of the debate between naïve realism and the content view has focused on a particular aspect of perceptual phenomenology: the phenomenal immediacy that distinguishes perceptual experiences from both imagery experiences and conscious thoughts. According to a version of the argument from hallucination, we should prefer the content view to naïve realism because the former, unlike the latter, can provide a unified explanation of the fact that both hallucinatory and veridical experiences possess immediacy. However, the standard variety of the content view that can provide such an explanation is not in a position to provide a unified explanation of a distinct aspect of perceptual phenomenology: perceptual experiences possess a presentational character that they share with imagery experiences (and which distinguishes both from conscious thoughts). Accordingly, I present an argument from imagination in defense of a non-standard variety of the content view—the sensory vehicle theory. Unlike its competitors, the sensory vehicle theory can provide unified explanations of why hallucinatory and veridical perceptual experiences possess immediacy, and why perceptual and imagery experiences possess their presentational character; as such, this theory provides a better explanation of the phenomenal facts than does either naïve realism or the standard variety of the content view.

Traditional compatibilists respond to the Consequence Argument by denying either the fixity of the past or by denying the fixity of the laws, neither of which is without theoretical cost. Recently, however, several authors—Christian List (2019b), Scott Sehon (2016), and Ned Markosian (2012)—have introduced novel approaches to free will that, they claim, imply that determinism is no threat to free will and, thus, that free will and determinism turn out to be compatible. The strategies employed by these authors differ considerably, with one influenced by psychology and decision theory, another by traditional philosophy of action, and the other by the metaphysics of causation. Nevertheless, this article aims to show, first, that these approaches share a common thread and, second, that each implicitly requires us to give up either the fixity of the past or the fixity of the laws (but without making this explicit or explaining how their views are preferable to traditional compatibilist views with respect to giving up the fixity of the past/laws). The article concludes with an important lesson that may be learned from our survey of these novel and interesting, even if ultimately unsuccessful, approaches to compatibilism.

Causal loops are circular chains of causally related events: each link causes others which in turn cause it. Not only are causal loops widely accepted as coherently conceivable; some are also provably self-consistent as well as seeming genuinely possible according to currently accepted laws of physics. On the common assumption that causation is transitive, each link in any causal loop would wind up causing itself; but the idea of self-causation is pretty much universally rejected as incoherent. A popular attempt to resolve this dilemma distinguishes “direct” from “indirect” self-causation: the direct variety, which operates without the aid of causal intermediaries, is claimed to be impossible even if the indirect variety isn’t. I argue against this attempted resolution on the grounds that causal loops themselves, unlike the links that compose them, should be viewed as directly self-caused; so indirect self-causation via causal loop is possible only if direct self-causation is as well. An important consequence is the availability of groundbreaking solutions to several longstanding puzzles in philosophy of mind.

At the heart of P. F. Strawson’s naturalistic approach to responsibility sits the Inescapability Claim. The main argument of this article is that the established interpretation of this claim is mistaken. According to, what I will call, the Standard Reading, it is the empirical claim that it is psychologically impossible for us to abandon our responsibility practices. Although widespread, this reading lacks interpretative basis, is in conflict with other features of Strawson’s approach, and is—most strikingly—explicitly rejected by Strawson himself. In its place, I propose that we understand Strawson’s Inescapability Claim as the metaphysical claim that the concept of responsibility is among those ineliminable concepts that form the fundamental core of any conceivable conceptual scheme. The responsibility skeptic’s doubt is “idle, unreal, a pretense”, not because their doubt is psychologically inefficacious, but because it treads beyond the bounds of sense; their doubt is, in a particular sense, inconceivable or unintelligible.

Philosophical analysis has long involved finding the “proper” form of a sentence, aiming to find a form that is “transparent” regarding its implications. Easy ontologists claim that finding the tacit ontological commitments of ordinary claims about the world is easy. Simple paraphrases and elementary deductions from those paraphrases will do, they claim. We find the easy ontologists’ arguments wanting. After examining the natures of idioms and paraphrase, we conclude that the so-called easy arguments provide no warrant for ontological conclusions as they have traditionally been understood. In several illustrative examples, we show that the easy ontologists preferred paraphrases are apt only if they carry no ontological implications, on pain of warranting ontological conclusions that are not credible.