The Practical Self begins with Descartes’s withdrawal into isolation. And it ends where the Meditations end: in a world of others, offering objections and replies, holding one another to account. But its route from self-consciousness to objectivity is decidedly not Cartesian—it denies that we can establish a connection between self-consciousness and the world on theoretical grounds alone. Instead, it argues that we have practical grounds to accept that we are the agents of our thinking and that our assent to this claim is sustained by practices which relate us to an objective world. Elliot Samuel Paul’s thoughtful comments identify two gaps in this argument and argue that Descartes’s account of agency and objectivity is needed to bridge them. The route from self-consciousness and objectivity needs supplementation with Cartesian resources.

The paradox of dogmatism is an argument to the effect that any subject who knows that P can thereby know that any counterevidence is misleading and, therefore, the subject ought to ignore that counterevidence. Regulative epistemology is the effort to develop principles to guide inquiry. The paradox of dogmatism is not typically understood as a regulative problem. But that is an illuminating way to view it. Understood that way, this paper offers a solution grounded in an epistemic policy of “following the argument wherever it leads.”

Philosophers are often embarrassed by philosophy, or at least write as if they are. But what should we make of this connection between philosophy and embarrassment? Taking a cue from sociologist Erving Goffman, this paper treats embarrassment in general as revealing of social phenomena and then considers the case of philosophical embarrassment from that point of view. As we will see, this allows us to formulate and explore several hypotheses about the discipline of philosophy, why it might be rational to be embarrassed by it, and how this embarrassment might be managed or overcome.

Proponents of modal knowledge accounts (safety and sensitivity) concur that one crucial advantage of their accounts is that they solve the so-called lottery problem—the problem of explaining why “lottery beliefs” based merely on statistical evidence do not constitute knowledge. Contra this claim, I argue that epistemic judgments about lottery beliefs do not consistently track what occurs in a specified set of nonactual possibilities. Thus, modal knowledge accounts cannot properly explain beliefs based merely on statistical evidence. Finally, I argue that these beliefs can be better accommodated by a rival theory of modal accounts—namely, explanationism.

In this paper, I argue that the literature on victims’ duties to resist their own oppression has not paid enough attention to the heterogeneity of victims and how this affects their duties. The main aim of the paper is to introduce considerations and complications—informed by an intersectional analysis, and particularly the concept of privilege—that must be taken into account when determining how to assign duties to resist. I argue that failure to recognize these nuances results in an overcautiousness when it comes to assigning duties of resistance, and that a blanket reluctance to assign such duties is of most detriment to the most marginalized.

The problem at the center of Gomes’ The Practical Self is how the self-conscious reflective subject can come understand herself, and establish, that she is in an objective world. Its proposed solution lies in practically, not theoretically, grounded assent, sustained by our conversation with others. This critical response to the book aims to do three things. First, to encourage people to read it. Second, to scrutinize Gome’s own recommendation for the best route to take in dealing with this problem. Third, to ask whether there is a shorter route.

In “A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,” Donald Davidson argues against the view that conventions fix the meanings of our words and for the position that a speaker’s intentions play a fundamental role in fixing what she means by her words. However, he is clear that he still holds to the externalism, holism, and literalism argued for earlier in his career. Lepore and Stone (Philosophical Perspectives, 31, 245–265, 2017) and Camp (Inquiry, 59, 113–138, 2016) suggest that the resulting picture is contradictory. In this article, I take up Lepore, Stone, and Camp’s arguments to clarify Davidson’s position and motivate an anti-conventional literalism about meaning.

Collective agents can be praiseworthy without any of their members being praiseworthy. To support this “discontinuity thesis,” we consider the role that motivation plays in the attribution of moral responsibility. An agent who is praiseworthy must have had the appropriate moral motivation. We argue that it is possible that the collective agent was appropriately motivated, while its members were not. Subsequently, we develop an account of corporate moral concern, which gives substance to this second discontinuity thesis, about the moral motivation of collective agents.

In response to the self-undermining problem for modest accounts of rational belief, some have proposed that an agent may rationally lose confidence in the truth of these accounts, while continuing to believe as the accounts prescribe. Such agents believe akratically. Many reject the possibility of rational akrasia. Others have defended it—at least in cases where an agent rationally sees her own beliefs as more accurate than rational alternatives would be. This paper argues that akrasia can be rational, but that defending rational akrasia based on an agent’s views about accuracy cannot succeed. Fortunately, however, the defense is not necessary.

One way of characterizing what makes someone a good reasoner is to appeal to intellectual virtues, such as curiosity, fair-mindedness, or epistemic humility. My aim in this paper is to show that explaining how the virtue of humility should manifest itself in complex reasoning is more difficult than one might think. A very natural view of what intellectually humble deliberation looks like is problematic, because it leads to an infinite regress. I will explore whether and in which way this regress is vicious, and how our answers to these questions can lead us to a better account of how humility can inform stopping rules for good reasoning.

We are self-conscious creatures thrown into a world, which is not of our making. What is the connection between being self-conscious and being related to an objective world? The Practical Self argues that self-consciousness requires faith in ourselves as the agents of our thinking and that this faith is sustained by a set of practices which relate us to a world of others.

After presenting Boyle’s appeal to the Sartrean notion of nonpositional self-awareness in explaining Evans’ “transparency fact” concerning self-knowledge, I argue that his explanation suffers a certain instability. To the extent that nonpositional self-awareness is taken to be a matter of first-order ‘transparent’ orientation to the world, Boyle’s suggestion concerning the character of explicit positional self-knowledge is compromised. On the other hand, to the extent that nonpositional awareness is regarded as a form of genuine self-awareness, his explanation overintellectualizes first-order mental states. I conclude by raising questions regarding Boyle’s success in providing a viable alternative to epistemic accounts of basic self-knowledge.

I give a brief overview of my book, Transparency and Reflection (Oxford 2024), to introduce the author-meets-critics symposium to follow.

I reply to three critical discussions of my book, Transparency and Reflection (Oxford, 2024). The replies discuss the basic structure of my “reflectivist” account of self-knowledge, the bearing of my account on the distinction between rational and nonrational minds, the question of how to respond to Hume’s challenge to our entitlement to attribute our thoughts to a single self, the relation between awareness of ourselves as conscious subjects and knowledge of our existence as embodied objects, and the relation of my views on self-awareness to the views of Immanuel Kant.

I am modest about my spelling accuracy. Oops, I cannot consistently believe that! Modesty about my spelling entails I underestimate my spelling. If I indeed underestimate my spelling accuracy, then my ignorance about spelling accuracy is contagious. For if I believe you and I are equals at spelling, then my modesty commits me to underestimating your spelling. In addition to my ignorance of my merit spreading to my ignorance of your merit, my ignorance can make you ignorant. After all, how do you know that I am modest rather than accurate? In general, any modesty I possess robs my peers.

In Chapter 5 of Transparency and Reflection, Matthew Boyle examines an “anti-Egoist” challenge to my reflective knowledge that I am thinking, which says all I really know is that thinking is occurring. Boyle replies that I know something more, namely that a subject is thinking. Even so, he concedes that traditional Egoists like Descartes go too far in claiming reflective knowledge that an object is thinking. However, these comments argue that there is no stable middle ground between Cartesian Egoism and Anti-Egoism. If I know that I am thinking, then I know that an object is thinking.

The Practical Self offers a new and gripping account of the conditions on being self-conscious subjects. Gomes argues that self-conscious subjects are required to have faith in themselves as the agents of thinking, sustained and supported by worldly practices. I argue that that Gomes leaves open either theoretical or alternative practical grounds to justify being the agents of thinking and so does not motivate an appeal to faith as the mode of assent. And I ask whether we can make available an alternative account of the tight relation between communal practices and self-consciousness that preserves it, absent faith.

In Transparency and Reflection, Matthew Boyle offers a Sartrean account of prereflective self-awareness to explain the essential link between self-consciousness and rationality, moving away from standard Kantian interpretations that he claims presuppose rather than explain this connection. I argue that Boyle’s account provides useful tools for re-interpreting Kant’s claim that the “I think” must accompany all representations as a form of nonpositional consciousness. I also aim to show that Boyle’s model risks fragmenting the unity of the subject across different representational domains, and that Kant’s account (construed as a kind of prereflective consciousness) has the resources to address this challenge.

Our politics are increasingly polarised. Polarisation takes many forms. One is increasing clustering, whereby people hold down-the-line liberal or conservative views on a wide range of orthogonal issues. Some philosophers think that such clustering is indicative of irrationality, and so finding yourself in one of several clusters gives you evidence that not all your political beliefs are true. I argue that the reverse is true, presenting a simple model of belief-formation in which finding yourself in one of several clusters of opinion on orthogonal issues should increase, rather than decrease, your confidence that all your beliefs are true.

The thought that intellectual arrogance consists in, roughly, overconfident resilience in one’s beliefs has been influential in philosophy and psychology. This thought is in the background of much of the philosophical literature on disagreement as well as some leading psychological scales of intellectual humility. It is not true, however. This paper highlights cases (of “stubborn fools” and the “arrogantly open-minded”) that cause trouble for equating intellectual arrogance with overconfident belief resilience. These cases are much better accommodated if we see intellectual arrogance as, instead, a form of vicious intellectual distraction by the ego.