A significant portion of the secondary literature on Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time has focused on interpreting his formal conceptions of death and anxiety. Unlike these previous works, this essay will serve to fill a gap in the Heideggerian portrayal of death. Although he argues that Dasein is anxious about death at a fundamental level and that it proximally and for the most part covers up such anxiety, Heidegger does not provide ontic evidence in support of his claim, instead opting to uncharacteristically take it as something self-evident. I attempt to supplement Heidegger’s framework by introducing Stephen Cave’s immortality narratives and the emerging field of Terror Management Theory as the aforementioned ontic evidence that rounds out Heidegger’s notion of death, before ultimately transitioning from Heidegger’s work into the larger philosophical discourse on death and demonstrating the potential joy that can manifest when one gains a lucid understanding of the ownness of their death and the narratives to which it gives rise.

This paper investigates a moment in the history of the phenomenological movement and offers an argument for its enduring significance. To this end, it brings to light, for the first time in a half-century, Manfred Frings’ rejected and so unpublished translation of Edmund Husserl’s Ideas II. After considering the meaning of the term Leib, which Frings renders ‘lived-body’ and to which the editor suggests ‘organism,’ a brief argument for the living tradition of phenomenology is given. It is claimed that the enduring significance of the document is found in the elucidation of the need to renew the phenomenological tradition through a collaboration across generations. Thus, even in its supposed “failure,” Frings’ translation gives data to future thinkers for insight into both their own life and the life of the ideas of phenomenology itself.

Epistemic conservatism maintains that some beliefs are immediately justified simply because they are believed. The intuitive implausibility of this claim sets the burden of proof against it. Some epistemic conservatives have sought to lessen this burden by limiting its scope, but I show that they cannot remove it entirely. The only hope for epistemic conservativism is to appeal to its theoretical fruit. However, such a defense is undercut by the introduction of phenomenal conservatism, which accomplishes the same work from a more intuitive starting point. Thus, if one opts for conservatism, better to choose the phenomenal kind.

Many philosophers think the non-identity problem undermines the ability for future generations to have been wronged by past ones. This problem has prompted a number of responses, some of which purport to vindicate the relevant claims of wrongdoing. However, I argue that a closely related issue remains even for those convinced by these responses. It is commonly thought that wrongdoing makes certain retrospective attitudes, such as resentment, fitting toward the wrongdoer. In this paper, I shift a familiar problem of future generations from wrongdoing to the fittingness of retrospective attitudes, and I show that a narrative sense of identity provides one means of addressing the puzzle of how these attitudes can be fi tting in non-identity cases.

When asked which of our concepts are normative concepts, metaethicists would be quick to list such concepts as good, ought, and reason. When asked why such concepts belong on the list, metaethicists would be much slower to respond. Eklund (2017) is a notable exception. He argues by elimination for “the Normative Role view” that normative concepts are normative in virtue of having a “normative role” or being “used normatively” (2017, p. 79). One view that Eklund aims to eliminate is “the Metaphysical view” that normative concepts are normative in virtue of referring to normative properties (2017, p. 71).2 In addition to arguing that Eklund’s objection looks doubtful by its own lights, we argue that there are several plausible versions of the Metaphysical view that Eklund doesn’t eliminate, defending various claims about normative concepts and their relationships to deliberation, competence, reference, and possession along the way.

In this paper, I offer an understanding of G.E. Moore’s epistemology as presented in, “A Defence of Common Sense” and “Proof of an External World.” To frame the discussion, I look to Roderick Chisholm’s essay, The Problem of the Criterion. I begin by looking at two ways that Chisholm believes one can respond to the problem of the criterion, and, referring back to Moore’s essays, explain why it is not unreasonable for Chisholm to believe that he is following a line of reasoning that Moore might take. I then show why I believe Chisholm is actually trying to do something quite different from what Moore was, and thus misses Moore’s actual point. I conclude that Moore is best understood as rejecting traditional epistemological concerns. By forcing Moore to deal with a traditional epistemological problem, it will become clear how bold Moore’s “epistemology” is.

This paper uses standpoint theory to explore whether all there is to establish epistemic peerhood between subjects is that they be (i) equally exposed to or familiar with the evidence pertaining to a disagreed claim, and be (ii) equals with regards to intelligence, freedom from bias and similar epistemic virtues within the domain of the claim in question. I argue that there is at least one general circumstance in which conditions (i) and (ii) are met, but nevertheless the subjects deviate in their likelihood to be mistaken about the claim in question, thus preventing them from being epistemic peers. Such a circumstance presents itself as a case in which the claim in question is part of those aspects of social relations and experiences of the marginalized.

Some questions about normative structure are global. We can ask how we should live, or what we ought to do all things considered, or whether there are any categorical oughts. But we can also examine local normative structure. We might ask ourselves about what we should do from the moral point of view rather than the prudential one, or discuss promissory obligation in contrast with what friendship demands. How should we understand such localized forms of normativity? We argue that a plausible sounding treatment of the distinction cannot account for what we call the “interrelatedness” of reasons from different domains.

In the time of Coronavirus, it is perhaps as good a time as any to comment on the use and abuse of metaphors. One of the worst instances of metaphor abuse—especially given the recent epidemiological crisis—is Lynne Tirrell’s notion of toxic speech. In the foregoing reply piece, I analyse Tirrell’s metaphor and reveal how it blinds us to the liberating power of public speech. Lynne Tirrell argues that some speech is, borrowing from field of Epidemiology, toxic in the sense that it harms vulnerable listeners. In this response piece, I summarize the main points of Tirrell’s toxic speech argument, map the underlying conceptual metaphor and pose three objections.

In 1963, Edmund Gettier published a short paper in the journal Analysis. That paper, entitled “Is Justifi ed True Belief Knowledge?,” purported to demonstrate that even though a person is justified in believing a true proposition p, having that justified true belief (JTB) is not sufficient for the person knowing that p (Gettier, 1963). In particular, Gettier presented examples purporting to show that a person may have a justified true belief, but the belief is, in one way or another, a “lucky belief,” and so the person having the justified true belief that p does not know that p. In what follows, I argue that justified, but luckily true beliefs do count as knowledge. What is important is that there is a limited ability to generalize from such cases, suggesting that many, if not most of what we count as instances of knowledge are, to a greater or lesser extent, localized.

Though philosophers are beginning to pay attention to the phenomenon of microaggressions, they are yet to fully draw on their training and skills in conceptual analysis to help make sense of what microaggression is. In this paper, I offer a philosophical analysis of the concept of microaggression. I ultimately argue that ‘microaggression’ as a concept gets its meaning not by decomposing into a set of necessary and sufficient conditions, but rather by means of what Ludwig Wittgenstein (1953) has called “family resemblance.” That is to say, what unifies the concept of microaggression is a set of common, overlapping features that link related instances together, but are not necessarily all present in all cases. I identify and explain a common set of features that together form the basis for a family resemblance account of the concept. I then argue that despite the difficulty that microaggressions pose in terms of being reliably recognized and understood as such, some people, in virtue of their epistemic standpoint, are better suited to recognize these features and subsequently identify instances of micraoggression in practice. I argue this by drawing on the vast literature in feminist standpoint epistemology (Alcoff, 1993; Hill Collins, 1990, 2004; hooks, 2004; Harding, 2004, 2008; Wylie, 2013).

I want to tackle a central thesis of contemporary Utilitarianism. Utilitarianism holds what has come to be called the Aggregation Thesis. The Aggregation Thesis claims, roughly, that several individual harms (or benefits) can be “added up” to represent a larger harm (or benefit). One controversial aspect of this view is that, seemingly, one large harm to a single individual (or smaller group) could be justified if such a harm spared a significantly smaller harm dealt out to a much larger number of other individuals. I will argue that on Utilitarian’s own grounds, the aggregation thesis is not warranted.