Amoral actions are actions outside of the moral domain. To establish a way of understanding amoral actions, I will draw upon Dale Dorsey’s agency view which, in sum, maintains that an agent must have a reason to perform an action and be able to perform the action in question based upon that reason. Dorsey focuses upon both cognitive and circumstantial limitations to establish the fact that moral agents can (and do) perform amoral actions. In this paper, however, I will focus upon a kind of deficiency of knowledge that is imparted socially. Some actions of persons suffering from autism seem to fall into the category of amoral actions that I have in mind but, so too, would some actions of persons who suffer from a moral injury. In sum, I aim to expand upon the category of amoral actions among moral agents.

Concepts like testimonial injustice (Fricker, 2007) and testimonial violence (Dotson, 2011) articulate that marginalized epistemic agents are unjustly undermined as testifiers when dominant agents cannot or will not hear, understand, or believe their testimony. This paper turns attention away from these constraints on uptake, and towards pragmatic, social, and political constraints on how dominant audiences receive and react to testimony. I argue that these constraints can also be sources of testimonial injustice and epistemic violence. Specifically, I explore a kind of injustice that I call testimonial withdrawal, which occurs when a would-be speaker chooses to remain silent because they know or reasonably expect that there is pragmatic risk associated with speaking, given their unjust marginalization. I argue that this unjustly undermines epistemic agency, and that expanding Fricker and Dotson’s umbrella concepts to accommodate this idea results in a better understanding of the moral and epistemic contours of both testimonial withdrawal and these broader categories.

The purpose of this paper is to show the plausibility of John Rawls’s treatment of efficiency within the system of justice. While in political philosophy efficiency is often treated as an independent condition for establishing justice, or more precisely, as a necessary condition for establishing justice, Rawls considers efficiency as a non-negligible factor that has normativity in general circumstances. This is similar to the view that efficiency is a presumptive condition for evaluating social arrangements. However, Rawls’s view is salient in a more substantive way. This paper demonstrates the salience of Rawls’s view of efficiency by responding to G. A. Cohen’s Impure Justice Objection to Rawls’s theory of justice. This shows that there is no impure connection between Rawls’s justice and efficiency. Moreover, the combined thesis of Rawls’s justice and efficiency is superior to Cohen’s pluralist theory of justice, making it a fruitful approach.

The following paper puts the history of race and colonialism in conversation with the history of the concept of energy. The objective is to understand what a critical decolonial perspective can teach us about the central role that energy plays in western culture, materially and epistemologically. I am interested in how this approach to political, epistemological, and ontological questions demands that we reconceptualize energy to account for the historical particularity of the concept and the phenomena of history and intersubjectivity, which are eschewed in a purely materialistic and quantitative conception of energy. We will see how energy has been complicit in the racialization of black and indigenous bodies, and how the privileged place that the concept of energy has occupied in the canon of western physics has served to obscure the theological, metaphysical, and cultural assumptions that constitute it.

Aristotle’s Prior Analytics is probably the earliest existing systematic philosophical writing on a syllogistic system and theory of logic. In this work, Aristotle introduces the categorical syllogistic, consisting of three figures and fourteen valid moods. This paper proposes that Aristotle distinguishes a general notion of syllogisms from a more technical notion of syllogisms. Syllogisms that belong to the categorical syllogistic fall under Aristotle’s technical notion of syllogisms that must satisfy two conditions: (1) a conclusion follows necessarily from the premises, and (2) the premises derive a conclusion that necessarily follows from them in regard to attributing the major extreme to the minor.

Many of our beliefs are the product of inference and depend on chains of reasoning from other beliefs we hold. Inferential internalism is the view that an inference can only provide justification if one is aware of the support relation that holds between the premises and conclusion. This inferential internalist requirement is controversial even among epistemologists who accept internalist conditions on justification more generally. In this paper, we argue that the intuition underlying a central motivation for internalism more generally is the same intuition that motivates inferential internalism. As such, internalists who reject the more demanding requirements of inferential internalism are prima facie involved in a problematic inconsistency. We finish the paper by considering a dilemma for inferential internalism and presenting two strategies for responding.

Wittgensteinian Thomism (WT) proposes a post-Wittgensteinian reading of Aquinas based on the presence of genuine affinities between them in philosophical anthropology, epistemology, philosophy of mind, action theory, and ethics. While this proposal has been historically fruitful in the works of Elizabeth Anscombe, Peter Geach, Anthony Kenny, and Herbert McCabe, there is a significant difficulty in the prima facie incompatibility in the respective attitudes towards metaphysics between Wittgenstein and Aquinas. This calls into question the very coherence of the WT proposal. Against this objection, I will argue that WT is a coherent proposal which can harmonize these seemingly incompatible attitudes towards metaphysics by showing that Wittgenstein’s conception of grammatical observations do not necessarily exclude metaphysics but provides a guide towards it. I will argue that rather than being opposed, grammar and metaphysics are concomitantly joined in Wittgenstein’s later remarks. If this reading of Wittgenstein surmounts that proposed by Hacker, then the incoherence objection to WT simply fails.

In their recent paper, “Practical Knowledge without Luminosity,” Bob Beddor and Carlotta Pavese (2022) claim that the doctrine of essentially intentional actions, or “essentialism,” is false. Essentialism states that some actions are essentially intentional, such that, “whenever they are performed, they are performed intentionally” (2022, p. 926). Beddor and Pavese work to reject essentialism, which figures as a key premise in Juan Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument against the knowledge condition for intentional action (Piñeros Glasscock, p. 1240). Historically, essentialism has received little attention from philosophers since its inception in Elizabeth Anscombe’s Intention (2000, §47). However, I believe that essentially intentional actions can play an important role in an ontology of action. In my paper, I develop and argue for a variety of essentialism in the context of naive action theory, which I call naive essentialism. Naive essentialism is a two-fold thesis, which claims that (1) essentially intentional actions exist, and (2) that essentially intentional actions ground accidentally intentional actions. My paper has four parts. In the first part, I distinguish between essentially and accidentally intentional actions, and unpack the relevant principles of naive action theory. Second, I present the grounding thesis that accidentally intentional actions are grounded in essentially intentional actions. Next, I provide an argument for the existence of essentially intentional actions. Lastly, I briefly respond to a possible objection to my argument. The upshot of my arguments is that essentially intentional actions form the metaphysical and explanatory bedrock in a naive ontology of action, and that there are good reasons for accepting a key premise in Piñeros Glasscock’s anti-luminosity argument.

Theoretical conceptions of realness can indicate what is fundamental or invariant in our experience of the world but are bound to miss a main point of realism due to the practical detachment of theoretical world modeling. The central sense in recognizing beings we encounter as real is accepting that we are or might be sharing existence with them, partnering with them in some significant way in the development of the world. This stance of engagement belongs to our modeling of how to live. The intentional sharing of existence makes for a dramatic situation, the sharers being viewed as interesting agents or quasi-agents who bear watching because the results of their combining actions might be important (possibly in a fictional world). Dramatizing life realistically is a basic expression of intentional vitality and is presupposed in highly serious forms of moral and aesthetic engagement (such as reverence and enchantment).

In his paper “Getting Sophisticated: In Favor of Hybrid Views of Skilled Action in Expertise,” Spencer Ivy (2023) argues effectively for what he calls a “sophisticated hybrid” view of expertise, driven by empirical considerations and argument from contemporary phenomenology and cognitive architecture. Here I raise three unfair objections which I think lead to some fair questions that may be productive for discussion and future work.