Making sense of our reasoning in disputes about necessary truths requires admitting nonvacuous counterpossibles. One class of these is the counteressentials, which ask us to make contrary to fact (and therefore contrary to possibility) suppositions about essences. A popular strategy in accounting for nonvacuous counterpossibles is to extend the standard possible worlds semantics for subjunctive conditionals by the addition of impossible worlds. A conditional A □→ C is then taken to be true if all of the nearest A worlds (whether possible or impossible) are C worlds. I argue that a straightforward extension of the standard possible worlds semantics to impossible worlds does not result in a viable account of counteressentials and propose an alternative covering law semantics for counteressentials.

A classic objection to act-consequentialism is that it is overdemanding: it requires agents to bear too many costs for the sake of promoting the impersonal good. I develop the complementary objection that act-consequentialism is underdemanding: it fails to acknowledge that agents have moral reasons to bear certain costs themselves, evenwhen itwould be impersonally better for others to bear these costs.

The new dispositionalists defend the position that an agent in a deterministic Frankfurt-style case (FSC) has the ability to do otherwise, where that ability is the one at issue in the principle of alternative possibilities. Focusing specifically on Kadri Vihvelin’s proposal, I argue against this position by showing that it is incompatible with the existence of structurally similar cases to FSCs in which a preemptive intervener bestows an agent with an ability.

According to the libertarian view of free will, people sometimes act freely, but this freedom is incompatible with causal determinism. Goetz (1997, 1998, 2008) has developed an important and unusual libertarian view of free will. Rather than simply arguing that a person’s free actions cannot be causally determined,Goetz argues that they cannot be caused at all. According to Goetz, in order for a person to act freely, her actions must be uncaused. My aim in this essay is to evaluate Goetz’s “noncausal” libertarian view of free will. In section 1, I outline Goetz’s view. In section 2, I develop two criticisms of his view. In section 3, I develop an improved “positive” account of the noncausal view, which takes Goetz’s metaphysical framework as its point of departure but is not subject to the criticisms that plague his development of this framework. Finally, in section 4, I respond to some objections to my proposed noncausal view.

Moral wrongness comes in degrees. On a consequentialist view of ethics, the wrongness of an act should depend, I argue, in part on how much worse the act’s consequences are compared with those of its alternatives and in part on how difficult it is to perform the alternatives with better consequences. I extend act consequentialism to take this into account, and I defend three conditions on consequentialist theories. The first is consequentialist dominance, which says that, if an act has better consequences than some alternative act, then it is not more wrong than the alternative act. The second is consequentialist supervenience, which says that, if two acts have equally good consequences in a situation, then they have the same deontic status in the situation. And the third is consequentialist continuity, which says that, for every act and for any difference in wrongness δ greater than zero, there is an arbitrarily small improvement of the consequences of the act which would, other things being equal, not change the wrongness of that act or any alternative by more than δ. I defend a proposal that satisfies these conditions.

Graham Priest defends the use of a nonmonotonic logic, LPm, in his analysis of reasoning in the face of true contradictions, such as those arising from the paradoxes of self-reference. In the course of defending this choice of logic in the face of the criticism that this logic is not truth preserving, Priest argued (2012) that requirement is too much to ask: since LPm is a nonmonotonic logic, it necessarily fails to preserve truth. In this article, I show that this assumption is incorrect, and I explain why nonmonotonic logics can nonetheless be truth preserving. Finally, I diagnose Priest’s error, to explain when nonmonotonic logics do indeed fail to preserve truth.

According to Originalism, word types are non-eternal continuants which are individuated by their causal-historical lineage and have a unique possible time of origination. This view collides with the intuition that individual words can be added to the lexicon of a language at different times, and generates other problematic consequences. The paper shows that such undesired results can be accommodated without abandoning Originalism.

Expressivists and relativists about epistemic modals often motivate their view by arguing against contextualist treatments of certain cases. However, I argue that even expressivists and relativists should consider being a kind of contextualist. Specifically, data involving mixed disjunctions motivate taking epistemic modals to be sensitive to contextually-salient partitions, and thus context-sensitive.

The accessibility relation between possible worlds can be defined in the metalanguage of counterfactual semantics. As a result, counterfactuals can ground the whole of standard modal logic.

I recommend three revisions to experimental philosophy’s ‘self-image’ which I suggest will enable experimentalist critics of intuition to evade several important objections to the ’negative’ strand of the experimental philosophy research project. First, experimentalists should avoid broad criticisms of ‘intuition’ as a whole, instead drawing a variety of conclusions about a variety of much narrower categories of mental state. Second, experimentalists should state said conclusions in terms of epistemic norms particular to philosophical inquiry, rather than attempting to, for example, deny that intuitions produce justified belief. Third, experimentalists should acknowledge the limitations of the ‘method of cases’ model of philosophical inquiry, and expand their experimental work accordingly.

Many expressions intuitively have different epistemic andmodal profiles. For example, co-referring proper names are substitutable salva veritate in modal contexts but not in belief-contexts. Two-dimensional semantics, according to which terms have both a so-called primary and a secondary intension, is a framework that promises to accommodate and explain these diverging intuitions. The framework can be applied to indexicals, proper names or predicates. Graeme Forbes (2011) argues that the two-dimensional semantics of David Chalmers (2011) fails to account for so-called nested contexts. These are linguistic contexts where a sentence is embedded under both epistemic and modal operators. Chalmers and Rabern (2014) suggest a two-dimensional solution to the problem. Their semantics solves the nesting-problem, but at the cost of invalidating certain plausible principles.We suggest a solution that is both simpler and avoids this cost.

It is widely agreed that properties play causal roles: they capture the causal powers of things. But do properties have their causal roles essentially? David Lewis did not think so. He adhered to the doctrine of quidditism, namely the doctrine that the identity of properties is primitive and that they can trade their causal roles. Quidditism is controversial. But Lewis did not see why he should want to reject it. He knew that he could avoid quidditism on the cheap by treating individuals and properties alike in rejecting transworld multilocation of properties and endorsing a counterpart theory for properties. But he did not see why he should want to do so. In this article, I argue that Lewis should have wanted to endorse a counterpart theory for properties in order to reject quidditism. My argument concerns resemblance relations among properties. Another constitutive role of properties is that they capture objective resemblances between their instances. The premises of my argument are intuitive claims about resemblances among some properties that Lewis held on Humean grounds.

Some essence facts have metaphysical explanations. Some metaphysical explanations for essence facts consist in nonessential facts.

McTaggart’s argument against the reality of the A series (or some variation on that argument) poses a serious problem for the moving-now block theory of time (MNBT). A defender of MNBT can respond along lines suggested by Broad: by denying that we should understand ‘e was present’ as saying that e is present at some past moment t. There is, however, a serious—plausibly defeating—objection to this type of response: it implicitly denies a non-negotiable platitude about time. As a result, MNBT is not tenable. Growing block theories are also defeated by a similar objection.

Kris McDaniel has argued that strong composition as identity entails a principle he calls the Plural Duplication Principle (PDP), and that (PDP) is inconsistent with the possibility of strongly emergent properties. Theodore Sider has objected that this possibility is only inconsistent with a closely analogous principle he calls the Set Duplication Principle (SDP). According to Sider, however, the friend of strong composition as identity is under no pressure to accept (SDP). In this paper, I argue that she has strong reason to accept either (SDP) or a principle that is also inconsistent with the possibility of strongly emergent properties.

Miranda Fricker has influentially discussed testimonial injustice: the injustice done to a speaker S by a hearer H when H gives S less-than-merited credibility. Here, I explore the prospects for a novel form of testimonial injustice, where H affords S due credibility, that is, the amount of credibility S deserves. I present two kinds of cases intended to illustrate this category, and argue that there is presumptive reason to think that testimonial injustice with due credibility exists. I show that if it is denied that ultimately these cases exemplify testimonial injustice without credibility deficit, then either they must be taken to exemplify a novel kind of epistemic, non-testimonial injustice, or they bring to light a significant exegetical result.

Researchers recently demonstrated a strong direct relationship between judgments about what a person knows (“knowledge judgments”) and judgments about how a person should act (“actionability judgments”). But it remains unknown whether actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments, or knowledge judgments cause actionability judgments. This paper uses causal modeling to help answer this question. Across two experiments, we found evidence that actionability judgments cause knowledge judgments.

The Consequence Argument is sound only if no one has a choice about the laws of nature, and one prominent compatibilist reply to the argument—championed by David Lewis (1981)—begins by claiming that there is a sense in which we do have such a choice, and a sense in which we don’t. Lewis then insists that the sense in which we do have such a choice is the only sense required by compatibilism. Peter van Inwagen (2004) has responded that even if Lewis’s distinction between two senses of having a choice about the laws is accepted, compatibilists are still committed to the incredible view that free will requires the ability to perform miracles. In this paper, I offer a reply to van Inwagen on Lewis’s behalf.