In the Essays on the Active Powers of Man V. 7, Thomas Reid seeks to show “[t]hat moral approbation implies a real judgment,” contrasting this thesis with the view that moral approbation is no more than a feeling. Unfortunately, his criticism of moral sentimentalism systematically conflates two different metaethical views: non-cognitivism about moral thought and subjectivism about moral properties. However, if we properly disentangle the various parts of Reid’s discussion, we can isolate pertinent arguments against each of these views. Some of these arguments, such as the argument from disagreement and the argument from implausible counterfactuals against subjectivism, or the transparency argument against non-cognitivism, still have important roles to play in contemporary metaethics.

In the latter half of the seventeenth century, Antoine Arnauld was a public and private defender of many of the central tenets of Cartesianism. Yet, one issue on which he is surprisingly silent is René Descartes’s claim that God freely created the eternal truths (the Creation Doctrine). Despite Arnauld’s evasion of the issue, whether he holds the Creation Doctrine is one of the most contested issues in Arnauld scholarship. In this article I offer an interpretation of Arnauld’s position. I argue that Arnauld does not hold what I call the metaphysical version of the Creation Doctrine according to which God in fact freely created the eternal truths. Rather, he holds what I call the epistemic version of the Creation Doctrine according to which we cannot know whether God freely created the eternal truths.

In this paper I argue that the basic form of good luck (eutuchia) that Aristotle identifies in his Eudemian Ethics 8.2 is the divine good luck, which is not also natural good luck, as is commonly assumed by interpreters. The property of being lucky is neither a primitive nor a natural property, nor such that it is based on some natural property, but a property bestowed by god. Hence, the only satisfactory explanation of good luck must be theological. Furthermore, I argue that Aristotle’s account is neutral in regard to character, intellectual, and physical dispositions of those who are subject to good luck.

The epistemology of moral principles should be developed in relation to general epistemology and integrated with a plausible moral ontology. On both counts, it is important to consider the nature of moral properties and, more generally, normative properties. This paper distinguishes two kinds of normative properties, indicates how they are related to one another and to moral properties, contrasts their supervenience on natural properties with their grounding in those properties, and, in the light of the points then in view, argues for a moderately rationalist account of knowledge of moral principles. The paper also considers in detail how one might account for the a priori status of certain moral principles—a status that remains controversial and is in any case difficult to establish. The final section shows how the overall position of the paper may be consistent with moral naturalism but does not depend on it.

Thomas Aquinas divides the sensory appetite into two powers: the irascible and the concupiscible. The irascible power moves creatures toward arduous goods and away from arduous evils, while the concupiscible power moves creatures toward pleasant goods and away from non-arduous evils. Despite the importance of this distinction, it remains unclear what counts as an arduous good or evil, and why arduousness is the defining feature of the division. The aim of this paper is twofold. First, I argue that an arduous object is one that is difficult and important for the creature. Second, given this proper understanding of arduousness, I highlight the shortcomings of the standard interpretation of Aquinas’s argument for the irascible-concupiscible distinction and suggest an alternative. I argue that Aquinas grounds the distinction in the distinction between useful and pleasant goods. I explain how these distinct goods allow arduousness to be the defining feature of the irascible-concupiscible division.

A priori metaphysics has come under repeated attack by naturalistic metaphysicians, who take their closer connection to the sciences to confer greater epistemic credentials on their theories. But it is hard to see how this can be so unless the problem of theory change that has for so long vexed philosophers of science can be addressed in the context of scientific metaphysics. This paper argues that canonical metaphysical claims, unlike their scientific counterparts, cannot meaningfully be regarded as ‘approximately true,’ and that this means that the epistemic progress that science arguably enjoys through episodes of theory change cannot be expected to transfer to its metaphysics. What the value of engaging in metaphysics of science before the emergence of a final theory becomes correspondingly unclear.

In this paper, I explore the possibility that the point Kripke (1982) made about understanding meaning also applies to understanding social interaction. This understanding involves extending what one has learned from a finite number of past observations to provide normative guidance for an indefinitely complicated future. Kripke argues (to my mind correctly) that what one should do in the future is inevitably underdetermined by the infinite possible interpretations of the past. Moreover, no matter how much one attempts to make the rules explicit, they will always be underspecified. I then explore the speculative hypothesis that having different tacit dispositions made manifest in one’s understanding of the rules of social engagement would look remarkably similar to tendencies exhibited by many autistic individuals. The analogy will say something substantive about how neurotypicals (and other autists) should treat the behavior of autistic individuals—if we are not even doing anything incorrect, then society should not be criticizing our means of engagement.

Readers of fictions sometimes resist taking certain kinds of claims to be true according to those fictions, even when they appear explicitly or follow from applying ordinary principles of interpretation. This “imaginative resistance” is often taken to be significant for a range of philosophical projects outside aesthetics, including giving us evidence about what is possible and what is impossible, as well as the limits of conceivability or readers’ normative commitments. I will argue that this phenomenon cannot do the theoretical work that has been asked of it. Resistance to taking things to be fictional is often best explained by unfamiliarity with kinds of fictions than any representational, normative, or cognitive limits. With training and experience, any understandable proposition can be made fictional and be taken to be fictional by readers. This requires a new understanding both of imaginative resistance and what it might be able to tell us about topics like conceivability or the bounds of possibility.

Classical philosophical analyses seek to explain knowledge as deriving from more basic notions. The influential “knowledge first” program in epistemology reverses this tradition, taking knowledge as its starting point. From the perspective of epistemic logic, however, this is not so much a reversal as it is the default—the field arguably begins with the specialization of “necessity” to “epistemic necessity”—that is, it begins with knowledge. In this context, putting knowledge second would be the reversal. This article motivates, develops, and explores such a “knowledge second” approach in epistemic logic, founded on distinguishing what a body of evidence actually entails from what it is (merely) believed to entail. We import a logical framework that captures exactly this distinction, use it to define formal notions of (internal and external) justification and knowledge, and investigate applications to the KK principle, the “strong belief” postulate, and the regress problem.

I argue that modal epistemology should pay more attention to questions about the structure and function of modal thought. We can treat these questions from synchronic and diachronic angles. From a synchronic perspective, I consider whether a general argument for the epistemic support of modal though can be made on the basis of modal thoughs’s indispensability for what Enoch and Schechter (2008) call rationally required epistemic projects. After formulating the argument, I defend it from various objections. I also examine the possibility of considering the indispensability of modal thought in terms of its components. Finally, I argue that we also need to approach these issues from a diachronic perspective, and I sketch how to approach this task.

Standard theories of epistemic possibility analyze this relation in terms of knowledge, entailment, or probability. These theories are mistaken. Here, I present counterexamples to the standard theories and defend a new theory: that a proposition is epistemically possible on a body of evidence just in case that evidence supports that if the proposition were true, then the evidence might exist. In addition to avoiding the problems of the standard views, this new theory captures good reasoning about epistemic possibilities and matches intuitive judgments in a wide range of cases, giving us good reason to accept it.