The grandfather paradox and physical probabilities. I go back in time and try to kill my grandfather. If I succeed, then I undermine the very sequence of causal events that enabled me to make the attempt. But, if time travel is possible, the assassination seems within my power – what could ensure that I fail on every attempt? This is the grandfather paradox. David Lewis argued that a time traveller will always fail in his assassination attempt, and always due to some coincidental event (such as the gun misfiring or slipping on the infamous banana peel). Lewis’ solution is attractive because it attempts to solve the grandfather paradox by appealing to coincidences and a proper analysis of the relevant counterfactuals. While the worlds at which I attempt to kill my grandfather are quite strange (insofar as they involve time travel) there is nothing metaphysically suspect about the events themselves. In this paper, I will argue that attention to the modal consequences of physical probabilities reveals a tension in Lewis’ claim that some coincidental event will always stop me from killing my grandfather. On the one hand, every physically close world at which the attempt is made is a world at which a coincidence must intervene. On the other hand, the physical probability of any coincidental event intervening is very low. The problem is that physical probabilities shape the surrounding modal space in a way that the Lewisian cannot accommodate merely by appealing to coincidences and a proper assessment of the relevant counterfactuals.
Seeing the whole without its parts. I argue that in backlit conditions we see objects without seeing any of their parts. To do this, I show that the assumption that to see an object one must see some part of it does not hold for backlit perception. I claim that abandoning this constrain allows for the simplest answer to the puzzle of which part of a backlit object we see: None, but still, we see a whole object. I argue that this answer is preferable to the alternatives because it respects the notion of simple seeing while not falling into an unrevised constraint on object perception.
Will Moorfoot is a fourth-year Ph.D. student at the University of Southampton. His Ph.D., supervised by Naomi Thompson and Richard Grey, investigates formulations of physicalism that reject the metaphysical supervenience of the mental on the physical. More generally, he is interested in the Philosophy of Mind, Metaphysics, and Philosophy of Science. He is funded by the South, West, and Wales Doctoral Training Partnership (AHRC). Will completed his BA and MPhil at Girton College, University of Cambridge.
Daniel Garcia is a PhD student at the University of York. His research focuses on the structural features of perceptual experience across the sensory modalities with a special emphasis on the how space is represented. He is also interested in phenomenology, ethics and ancient philosophy. Before completing his MA at the University of York, Daniel read philosophy at The National University of Colombia, Bogotá D.C.
What is it like to hear silence? The objectual perceptualist about silence experiences claims that silences are among the objects of our veridical phenomenally conscious auditory experiences — that our auditory experiences veridically represent or present absences of sound. Despite its arguable intuitive appeal, objectual perceptualism faces a phenomenological challenge. On the one hand, it is plausible to suppose that one can hear something only if it determines some phenomenal property of one’s auditory experience — makes a difference to what one’s auditory experience is like. On the other, in total silence it is difficult to introspectively discover auditory phenomenal properties that would correspond to silence. In this paper, I defend objectual perceptualism by arguing that silence can determine the phenomenal properties of auditory experience over time. Absences of sound make a difference to the gappy phenomenology of hearing events like the beeping of an alarm over time. I close by arguing that if silences do determine auditory phenomenal properties, then the representationalist has a reason to reject a notable principle regarding the epistemology of phenomenal properties: the thesis of revelation.
Against inferential pollution: a critique of the adoption problem in logic. In the philosophy of logic, the Adoption Problem is a challenge to the claim that the logic one uses is always under one’s rational control. According to its proponents, some fundamental logical principles, such as Modus Ponens, cannot begin to be used by a reasoner who does not already use them (Birman 2023; Kripke 2023). The standard explanation is that these principles are “self-governing,” and hence unadoptable; this serves as an argument for the exceptional epistemic status of fundamental logical principles (Finn 2019). I argue, however, that this interpretation is flawed. The account of adoption proposed by Birman (2023) relies on an incorrect assumption about the relationship between logical adoption and logical inference, and this assumption makes the adoption of all logical principles impossible, even if they are not selfgoverning. The Adoption Problem is therefore not convincing, at least not in its original form.
Roope Ryymin recently finished a PhD at King’s College London, where his primary supervisor was Matthew Soteriou. Ryymin works mostly on metaphysics and philosophy of mind, especially philosophy of perception. In Ryymin’s PhD thesis, he defended a perceptualist account of absence experiences: a view according to which we genuinely see darkness, hear silence, and perceive the absence of a friend in a cafe. He is currently working on a project developing a unified perceptualist account of absence experiences across different sense modalities. In addition, he is also working on a couple of papers clarifying the positive metaphysical picture that naïve realist accounts of perceptual experience can provide. Prior to the PhD, he completed the MPhilStud at King’s. Before that, Ryymin completed an MA in Philosophy and a BA in European Social and Political Studies, both at University College London.
Viviane Fairbank is a PhD student in the St Andrews and Stirling Graduate Programme in Philosophy, co-supervised by Greg Restall and Crispin Wright. Her primary research is on normative pragmatism and the philosophy of logic; her dissertation focuses on articulating a pragmatist account of the objectivity of logic and responding to circularity-based objections to such an account. She is also interested in feminist philosophy, epistemology, and philosophy of journalism. Before coming to Scotland, and after transitioning from a previous career in magazines, Viviane completed her master’s in philosophy at Concordia University in Montreal; she has also spent one visiting semester in Paris’s Institute for the History and Philosophy of Science and Technology and two visiting semesters in Pittsburgh’s Department of Philosophy. Viviane is currently the editor of the Logic and Philosophy of Logic section of the Diversity Reading List in Philosophy.
Moral burnout. A nurse in an understaffed hospital; an activist fighting insurmountable systemic injustice; an aid worker desperately triaging resources between victims of violence: individuals in morally demanding circumstances run a significant risk of burning out. Unnoticed by philosophers, an empirical literature on this phenomenon has explored a chronic stress condition called ‘Moral Burnout.’ Individuals with Moral Burnout become so preoccupied with their moral shortcomings that they lose the motivation to act on their moral judgments. This article introduces the phenomenon of Moral Burnout. It then showcases its philosophical significance by introducing it to a debate about Moral Motivation. Specifically, a popular view in metaethics called Internalism about Moral Judgments holds there to be a necessary connection between judging an action to be morally right and being motivated to act on said judgment. This precludes the existence of amoralists, i.e., individuals who are not motivated by their moral judgments. I argue that individuals with Moral Burnout are amoralists. This makes them walking counterexamples to Internalism about Moral Judgments. I further argue that the most common internalist strategies of dealing with amoralists fail to apply to the case of Moral Burnout, thereby making the study of Moral Burnout a pressing matter of metaethical significance.
Be confident! Rethinking the ontology of confidence in light of difficult action. This paper has two aims. Firstly, to introduce the paradox of difficult action for the orthodox view that rational confidence is an exclusively epistemic attitude (e.g., degree of belief). Secondly, to propose a novel view, Confidence Dualism, that can solve the paradox. It broadens the notion of rational confidence to include two fundamentally distinct types of attitudes—epistemic confidence and practical confidence— and shows why this view is explanatory superior to the orthodox monistic view. First, I argue that an agent can in the context of difficult action, e.g., quitting smoking, simultaneously have practical reasons to be confident in success (e.g., to persevere) and have epistemic reasons to not be confident in success. I show why standard monistic-epistemic approaches to rational confidence struggle to resolve the paradox. I argue that the argument that epistemic rationality is a form of instrumental rationality leads to two meta-normative problems: the incommensurability problem and a failure to explain how an agent can simultaneously have epistemic reasons for low confidence and practical reasons for high confidence. Finally, by extending Bratman’s model of the agent’s cognitive background of deliberation to include degrees of acceptance, I argue that practical confidence is grounded in degrees of acceptance and propose a way to model rational confidence for temporally extended action. I explain how on this view rational agents can pursue difficult actions and be continuously practically confident without giving up an epistemic conception of confidence, thereby resolving the paradox of difficult action.
Malte Hendrickx is a fifth-year PhD candidate at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor. His main interests are in Mind & Morality. His dissertation consists of three research projects: one on the nature of effort, one on the nature of difficulty, and one on moral failures and their consequences. He has recently received the Cornwell Prize, the Outstanding Graduate Instructor Award, a Live Worth Living Pedagogy Fellowship, and an IHS Junior Research Fellowship. He spent a semester in Neuchâtel as a visiting instructor and another semester at Peterhouse, Cambridge as a visiting postgraduate student. You can find his website here and his research here.
Puneh Nejati-Mehr is a first-year MPhil/PhD student at the Department of Philosophy, Logic and Scientific Method at the LSE. Her research interests lie at the intersections of epistemology (formal, social, traditional), the philosophy of action (action theory and decision theory), and the philosophy of language. Currently she is working on projects focused on the nature and norms of first- and second-order attitudes that ground rational reasoning—both theoretical and practical—as well as descriptive and normative issues arising from our temporally extended agency (e.g., intentions/plans, self-prediction, extended action). She also enjoys thinking about the philosophy of mind, probability and metaethics. Prior to coming to London, she completed both her MA in Philosophy and her BA in Philosophy (with a minor in German Studies) at Humboldt-University of Berlin. Her research at LSE is funded by a LAHP (AHRC) studentship.
Existential self-identification: practical necessity meets meaning in life. I aim to offer an account of the psychological phenomenon of existential self-identification (ESI), according to which some people cannot fathom living a meaningful life without some X they strongly and intrinsically value. ESI is best exemplified by people who overcome phases of existential distress by committing to a specific evaluative self-conception, like Martin Luther expressing his moral and theological commitments with the famous words ‘here I stand, I can do no other’, and many other people consciously holding that life makes no sense without caring for some X, be it about politics, religion, profession, familial and romantic relationships, etc. I first consider two influential notions of practical necessity as candidates to specifically account for ESI, namely Harry Frankfurt’s notion of volitional necessity and Christine Korsgaard’s notion of self- legislative commitment and conclude that both fail to do justice to the nature of ESI. My alternative account of ESI treats it as a hybrid phenomenon, which combines a belief held with conviction that something, which or whom one strongly and intrinsically values, is constitutive of meaning in living one’s life, with a desire for living meaningfully. Contrarily to the alternatives, my account captures both the reflective dimension of ESI as well as its connection to meaning in living, but is exposed to other challenges, such as the possibility of beliefs about oneself being wrong, the controversial postulation of ‘reasons of meaning,’ and the seemingly idiosyncratic nature of the phenomenon. Addressing these challenges highlights further interesting aspects of ESI.
Moral and epistemic praiseworthiness. Some deeds are such that we are praiseworthy for them. A benevolent agent who made some sacrifice to help someone in need is morally praiseworthy. And someone who managed to solve an important scientific problem is epistemically praiseworthy. The question that arises is whether there is a unified explanation of what makes agents praiseworthy – one that holds for both the moral and the epistemic domain? I argue that there is: in both the moral and the epistemic domain, what makes an agent praiseworthy for her response is that it manifests a degree of sensitivity that exceeds the degree of sensitivity one can fittingly expect of her. This view does not require any revisionism in moral philosophy. It is consistent with the most widespread view of what makes agents morally praiseworthy: the “Quality of Will View”. All we need to do is to see that the manifestation of morally good will is the manifestation of moral sensitivity, and that there is a structurally analogous notion of epistemic sensitivity in terms of which the correct view about epistemic praiseworthiness shall be formulated.
Damiano is a PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Konstanz. He holds a BA in Philosophy from the University of Milan and an MA in Philosophy from the University of Vienna. His doctoral thesis argumentatively explores the phenomenon of “existential self-identification” — the deep conviction some individuals hold that the meaning of their lives depends on things they are especially fond of. This original concept, which Damiano developed independently, bridges research on practical necessity and on meaning in life, revealing the human mind’s ability to anchor itself to sources of meaning to overcome distressing existential crises. Damiano’s research primarily engages with contemporary debates in moral psychology and the philosophy of meaning in life. He also has strong interests in the philosophy of action, practical rationality, and metaethics.
Leo Eisenbach is a PhD student at Humboldt University Berlin. From February to April 2025, he was a visiting doctoral researcher at the University of Groningen. And from July 2025 to January 2026, he will be a visiting doctoral researcher at the University of Bielefeld in the ERC project “Reasons F1rst”. Leo’s main research interests are in (meta)ethics and epistemology. His dissertation is about praiseworthiness and blameworthiness in the moral and the epistemic domain. He obtained an MA in philosophy at Humboldt University Berlin and a BA in philosophy and political science at Goethe University Frankfurt.
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