Wes Siscoe

Starting with the slogan that understanding is a ‘knowledge of causes’, Stephen Grimm and John Greco have argued that understanding comes from a knowledge of dependence relations. Grounding is the trendiest dependence relation on the market, and if Grimm and Greco are correct, then instances of grounding should also give rise to understanding. In this paper, I will show that this prediction is correct – grounding does indeed generate understanding in just the way that Grimm and Greco anticipate. However, grounding examples of understanding also show that Grimm and Greco are not telling the full story when it comes to understanding. Understanding can only be generated by a particular subset of dependence relations – those dependence relations that are also explanatory. Grimm and Greco should thus appeal to a privileged class of dependence relations, relations like grounding that can also give rise to explanation.

If political decision-making aims at getting a particular result, like identifying just laws or policies that promote the common good, then political institutions can also be evaluated in terms of how often they achieve these results. Epistemic defenses of democracy argue that democracies have the upper hand when it comes to truth, identifying the laws and policies that are truly just or conducive to the common good. A number of epistemic democrats claim that democracies have this beneficial connection to truth because of the type of deliberative environment created by democratic political institutions. Democratic political cultures encourage giving and exchanging reasons, ultimately improving the justification that citizens have for their political beliefs. With this improved justification comes a better chance at truth, or so the story goes. In this paper, I show that attempts to forge a connection between justification and truth in epistemology have encountered numerous difficulties, making the case that this causes trouble for deliberative epistemic defenses of democracy as well. If there is no well-defined connection between truth and justification, then increasing the justification that citizens have for their beliefs may not also increase the likelihood that those beliefs are true, revealing a serious flaw in charting a connection between political justification and political truth.

The Apology of Socrates is not your standard apology, at least not in the way we typically think of apologies. Socrates is on trial in Athens, accused of impiety and corrupting the youth. But instead of saying he is sorry and doing his best to dodge the charges, Socrates mounts a defense that includes everything from an appeal to an oracle, his explanation of his mission as a philosopher, and his famous claim that the unexamined life is not worth living. In all of this, Socrates serves as a model for how philosophy can shape our lives. Whether that is for better or for worse, only you can be the judge.

A strength of liberal political institutions is their ability to accommodate pluralism, both allowing divergent comprehensive doctrines as well as constructing the common ground necessary for diverse people to live together. A pressing question is how far such pluralism extends. Which comprehensive doctrines are simply beyond the pale and need not be accommodated by a political consensus? Rawls attempted to keep the boundaries of reasonable disagreement quite broad by infamously denying that political liberalism need make reference to the concept of truth, a claim that has been criticized by Joseph Raz, Joshua Cohen, and David Estlund. In this paper, we argue that these criticisms fail due to the fact that political liberalism can remain non-committal on the nature of truth, leaving the concept of truth in the domain of comprehensive doctrines while still avoiding the issues raised by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund. Further substantiating this point is the fact that Rawls would, and should, include parties in the overlapping consensus whose views on truth may be incoherent. Once it is seen that political liberalism allows such incoherence to reasonable parties, it is clear that the inclusion of truth and the requirement of coherence urged by Raz, Cohen, and Estlund requires more of reasonable people than is necessary for a political consensus.

Although the diversity of philosophy is increasing at the undergraduate level, there is still a significant gap between the percentage of underrepresented students that major in philosophy and the percentage that complete PhDs. With the support of a seed grant from the American Philosophical Association, we created four chapters of a mentoring program that provided underrepresented undergraduates with support for considering and applying to graduate school. After completing a year of the program, the majority of surveyed mentees reported that they had an increased sense of belonging within philosophy, were more likely to take additional philosophy classes, were more likely to apply to graduate school in philosophy, and were more likely to pursue a career that has some connection to philosophy. In this paper, we consider not only the benefits of the program, but also provide a guide for those who are considering creating mentoring programs at their home institutions.

In the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle considers what it takes to achieve happiness or eudaimonia. And when Aristotle talks about eudaimonia, he has a broader concept in mind than just a particular emotional state. He wants to know, not what makes us psychologically happy, but what makes us flourish. In Book I, he argues that flourishing is not found in pleasure, fame, or wealth, but rather in living in accordance with virtue, setting the stage for a deeper discussion of virtue in the rest of the Nicomachean Ethics.

Even though the virtues may be interconnected, it seems obviously possible to have one of the virtues without having them all. Some have defended the unity thesis against this concern by arguing that the virtues are still unified in their ideal forms. The problem with this defense is that it simply admits that the unity thesis, as traditionally conceived, is mistaken, taking the unity of the virtues to be limited to the ideal case. In this paper, I outline a blueprint for how the ideal virtue response can be used to defend the original unity thesis.

René Descartes was a French mathematician and philosopher and is considered the father of modern philosophy. Coinciding with a period of scientific exploration and discovery in Europe, modern philosophy emphasized the use of reason over a dependence on traditional ways of thinking about the world. Embodying this spirit, Descartes split with many of the medieval and scholastic philosophers that came before him and attempted to build a philosophical system from scratch. In his Meditations on First Philosophy, Descartes begins this project by considering how much we can know about the world around us. In this piece, we will critically examine Descartes’ arguments that reality is not what it appears to be. Descartes makes the case that we can't rule out that our life is all a dream or that we might all be radically deceived. Is there any way that we can rule these things out?

Research has shown that when healthcare providers have the time to show their patients compassion, medical outcomes not only improve, but unnecessary costs are reduced as well. At the same time, compassion also helps curtail physician burnout, as connecting with patients makes doctors happier and more fulfilled. But due to an emphasis on efficiency and increased medical surveillance, many doctors already say that they do not have enough time for compassion in their clinical routines. If compassion plays a significant role in providing quality healthcare, then that needs to change.

Do factive mental states come in degrees? If so, what is their underlying structure, and what is their theoretical significance? Many have observed that ‘knows that’ is not a gradable verb and have taken this to be strong evidence that propositional knowledge does not come in degrees. This paper demonstrates that the adjective ‘aware that’ passes all the standard tests of gradability, and thus strongly motivates the idea that it refers to a factive mental state that comes in degrees. We will explore a range of structural questions that have been overlooked in regard to our awareness of facts, showing that the degreed structure of awareness has significant implications for our understanding of knowledge.

When polarization occurs on issues of race and gender, political boundaries are increasingly drawn along racial and gendered lines. One approach to improving the current political climate is by focusing on education for the civic virtues. While talk of citizenship or civic virtue might sound quaint or old-fashioned, the civic virtues are simply the habits that citizens need to support a healthy, well-functioning political community. These virtues are especially critical for liberal democracies, as democratic nations ultimately depend on the political engagement of their citizens.

Alongside other virtues like honesty, courage, integrity, and generosity, it is widely accepted that we should all strive to be humble people. But what if humility isn’t all it’s cracked up to be? Some philosophers, for example, have argued that humility can reinforce subordination and entrench exploitation. Despite some popular misconceptions, humility isn’t fundamentally about being servile. Humility doesn’t require being a doormat for whoever wants to take advantage of us. Instead, humility helps us avoid being distracted by our own egos, a trait that is valuable for those from all walks of life.

How are justified belief and rational belief related? Some philosophers think that justified belief and rational belief come to the same thing. Others take it that justification is a matter of how well a particular belief is supported by the evidence, while rational belief is a matter of how well a belief coheres with a person’s other beliefs. In this paper, I defend the view that justification is a dimension of rationality, a view that can make sense of both of these conflicting accounts. When it modifies belief, ‘rational’ is a multidimensional adjective, as there are multiple dimensions along which a belief can be rational. I will argue that one of these dimensions is justification, an account that can not only explain why philosophers give diverging theories of the relationship between justified belief and rational belief, but can also reveal why rational belief and justified belief are closely related despite being distinct.

Every year, billions of dollars are spent prolonging our lives, and we are still waiting for the pill that cures aging once and for all. But if we lived forever, wouldn’t we just end up bored and depressed? If our lives continued on forever, then eventually we would have no goals left to accomplish, leaving us apathetic, unmotivated, and potentially downright miserable. A life worth living, though, is not merely the sum of our projects. Instead, there are certain things we enjoy doing simply for their own sake, and if not for our biological limitations, they could potentially go on without end.

Dishonest research violates one of the cardinal virtues of the academic vocation. Some readers might already be familiar with the traditional list of the cardinal virtues: Justice, Courage, Prudence, and Temperance. Honesty, of course, is nowhere on this list. So what does it mean to say that honesty is a cardinal virtue of the academic life? Professors typically have two primary tasks: the generation and transmission of knowledge. For both of these tasks, an emphasis on truth takes center stage. And this focus on truth means that honesty is of particular importance for the academic vocation.

Political polarization is on the rise, undermining the shared space of public reason necessary for a thriving democracy and making voters more willing than ever to dismiss the perspectives of their political opponents. This destructive tendency is especially problematic when it comes to issues of race and gender, as informed views on these topics necessarily require engaging with those whose experiences may differ from our own. In order to help our students combat further polarization, we created a course on "The Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender" that incorporated intergroup dialogues - small, diverse, semester-long discussion groups-that focused on building the civic virtues of toleration, egalitarianism, and solidarity. In this article, we describe our approach, including the evidence that intergroup dialogue can act as a catalyst for democratic dialogue. We hope that the practice of intergroup dialogue can help other instructors cultivate the civic virtues in their philosophy classrooms as well.

We like to rate each other. We rate restaurants on Yelp, drivers on Lyft, and movies on Rotten Tomatoes. And these ratings can help us make decisions. With all of this rating going on, wouldn’t it be helpful if we rated how ethical other people are? Knowing the moral scruples of others could help us make friends, choose who to date, and avoid getting ripped off. But even though lots of ratings are useful, I don’t think that giving each other a moral score is a good idea. In fact, I think it might make us even more unethical.

Given the significant exculpatory power that ignorance has when it comes to moral, legal, and epistemic transgressions, it is important to have an accurate understanding of the concept of ignorance. According to the Standard View of factual ignorance, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not know that p, while on the New View, a person is ignorant that p whenever they do not truly believe that p. On their own though, neither of these accounts explains how ignorance can often be a degreed notion—how we can sometimes be slightly ignorant, quite ignorant, or completely ignorant that p. In this paper, I will argue that there is a route for advocates of the Standard View and the New View to accommodate the gradability of ignorance. On the view I defend, ‘ignorant’ picks out everyone that is ignorant to some degree, making it possible that ignorance can be both degreed and characterized as a lack of knowledge or true belief. Even though we can be ignorant to a greater or lesser extent, the only way to avoid being ignorant that p is to know or truly believe.

In order to serve their citizens well, democracies must secure a number of epistemic goods. Take the truth, for example. If a democratic government wants to help its impoverished citizens improve their financial position, then elected officials will need to know what policies truly help those living in poverty. Because truth has such an important role in political decision-making, many defenders of democracy have highlighted the ways in which democratic procedures can lead to the truth. But there are also a number of other epistemic goods – goods like evidence, intellectual virtue, epistemic justice, and empathetic understanding – that democracies can benefit from producing as well. In this teaching and learning guide, I chart a course through the literature that considers the importance of truth, along with these other political goods, for the healthy functioning of democracies.

Inspired by the practice of dialogue in ancient philosophical schools, the Philosophy as a Way of Life (PWOL) Project at the University of Notre Dame has sought to put dialogue back at the center of philosophical pedagogy. Impromptu philosophical dialogue, however, can be challenging for students who are new to philosophy. Anticipating this challenge, the Project has created a series of manuals to help instructors conduct dialogue groups with novice philosophy students. Using these guidelines, we incorporated PWOL-style dialogue groups into our Spring 2021 course “The Philosophy of Race, Class, and Gender” with the hope that, through having conversations about these challenging topics, our students would both be able to practice having philosophical dialogues as well as form their views on race and gender in light of contributions from their diverse peers. This article examines several strategies for how instructors can seek to incorporate similar dialogues into their own introductory classroom.

Many political philosophers have held that democracy has epistemic benefits. Most commonly, this case is made by arguing that democracies are better able to track the truth than other political arrangements. Truth, however, is not the only epistemic good that is politically valuable. A number of other epistemic goods – goods including evidence, intellectual virtue, epistemic justice, and empathetic understanding – can also have political value, and in ways that go beyond the value of truth. In this paper, I will survey those who have argued that democracy can be valuable because of these other epistemic benefits, considering (1) the ways in which these epistemic goods can be of political value and (2) the challenges that democracies face in producing them.

ABSTRACT Against the maximizing conception of practical rationality, Michael Slote has argued that rationality does not always require choosing what is most rational. Instead, it can sometimes be rational to do something that is less-than-fully rational. In this paper, I will argue that maximizers have a ready response to Slote’s position. Roy Sorensen has argued that ‘rational’ is an absolute term, suggesting that it is not possible to be rational without being completely rational. Sorensen’s view is confirmed by the fact that, by the lights of contemporary linguistics, ‘rational’ is an absolute gradable adjective. Because ‘rational’ is an absolute gradable adjective, being rational requires being at the top of the scale of rationality, making anyone who is not fully rational positively irrational. Contra Slote, the only way to be rational enough is to be maximally rational.