Berislav Marušić

It is common to think of reflection as giving rise to second order belief. Yet then it is open to Kornblith's critique: Why wouldn’t the problems that arise the first order not arise at the second order as well? And why should we think of reflection as reliable—especially since empirical research shows it not to be? In this chapter, I argue that the problem lies not with reflection as such but with Kornblith’s conception of reflection as second order belief. This conception is distorting because it reifies the mind: it conceptualizes our believing something as being the kind of thing that persists as it is, independently of our attitudes. Yet our beliefs do not persist as they are, independently of our attitudes, precisely because they form part of our attitudes. Instead, I conjecture, reflection brings into view the way in which our beliefs and other attitudes are essentially social.

A prominent theory of belief holds that belief is transparent, in the sense that one should, and normally will, settle the question of whether one believes p by settling the corresponding question about whether p. Transparency is held to be a normative requirement and also crucial to understanding the distinctive nature of knowledge of one’s own beliefs. In this paper, we argue that the transparency requirement, as well as our doxastic self-knowledge, must themselves be explained by the social role of belief. We hold that to believe p transparently is to be prepared to contribute p to shared reasoning with others, and to self-ascribe the belief that p transparently is to make explicit that one would contribute p to shared reasoning. On this basis, we argue that understanding our normative epistemic relationships to other people is surprisingly fundamental to explaining distinctive features of knowledge of our own beliefs.

Stephen J. White (1983-2021) was developing a comprehensive view of responsibility and its limits when his life was tragically cut short. This volume contains his collected papers. White's view of responsibility spans across ethics, action theory, and interpersonal epistemology. Its core idea is that to be responsible for doing or believing something is to be answerable for why one has done it or why one believes it, and to be responsible for a state of affairs is to be answerable for why things are that way, rather than some other way. White deploys this conception of responsibility to illuminate the notions of autonomy, coercion, shared reasoning, self-prediction, doxastic wronging, and peer disagreement. He also investigates the nature of practical reasoning: he argues against a production-oriented conception of practical reasoning, delineates the scope of transmission principles in means-ends reasoning, and identifies a limited for self-prediction in practical reasoning that is subject to an anti-opportunism constraint. The papers form the outline of a deep ethical outlook that takes seriously our personal and collective responsibilities and yet leaves room for personal autonomy both in thought and in action.

Suppose we suffer a loss, such as the death of a loved one. In light of her death, we will typically feel grief, as it seems we should. After all, our loved one’s death is a reason for grief. Yet with the passage of time, our grief will typically diminish, and this seems somehow all right. However, our reason for grief ostensibly remains the same, since the passage of time does not undo our loss. How, then, could it not be wrong for grief to diminish? Or how are we to make sense of the diminution of grief? Do reasons expire? —The paper clarifies the puzzle and then considers four responses. It argues that all of them are inadequate and that there are principled reasons why this should be so: In experiencing grief we are apprehending a loss. Yet in our effort to understand the diminution of grief, we must apprehend ourselves. But because grief is not about ourselves, our apprehension of the diminution of grief is at odds with our apprehension of the object of grief. This gives rise to a kind of double-vision, which is why the puzzle eludes a solution.

This paper offers an analytic reconstruction of Sartre’s theory of radical freedom. On the proposed interpretation, freedom is radical, because the freely chosen act and the reasons for choice are codependent: the freely chosen act grounds reasons by being based on them. Nonetheless, since freedom is embodied, there can be constraint on choice. Such constraint becomes intelligible once we properly understand the temporality of freedom. The chapter illustrates this through a close reading of Sartre’s example of the gambler and argues that it is part of the gambler’s mistake to think that all resolutions have to be remade at every instant _ex nihilo_.

This paper proposes to reorient the philosophical debate about peer disagreement. The problem of peer disagreement is normally seen as a problem about the extent to which disagreement provides one with evidence against one's own conclusions. It is thus regarded as a problem for individual inquiry. But things look different in more collaborative contexts. Ethical norms relevant to those contexts make a difference to the epistemology. In particular, we argue that a norm of mutual answerability applies to us when we engage in shared inquiry with others, and precludes us from treating one another's conflicting judgments as evidence relevant to the dispute. From this it follows that standard philosophical accounts of peer disagreement—e.g., the Equal Weight View and the Total Evidence View—presuppose that the disagreeing parties are in a sense alienated from one another. It's doubtful that such forms of alienated disagreement should be treated as the central case.

Many emotions attenuate more rapidly than the significance of the considerations that gives rise to them as we accommodate ourselves to what happens. Grief often diminishes quickly, even though the dead continue to matter to us; anger often evaporates, even though the injustice to which it responds remains undiminished. Nonetheless, such accommodation seems acceptable: it would be a mistake to be persistently grieving or to be relentlessly angry. But how could it be acceptable, if the reasons for grief and anger remain significant? Unlike grief and anger, whose diminution is puzzling, what seems puzzling in the case of love is its continuation. In its self-consciousness, love is endless; in loving someone, we foresee no end to our love. Yet we know that love can end: hearts are broken, lovers betrayed, and people grow apart. Does the self-consciousness of love involve a mistake? Or can we reasonably think of our love as lasting? On the Temporality of Emotions argues that whereas grief and anger reasonably diminish, love can rationally be conceived as endless. Berislav Marušić draws on contemporary theories of the emotions, especially grief and love, as well as recent accounts of reasons. It puts forward an account of emotional self-consciousness as, at once, embodied and rational, and maintains that accommodation reveals an irreconcilable moment in our emotional life, a moment that philosophical reflection ought not seek to resolve, lest our emotions are conceived as too neat, and philosophy as too comforting.