Carla Merino-Rajme

This paper offers and defends a conception of the ethical principle of respect for persons. I maintain that respecting persons involves (among other things) watching for, interpreting, and affording ethical significance to expressions of the sub‐rational. Drawing from a range of sources and focusing especially on literary works with broad resonance, I defend this understanding by outlining a view of the self that includes the unconscious mind. I argue, first, that our practices and folk conceptions in a range of contexts—from medical ethics to dream interpretation—already reflect this picture of the self, and, second, that this conception of the self is ethically attractive.

The idea that delusions are beliefs is supported by the observation that delusions, similarly to beliefs, are used in reasoning. However, delusions also exhibit other features that are difficult to explain under this doxastic view—they strongly resist evidence and sometimes conflict with an agent’s actions (in ways in which beliefs seemingly do not), giving rise to what is known as the double bookkeeping phenomenon. These features have motivated non-doxastic views, arguing that delusions are other types of mental phenomena (e.g., imaginings or empty speech acts). While these non-doxastic views account for the features of delusions like evidence resistance and double bookkeeping, they struggle to explain the belief-like features of delusions. We are thus at an impasse, where neither the doxastic nor the non-doxastic account of delusions can explain all the features of delusions. In this paper, I aim to make progress in this debate by showing that the doxastic view can, after all, account for both the belief-like and the other features of delusions. Drawing on recent literature in epistemology, I argue that (rational) beliefs can be motivated by non-evidential (e.g., pragmatic and emotional) factors, and that these factors help explain delusions’ otherwise puzzling features. I also propose that categorizing beliefs across two functional compartments, the implicit and the explicit, is helpful for understanding the dynamic interplay of delusions and non-delusional beliefs.

Say that an audience understands a given utterance perfectly only if she correctly identifies which proposition (or propositions) that utterance expresses. In ideal circumstances, the participants in a conversation will understand each other’s utterances perfectly; however, even if they do not, they may still understand each other’s utterances at least in part. Although it is plausible to think that the phenomenon of partial understanding is very common, there is currently no philosophical account of it. This paper offers such an account. Along the way, I argue against two seemingly plausible accounts which use Stalnaker’s notion of common ground and Lewisian subject matters, respectively.

Sometimes, ignorance is inexpressible. Lewis recognized this when he argued, in “Ramseyan Humility,” that we cannot know which property occupies which causal role. This peculiar state of ignorance arises in a number of other domains too, including ignorance about our position in space and the identities of individuals. In these cases, one does not know something, and yet one cannot give voice to one's ignorance in a certain way. But what does the ignorance in these cases consist in? This essay argues that many standard models of ignorance cannot account for the phenomenon of inexpressible ignorance. It then develops an alternative model that does better, on which the ignorance consists in a failure to identify something by way of its nature or essence.

In A Confession, a memoir of his philosophical midlife crisis, Tolstoy recounts falling into despair after coming to believe that his life, and for that matter all human life, is meaningless and absurd. Although Tolstoy's account of the origin and phenomenology of his crisis is widely regarded as illuminating, his response to the crisis, namely, embracing a religious tradition that he had previously dismissed as “irrational,” “incomprehensible,” and “mingled with falsehood” seems unpromising, at best. Nevertheless, I argue, Tolstoy's account of his response makes a valuable contribution to contemporary thought about the meaning and absurdity of life. I begin by drawing on classic discussions in the philosophical literature, and on Tolstoy's memoir, in order to characterize the problem of meaning and the problem of the absurd, and to clarify the relation between these problems. I then draw on Tolstoy's account of his response to his crisis in order to characterize a form of faith in our deepest values. I argue that such faith supplies one important part of the story concerning how we might respond to the problem of the absurd — a part that has been overlooked by more recent discussions of these issues.