David Matheson

In the summer of 2025, the seventh (and first North American) version of the conference was held here at Carleton University, with the generous support of the conference’s steering committee and of Carleton’s Department of Philosophy, Ethics and Public Affairs Program, Centre on Values and Ethics, and Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences. This version of the conference stretched over three days and featured over 30 presentations, including keynote addresses by Professor Iddo Landau of the University of Haifa and Professor Kiki Berk of Southern New Hampshire University. The present volume includes a selection of peer-reviewed papers based on the presentations given at this seventh version of the conference. In his paper, Masahiro Morioka insightfully considers the ways in which a positive attitude about life can emerge after the collapse of the “ground projects” that Bernard Williams identified as giving meaning to our lives. Yuval Etan offers a novel interpretation of the open-ended perspective on meaning that John Stuart Mill embraced after a well-known psychological collapse he experienced as a young Utilitarian thinker. In his paper, Yusuke Nagato explores the meaning to be found in the lives of those who don’t just rehabilitate themselves from troubled pasts, but redeem themselves by manifesting a certain sort of care for those pasts. In my own paper, I make the case that there are at least two fundamentally distinct ways in which a life can be meaningful—either by realizing an extraordinary amount of meaning or by being dedicated to a life that does this. Lawrence Lengbeyer’s essay highlights the virtues of adopting a contextualist approach to the assessment of meaning in life and avoiding the common assumption that there is a single, all-purpose notion of meaning that can be usefully deployed in such assessment. Jonathan Strand argues in his paper that an analysis of the concept of making a difference suggests that we value free will because we take free actions to be more significant, and to that extent to make for more meaning in life, than other sorts of actions. In his essay, Brian Lightnody suggests that the vignettes philosophers have traditionally used to express the absurdity of human existence problematically obscure what Stephen Darwall has called a “second-person” perspective on our lives, and that we would be well-advised to find ways of adopting this perspective in our efforts to find meaning beyond the absurd. Together, these papers provide a very good sample of the sort of research on the value and intelligibility of human existence shared at the conference, and I am honored to present them to the reader.

Objectivist naturalists about life's meaning regard it as implicating no world but the natural one, and yet as deriving from more than just subjective attitudes or interests. Such naturalists must obviously deny prominent religious conceptions of meaning. But must they further deny that it can be found in religious pursuits? In this article, I defend a negative answer by arguing that, contrary to a prima facie plausible consideration in support of a positive answer, and by many objectivist naturalists’ own lights, the meaning of life can be found in pursuits predicated on false belief. Les tenants d'une approche naturaliste objectiviste sur le sens de la vie considèrent qu'il n'implique aucun autre monde que le monde naturel et que, néanmoins, il ne découle pas uniquement d'attitudes et intérêts subjectifs. Ces naturalistes doivent évidemment rejeter les conceptions du sens issues des grandes religions. Mais doivent-ils en outre nier que ce sens puisse être trouvé dans des quêtes religieuses? Dans cet article, je défends une réponse négative en soutenant que, contrairement à une considération de prime abord plausible en faveur d'une réponse positive, et de l'aveu même de plusieurs objectivistes naturalistes, le sens de la vie peut être trouvé dans des quêtes fondées sur des croyances fausses.

In this paper I offer an argument for the thesis that evil activity, unlike its less extremely immoral counterparts, cannot endow the agent’s life with any measure of meaning. I first review two other important arguments for this thesis that can be drawn from the recent literature. I then articulate my own argument and show how it avoids the problems of these others. According to my argument, meaning-endowing activity cannot be of the worst sort, along any of the basic ways in which we evaluate activity, but evil activity is of the worst sort along one of these ways, namely, the moral one. Because it is grounded in a traditional concept of meaning for which there is much to be said, I note, my argument should hold broad appeal. I also note that my argument is consistent with various contemporary conceptions of evil activity.

Here I speak in favor of the view that life's meaning can be found in the pursuit of pleasure. I first present an argument for this view that is grounded in a traditional concept of meaning. To help ease remaining concerns about accepting it, I then draw attention to four things the view does not imply: (1) that we have a reason to take hedonistic theories of meaning seriously; (2) that meaning can be found in the deeply immoral, the deeply ignorant, or the deeply repulsive pursuit of pleasure; (3) that there is a significantly easier route to meaning than the pursuit of morality, the pursuit of knowledge, or the pursuit of art; and (4) that meaning can be found in pursuits that involve only baser aspects of human nature.

The M → W thesis that a meaningful life must be a worthwhile life follows from an appealing approach to the axiology of life. Yet one of the most prominent voices in the recent philosophy of life literature, Thaddeus Metz, has raised multiple objections to that thesis. With a view to preserving the appeal of the axiological approach from which it follows, I here defend the M → W thesis from Metz’s objections. My defense yields some interesting insights about both a meaningful life and a worthwhile life: a meaningful life should be firmly distinguished from a life with meaning, the value of a meaningful life must outweigh whatever disvalue the life has, a worthwhile life at a given time needn’t be a life worth continuing at that time, and the M → W thesis doesn’t preclude the possibility of something being part of what constitutes the meaningfulness of a life without also being part of what constitutes the worthwhileness of the life.

Reductionism as an approach to the epistemology of testimony places certain demands on the recipient of testimony that its competitor, antireductionism, does not. After laying out the two approaches and their respective demands on the recipient of testimony, I argue that reductionism also places certain anonymity-shedding demands on the testifier that antireductionism does not. The difficulty of deciding between the approaches leads to a worry about the extent to which the current state of affairs in epistemology can offer secure advice on the sorts of anonymity constraints that a networked society should place on its testifiers. This worry can be mitigated, I further argue, upon recognition of the fact that the two approaches stand on common ground when it comes to cases of known testimonial conflict.

The relationship between philosophical inquiry and our pretheoretic, everyday convictions has always been a matter of some controversy. In large part, this dissertation constitutes an attempt to clarify that relationship specifically within the subfield of philosophy we call epistemology. ;Two types of project emerge in traditional epistemology: epistemological projects of understanding, whose goal is to analyze or explicate key epistemic concepts, and epistemological projects of validation, whose goal is to determine whether our everyday, nonphilosophical applications of these concepts are legitimate. The central thesis of this dissertation---the Methodological Priority of Understanding Thesis---is that projects of understanding, taking everyday epistemic convictions as primary data, have a position of methodological priority within the epistemological enterprise. ;Chapter 1 lays out the fundamental line of support for this thesis. Chapter 2 follows up with an extended investigation into the nature of epistemological projects of understanding. The remaining three chapters make use of the Priority Thesis to shed light on a number of contemporary metaepistemological issues. Chapter 3 defends Roderick Chisholm's common sense particularist approach to epistemological inquiry. In Chapter 4 it is argued that one common objection to typically externalist ways of theorizing in epistemology is undercut by the Priority Thesis. Chapter 5 concludes with a discussion of the Humean claim, endorsed and defended by such contemporary epistemologists as Barry Stroud and Michael Williams, that some form of philosophical skepticism is the inevitable outcome of serious and sustained epistemological reflection on putative knowledge in a given domain

Ignorance theorists about privacy hold that it amounts to others’ ignorance of one’s personal information. I argue that ignorance theorists should adopt a distributive reductionist approach to the right to privacy, according to which it is reducible to elements that, despite having something significant in common, are distributed across more fundamental rights to person, liberty, and property. The distributed reductionism that I present carries two important features. First, it is better suited than its competitors to explain a sense of scatter that many have about the right to privacy. Second, it warrants caution about claims to the effect that the right to privacy is sharply to be distinguished from such rights as the right to liberty and the right to property.

There is an intuitive distinction between knowing someone in a detached manner and knowing someone in a more intimate fashion — personally. The latter seems to involve the specially active participation of the person known in a way that the former does not. In this paper I present a novel, communication account of knowing someone personally that successfully explains this participation. The account also illuminates the propositional and testimonial character of the personal knowledge of persons, the conditions of limited transferability to which such knowledge is subject, and its distinctly meaningful role in everyday life. I conclude by considering a worry about self-knowledge that arises on the communication account

Conjoined with the claim that there is a moral right to privacy, each of the major contemporary accounts of privacy implies a duty of ignorance for those against whom the right is held. In this paper I consider and respond to a compelling argument that challenges these accounts (or the claim about a right to privacy) in the light of this implication. A crucial premise of the argument is that we cannot ever be morally obligated to become ignorant of information we currently know. The plausibility of this premise, I suggest, derives from the thought that there are no epistemically ways in which we can cause ourselves to become ignorant of what we already know. Drawing on some recent work in the epistemology and psychology of self-deception and forgetting, I seek to undermine this thought, and thus provide a defense against the challenging argument, by arguing that there are indeed such ways

I argue that life’s meaning is not only a distinct, gradational final value of individual lives, but also an “extradimensional” final value: the realization of meaning in life brings final value along an additional evaluative dimension, much as the realization of depth in solids or width in plane geometric figures brings magnitude along an additional spatial dimension. I go on to consider the extent to which Metz’s (2013) fundamentality theory respects the principle that life’s meaning is an extradimensional final value, and consequently suggest that the theory may stand in need of further refinement and supplementation.

In this paper I consider whether the reasons on which our testimonial beliefs are directly based—“testimonial reasons”—are basic reasons for belief. After laying out a Dretske-inspired psychologistic conception of reasons for belief in general and a corresponding conception of basic reasons for belief, I present a prima facie case against the basicality of testimonial reasons. I then respond to a challenge from Audi to this case. To the extent that my response is successful, the viability of an important kind of inferentialism about testimonial belief is preserved.

One problem that students of cognitive science are likely to encounter in their examination of the literature on bounded rationality is that of finding a succinct formulation of the relevant boundedness claim in the first place. In this chapter I provided such a formulation, before going on to locate the debate about bounded rationality against the background of competing pictures of cognitive virtue. I also consider a reason for pause about the the bounded rationality claim, viz. that it commits us to a troubling form of "cognitive luck."

There is a Barthian objection to the project of natural validation theology (i.e. to the attempt to establish, on purely natural bases, whether God exists) according to which, far from being required to engage in the project, the theologian is required to abstain from engaging in it. By considering the motivation for an analogous objection to validation projects in metaphysics and epistemology, voiced by representatives of the comman sense tradition in modern Western philosophy, I argue that this objection is plausibly motivated by the thought that engaging in natural validation theology inappropriately commits one to the irrelevance of putatively nonnatural belief-sources.

Despite their differences, the three most prominent accounts of informational privacy on the contemporary scene—the Control Theory, the Limited Access Theory, and the Narrow Ignorance Theory—all hold that an individual’s informational privacy is at least partly a function of a kind of inability of others to know personal facts about her. This common commitment, I argue, renders the accounts vulnerable to compelling counterexamples. I articulate a new account of informational privacy—the Broad Ignorance Theory—that avoids the commitment by rendering an individual’s informational privacy exclusively a function of others’ ignorance ofpersonal facts about her. I then go on to answer four objections to the Broad Ignorance Theory: that it paradoxically renders private what is in the public domain, that it fails to explain the oddity of attributions of informational privacy to individuals unable to control whether others know various personal facts about them, that it conflates informational privacy and secrecy, and that it conflicts with intuitions about informational privacy losses stemming from false or unjustified beliefs. In the final section of the paper I consider the plausibility of expanding the Broad Ignorance Theory into an account of privacy in general.

To forestall scepticism about meaning in life as a distinct final value, I sketch a preliminary characterization of meaning as superlative final value in life. I then make the case that this characterization helps us better appreciate a neglected substantive account of meaning, namely, Richard Taylor's creativity account. After laying out the creativity account, I argue that it is not just very compelling, but more compelling under the superlativeness characterization than the most prominent of the recent substantive accounts.

ABSTRACT: In this paper I defend an epistemic value pluralism according to which true belief, justified belief, and knowledge are all fundamental epistemic values. After laying out reasons to reject epistemic value monism in its central forms, I present my pluralist alternative and show how it can adequately explain the greater epistemic value of knowledge over both true belief and justified belief, despite their fundamentality. I conclude with a sketch of how this pluralism might be generalized beyond the epistemic domain to the ethical

As a belief source, testimony has long been held by theorists of the mind to play a deeply important role in human cognition. It is unclear, however, just why testimony has been afforded such cognitive importance. We distinguish three suggestions on the matter: the number claim, which takes testimony’s cognitive importance to be a function of the number of beliefs it typically yields, relative to other belief sources; the reliability claim, which ties the importance of testimony to its relative truth-conduciveness; and the scope claim, according to which testimony’s importance is a function of its relative representational power, non-numerically conceived. After laying out these three suggestions, we go on to argue that there is little hope of grounding testimony’s cognitive importance in either the number claim or the reliability claim. We conclude with a tentative exploration of the basis and plausibility of the scope claim.

We argue that a sufficiently strong Empiricism calls into question key Quinean doctrines about analyticity and the indeterminacy of translation. This critique of Quine, the arch-Empiricist of the 20th Century, has a paradoxical air about it: under one construal, it looks as though we are using Empiricism to undermine itself. We explain away the air of paradox by highlighting quite distinct facets of traditional Empiricism. Ultimately, we suggest, the combination of an epistemological variety of Empiricism and a doxastic variety of Rationalism might in fact be the most defensible position - depending on how the empirical chips fall.