Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt

Center for Advanced Studies, Berlin: Human Abilities & Freie Universität Berlin
  •  18
    We defend a new constraint on the progressive that says that what you are doing is always specific in an important sense. This principle is Progressive Specificity: if you are Ving and to V is to X or to Y, then you are Xing or you are Ying. We offer three arguments for Progressive Specificity. We then extend those arguments to an analogous principle governing the futurative progressive. Finally, we explore the relationship between Progressive Specificity and the well-known principle of Conditi…Read more
  •  272
    Anscombe famously said that there are some act types that can only be done intentionally. We defend this claim: some act types are essentially intentional. We argue that Ving intentionally is itself essentially intentional: it is not possible to be non-intentionally Ving intentionally. And we show how this explains why various other act types—such as trying, lying, and thanking—are essentially intentional. Finally, building on Piñeros Glassock (2020) and Beddor & Pavese (2022), we explain how th…Read more
  •  663
    Thing Causation
    Noûs. forthcoming.
    According to orthodoxy, the most fundamental kind of causation involves one event causing another event. I argue against this event‐causal view. Instead, the most fundamental kind of causation is thing causation, which involves a thing causing a thing to do something. Event causation is reducible to thing causation, but thing causation is not reducible to event causation, because event causation cannot accommodate cases of fine‐grained causation. I defend my view from objections, including C. D.…Read more
  •  626
    Supererogation and the Limits of Reasons
    with Daniel Munoz
    In David Heyd (ed.), Handbook of Supererogation, Springer Nature Singapore. pp. 165-180. 2023.
    We argue that supererogation cannot be understood just in terms of reasons for action. In addition to reasons, a theory of supererogation must include prerogatives, which can make an action permissible without counting in favor of doing it.
  •  245
    Who Cares About Winning?
    European Journal of Philosophy 31 (1): 248-265. 2023.
    Why do we so often care about the outcomes of games when nothing is at stake? There is a paradox here, much like the paradox of fiction, which concerns why we care about the fates and threats of merely fictional beings. I argue that the paradox threatens to overturn a great deal of what philosophers have thought about caring, severing its connection to value and undermining its moral weight. I defend a solution to the paradox that draws on Kendall Walton's solution to the paradox of fiction, dev…Read more
  •  1523
    Wronging Oneself
    Journal of Philosophy 121 (4): 181-207. 2024.
    When, if ever, do we wrong ourselves? The Self-Other Symmetric answer is: when we do to ourselves what would wrong a consenting other. The standard objection, which has gone unchallenged for decades, is that Symmetry seems to imply that we wrong ourselves in too many cases—where rights are unwaivable, or “self-consent” is lacking. I argue that Symmetry not only survives these would-be counterexamples; it explains and unifies them. The key to Symmetry is not, as critics have supposed, the bizarre…Read more
  •  216
    Contingent Grounding
    Synthese 199 (1-2): 4561-4580. 2021.
    A popular principle about grounding, “Internality”, says that if A grounds B, then necessarily, if A and B obtain, then A grounds B. I argue that Internality is false. Its falsity reveals a distinctive, new kind of explanation, which I call “ennobling”. Its falsity also entails that every previously proposed theory of what grounds grounding facts is false. I construct a new theory.