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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
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Supererogation and the Limits of ReasonsIn David Heyd (ed.), Handbook of Supererogation, Springer Nature Singapore. pp. 165-180. 2023.
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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
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Thing CausationNoûs. 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
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Contingent GroundingSynthese 199 (1-2): 4561-4580. 2021.
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Wronging OneselfJournal 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. We 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 bizarr…Read more
Nathaniel Baron-Schmitt
Center for Advanced Studies, Berlin: Human Abilities & Freie Universität Berlin
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Center for Advanced Studies, Berlin: Human Abilities & Freie Universität BerlinUnknown
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Philosophy of Action |
Value Theory |