Ning Fan

Contemporary philosophers recognize a tension between Epicureanism about death—the view that death cannot be bad for the one who dies—and our commonsense judgment that it is generally morally wrong to kill a person. They observe that what intuitively explains why killing is wrong is precisely that death is bad for the one who dies. In this paper, I develop an anti-Epicurean argument grounded in this tension. More specifically, I defend an abductive argument, or inference to the best explanation argument, against Epicureanism about death. My argument involves two claims: (1) that death is bad for the one who dies, if true, would explain why killing is wrong, and (2) Epicureans lack a better, or equally good, explanation of why killing is wrong. If these claims are successfully defended, then solely on the basis of the conviction that killing is wrong, we have reason to favor the commonsense anti-Epicurean view of death. Thus, other things being equal, our belief in the wrongness of killing provides a reason to reject Epicureanism.

Casey Doyle has recently argued that AI is not an epistemic authority for us regarding what beliefs, desires, or intentions we have, so we should not defer to AI about our own minds. Central to Doyle’s argument is his view about what is necessary for a source of information to be authoritative. In this paper, I reject Doyle’s necessary condition for epistemic authorities and propose a new one. According to the condition I propose, AI is still ruled out as an epistemic authority for us when we inquire into our own minds. The newly proposed condition also entails that AI is not an epistemic authority for others when they inquire into our minds, thereby helping to provide a more comprehensive answer to a central question discussed in Doyle’s article.

Can we still have the kind of achievements that a meaningful life requires if it turns out that we lack free will due to determinism? Derk Pereboom, an optimistic free-will skeptic, answers positively. He argues that even if we lack free will due to determinism, we can still have achievements and thereby lead meaningful lives. In this paper, we critically assess this issue. After showing that Pereboom fails to provide good reason to think that achievements do not require free will, we offer a compelling argument that they do. So, if people lack free will due to determinism, then they cannot have achievements and live meaningful lives.

Epicurus famously argued that death cannot be bad for a person because only painful experiences or something that brings about them can be bad for people, but when a person dies, she cannot experience anything at all, let alone pain. If, as Epicurus argued, death is not something bad for us, then presumably, we have no reason to fear it. In contrast with Epicurus, however, contemporary philosophers of death generally subscribe to the deprivation account of the badness of death, which allows that death can be comparatively bad for the one who dies. Still, many deprivation theorists believe that death, as merely comparatively bad, is not a fitting object of fear. Some of them argue that our attitudes would be unfitting if they respond to comparative value; while others contend that fear is not the kind of attitude that tracks comparative value. In this paper, I critically assess these arguments by deprivation theorists, and argue that, contrary to what these theorists claim, their arguments do not entail that death does not merit fear.

In Philosophical Investigations §244, Wittgenstein suggests that we understand avowals (first-person psychological utterances) as manifestations or expressions of the speaker's mental states. An interesting philosophical theory, called expressivism, then develops from this Wittgensteinian idea. However, neo-expressivists disagree with simple expressivists on whether avowals are at the same time assertions, which are truth-evaluable. In this paper, I pursue the expressivist debate about whether avowals must also be viewed as assertions. I consider and reject three neo-expressivist objections against simple expressivism. Then, I offer my own account of why we should understand avowals as assertions.

In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran provides a fascinating account of how we know what we believe that he calls the “transparency account.” This account relies on the transparency relation between the question of whether we believe that p and the question of whether p is true. That is, we can consider the former by considering the grounds for the latter. But Moran’s account has been criticized by David Finkelstein, who argues that it fails to explain how we know our attitudes and emotions more generally. The aim of this paper is to show how Moran’s transparency account can be extended to meet this criticism by modifying it, using insights from Davidson’s view on attitudes and emotions.