Ning Fan

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.