•  13
    What's a(t) stake? On stakes, encroachers, knowledge
    Theoria 90 (1): 109-121. 2024.
    According to subject‐sensitive invariantism (SSI), whether S knows that p depends not only on the subject's epistemic position (the presence of a true belief, sufficient warrant, etc.) but also on non‐epistemic factors present in the subject's situation; such factors are seen as “encroaching” on the subject's epistemic standing. Not the only such non‐epistemic factor but the most prominent one consists in the subject's practical stakes. Stakes‐based SSI holds that two subjects can be in the same…Read more
  •  79
    Kant’s views about the nature and value of enlightenment have been discussed very much since 1784, and without ever losing any of their relevance and importance. I will discuss a topic that has not been discussed quite that extensively: Kant’s conception of enlightenment as it relates to the idea of perfection (Vollkommenheit) in particular. Is the project of enlightenment also a project of perfection (and vice versa), and if yes, in what sense and to what degree? My aim is twofold here: not jus…Read more
  •  90
    Practical Conflicts: New Philosophical Essays (edited book)
    Cambridge University Press. 2004.
    Practical conflicts pervade human life. Agents have many different desires, goals, and commitments, all of which can come into conflict with each other. How can practical reasoning help to resolve these practical conflicts? In this collection of essays a distinguished roster of philosophers analyse the diverse forms of practical conflict. Their aim is to establish an understanding of the sources of these conflicts, to investigate the challenge they pose to an adequate conception of practical rea…Read more
  •  4
    Influencing the Will of Another Person
    Social Philosophy Today 12 25-40. 1996.
    This article discusses a neglected from of social power: the non-coercive power to influence the will of another person. This form of power allows to avoid the costs of open conflict and works in less obvious and visible ways. It is, however, an important resource in social relations and can help explain a lot of the structural stability of societies.
  • Knowing about Other Contexts
    In Christoph Jäger & Winfried Löffler (eds.), Epistemology: Contexts, Values, Disagreement. Papers of the 34th International Ludwig Wittgenstein-Symposium in Kirchberg, 2011, The Austrian Ludwig Wittgenstein Society. pp. 63-80. 2007.
  •  602
    Trolleys, Transplants and Inequality: An Egalitarian Proposal
    Erkenntnis 87 (4): 1737-1751. 2022.
    This paper deals with the core version of the Trolley Problem. In one case many people favor an act which will bring about the death of one person but save five other persons. In another case most people would refuse to “sacrifice” one person in order to save five other lives. Since the two cases seem similar in all relevant respects, we have to explain and justify the diverging verdicts. Since I don’t find current proposals of a solution convincing, I propose an alternative one according to whi…Read more
  •  18
    Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood, by Simon Evnine
    Mind 118 (471): 823-827. 2009.
    Review of Evnine, "Epistemic Dimensions of Personhood".
  •  25
    Thomas Reid, Common Sense, and Pragmatism
    International Journal of Philosophical Studies 31 (1): 54-67. 2023.
    Thomas Reid’s conception of common sense is important and interesting for many reasons – also because of the questions and issues it raises. I am going to focus on what one could call ‘Reid’s dilem...
  •  519
    Sorry if! On Conditional Apologies
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (5): 1079-1090. 2021.
    Usually, apologies are made by using non-conditional utterances: “I apologize for ruining your evening!” Very little, if any, attention has been given so far to conditional apologies which typically use utterances such as “If I have ruined your evening, I apologize!” This paper argues that such conditional utterances can constitute genuine apologies and play important moral roles in situations of uncertainty. It also proposes a closer analysis of such conditional apologies (rejecting some altern…Read more
  •  13
    The many-worlds view is one of the most discussed “interpretations” of quantum mechanics. As is well known, this view has some very controversial and much discussed aspects. This paper focuses on one particular problem arising from the combination of quantum mechanics with Special Relativity. It turns out that the ontology of the many-worlds view – the account of what there is and what branches of the universe exist – is relative to inertial frames. If one wants to avoid relativizing ontology, o…Read more
  •  20
    Checking out Checking
    Acta Analytica 38 (1): 15-26. 2022.
    Guido Melchior’s important and rich book (Melchior _Knowing and Checking. __An Epistemological Investigation_ 2019 ) draws our attention to the much neglected topic of checking. There are many new leads to follow. Here, I will pick a few that seem to me to allow the most room for discussion and disagreement: the alleged modal profile of checking (Sect. 1), the contrastive aspects of checking (Sect. 2), and the relation of checking to closure (Sect. 3). I will end with two smaller points worth br…Read more
  •  8
    Trolleys, Transplants and Inequality: An Egalitarian Proposal
    Erkenntnis 87 (4): 1737-1751. 2020.
    This paper deals with the core version of the Trolley Problem. In one case many people favor an act which will bring about the death of one person but save five other persons. In another case most people would refuse to “sacrifice” one person in order to save five other lives. Since the two cases seem similar in all relevant respects, we have to explain and justify the diverging verdicts. Since I don’t find current proposals of a solution convincing, I propose an alternative one according to whi…Read more
  •  21
    This work presents a defense of causal contrastivism based on causal contexualism. As argued, our proposal on causal contextualism is compatible with both causal contrastivism and causal binarism, including explanations of why and in which sense secondary counterfactuals are relevant.
  •  10
    Safety and Unknowability
    Philosophia 50 (4): 1601-1605. 2022.
    In a recent paper Jacob Ross presents two ingenious objections against the safety theory of knowledge: one against the claim that safe true belief is necessary for knowledge, the other one against the claim that safe true belief is sufficient for knowledge. While the first objection seems to go through there are problems with the second one: Its core issue is due not to problems of the safety theory but to peculiarities of the proposition used in the objection. Instead of showing that safety is …Read more
  •  33
    Journal of Philosophy of Education, Volume 56, Issue 2, Page 281-289, April 2022.
  •  1210
    Rational Intransitive Preferences
    Politics, Philosophy and Economics 21 (1): 3-28. 2022.
    According to a widely held view, rationality demands that the preferences of a person be transitive. The transitivity assumption is an axiom in standard theories of rational choice. It is also prima facie very plausible. I argue here that transitivity is not a necessary condition of rationality; it is a constraint only in some cases. The argument presented here is based on the non-linearity of differential utility functions. This paper has four parts. First, I present an argument against the tra…Read more
  •  688
    True Knowledge
    Logos and Episteme (4): 463-467. 2021.
    That knowledge is factive, that is, that knowledge that p requires that p, has for a long time typically been treated as a truism. Recently, however, some authors have raised doubts about and arguments against this claim. In a recent paper in this journal, Michael Shaffer presents new arguments against the denial of the factivity of knowledge. This article discusses one of Shaffer’s objections: the one from “inconsistency and explosion”. I discuss two potential replies to Shaffer’s problem: dial…Read more
  •  46
    Sorry if! On Conditional Apologies
    Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 24 (5): 1079-1090. 2021.
    Usually, apologies are made by using non-conditional utterances: “I apologize for ruining your evening!” Very little, if any, attention has been given so far to conditional apologies which typically use utterances such as “If I have ruined your evening, I apologize!” This paper argues that such conditional utterances can constitute genuine apologies and play important moral roles in situations of uncertainty. It also proposes a closer analysis of such conditional apologies and contrasts them wit…Read more
  •  14
    This article responds to Daniel Coren’s very insightful critical discussion of Baumann. It clarifies and defends the view that there is a problem of mutually consistent but necessarily incompatible desires. Distinguishing explicitly between semantic and syntactic consistency, one can show that the problem remains under each interpretation of “consistent.”
  •  266
    Ludwig’s Punch and Bertie’s Comeback. Reconciling Russell and Wittgenstein on the Content of Desires
    Russell: The Journal of Bertrand Russell Studies 40 (2): 132-149. 2020.
    Desires are contentful mental states. But what determines the content of a desire? Two different classic answers were proposed by Russell and by Wittgenstein, starting in the 1910s. Russell proposed a behaviorist account according to which the content of the desire is fixed by the type of state that puts an end to the relevant kind of behavior which was triggered by some initial discomfort. The desire’s content consists in its “satisfaction conditions”. Wittgenstein criticized such an account fo…Read more
  •  86
    Safety accounts of knowledge claim, roughly, that knowledge that p requires that one's belief that p could not have easily been false. Such accounts have been very popular in recent epistemology. However, one serious problem safety accounts have to confront is to explain why certain lottery‐related beliefs are not knowledge, without excluding obvious instances of inductive knowledge. We argue that the significance of this objection has hitherto been underappreciated by proponents of safety. We d…Read more
  •  473
    Close to the Truth
    Philosophia 48 (5): 1769-1775. 2020.
    We often think or say that someone was wrong about something but almost right about it or close to the truth. This can mean more than one thing. Here, I propose an analysis of the idea of being epistemically close to the truth. This idea plays an important role in our practice of epistemic evaluation and therefore deserves some detailed attention. I start with an exposition of the idea of getting things right by looking at the main forms of reliabilism about true belief and belief acquisition. T…Read more
  •  258
    DeRose on Lotteries
    International Journal for the Study of Skepticism 10 (1): 44-67. 2020.
    This article discusses Keith DeRose’s treatment of the lottery problem in Chapter 5 of his recent The Appearance of Ignorance. I agree with a lot of it but also raise some critical points and questions and make some friendly proposals. I discuss different ways to set up the problem, go into the difference between knowing and ending inquiry, propose to distinguish between two different kinds of lotteries, add to the defense of the idea that one can know lottery propositions, give a critical discu…Read more
  •  312
    Brains in Vats? Don't Bother!
    Episteme 16 (2): 186-199. 2019.
    Contemporary discussions of epistemological skepticism - the view that we do not and cannot know anything about the world around us - focus very much on a certain kind of skeptical argument involving a skeptical scenario (a situation familiar from Descartes’ First Meditation). According to the argument, knowing some ordinary proposition about the world (one we usually take ourselves to know) requires knowing we are not in some such skeptical scenario SK; however, since we cannot know that we are…Read more
  •  713
    Knowledge requires belief – and it doesn’t? On belief as such and belief necessary for knowledge
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 62 (2): 151-167. 2019.
    ABSTRACTDoes knowledge entail belief? This paper argues that the answer depends on how one interprets ‘belief’. There are two different notions of belief: belief as such and belief for knowledge. They often differ in their degrees of conviction such that one but not both might be present in a particular case. The core of the paper is dedicated to a defense of this overlooked distinction. The beginning of the paper presents the distinction. It then presents two cases which are supposed to back up…Read more
  •  213
    Nearly Solving the Problem of Nearly Convergent Knowledge
    Social Epistemology Review and Reply Collective 7 (10): 16-21. 2018.
    This is a reply to Chris Tweed's recent attempt to solve the problem of "nearly convergent knowledge" and thus defend a binary account of knowledge against a contrastivist alternative. Ingenuous as his proposal is, it still does not solve the problem.
  •  421
    Big decisions in a person’s life often affect the preferences and standards of a good life which that person’s future self will develop after implementing her decision. This paper argues that in such cases the person might lack any reasons to choose one way rather than the other. Neither preference-based views nor happiness-based views of justified choice offer sufficient help here. The available options are not comparable in the relevant sense and there is no rational choice to make. Thus, iron…Read more
  •  731
    Epistemic Contrastivism
    Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2017.
    Contrastivism about knowledge is the view that one does not just know some proposition. It is more adequate to say that one knows something rather than something else: I know that I am looking at a tree rather than a bush but I do not know that I am looking at a tree rather than a cleverly done tree imitation. Knowledge is a three-place relation between a subject, a proposition and a contrast set of propositions. There are several advantages of a contrastivist view but also certain problems with…Read more