Yuanfan Huang

The article examines the necessity of moral knowledge for moral worth, focusing on Neil Sinhababu’s (2024) arguments. Sliwa (2015) and Cunningham (2021) contend that moral worth requires moral knowledge. In contrast, Sinhababu (2024) challenges this view using Gettier cases, arguing that justified true belief, even without knowledge, can still confer moral worth. This article argues that Sinhababu’s Gettier cases do not convincingly demonstrate that moral knowledge is unnecessary for moral worth.

This paper responds to Chen Yajun’s critique in “Frankfurt’s Concept of Identification.” Frankfurt is well-known for defining free will as second-order volitions that an agent fully endorses wholeheartedly. Chen, however, argues that Frankfurt’s concept of wholeheartedness is problematic for two reasons. First, it fails to offer a clear endpoint in the appeal to higher-order desires to resolve conflicts among second-order desires. Second, wholeheartedness sets an unreasonably high bar for acting freely, as one can still act freely even in a state of halfheartedness or ambivalence. In response, Chen proposes his theory of weak identification, which he claims has certain advantages over Frankfurt’s view. I argue that Frankfurt can address the issue of arbitrariness and that Chen misinterprets Frankfurt’s concept of wholeheartedness. Furthermore, I argue that Chen’s theory faces significant challenges.

While conceptual engineering aims to revise or improve known concepts, it faces the problem of avoiding changing the subject, known as the discontinuity challenge. Although there are three versions of the discontinuity challenge, this paper focuses on addressing the continuity between folk commitments and philosophers’ concepts. One prevailing solution considered is appealing to the concept’s proper function. This approach uses the concept’s function, a theoretical notion, to solve the discontinuity challenge. However, the functional plan faces the problem of indeterminacy, namely that philosophers can never reach a consensus on a concept’s function. In contrast, this paper proposes a solution based on Lycanian reflective equilibrium. The notion of “folk commitments” in Lycanian reflective equilibrium is too narrow. To address this shortcoming, this paper provides a revised Lycanian reflective equilibrium based on a richer notion of “folk commitments” that includes case intuitions, common sense, and ordinary language usage.

This paper explores how contemporary discussions of conceptual engineering can benefit from Richard Rorty's approach by outlining Rortian conceptual engineering. Three perspectives on Rortian conceptual engineering are discussed. First, Rortian conceptual engineering represents a form of radical conceptual engineering that dismisses the role of folk intuitions and views philosophical progress as the replacement of old problems with new ones. More specifically, Rortian conceptual engineering sees conceptual revolution as a process in which new metaphors replace old literal meanings. Second, Rorty's metaphilosophical distinction between epistemological and conversational philosophy is more profound than the distinctions between conceptual analysis and conceptual engineering, or between functional and nonfunctional approaches, thus enhancing our understanding of two types of contemporary conceptual engineering: epistemological and conversational. Third, Rorty argues that choosing concepts should take into account not only the competing concepts but also the conceptual schemes in which these concepts are situated.

Philosophy is typically described as a pursuit of wisdom. However, many philosophers maintain that only one type of wisdom exists—practical wisdom. Contrary to this claim, this study contends that a self-contained characterization of theoretical wisdom is possible. Although many current accounts of such wisdom are knowing-that-based, this study considers that this approach is problematic and instead favors a knowing-how-based approach. Moreover, this study offers a detailed account of theoretical wisdom in terms of conceptual knowing-how.

Although a sizable number of works on analytic philosophy are published in non-Western languages, the literature continues to be written mainly in Western languages, especially English and German. This article makes a case for discussing analytic philosophy in Chinese and argues that it entails a dilemma: it can fulfill either the audience-service or knowledge-service functions but not both at the same time. This is problematic because a standard original or critical philosophical article should fulfill both functions. Then, to challenge the validity of this dilemma, I pose the hypothetical scenario of Jake, who writes a marvelous, purely original publication on analytic philosophy in Chinese. This article posits that the dilemma will not be undermined by such a case and suggests an alternative way to resolve it.