Zijian Zhu

Gareth Evans infers the absoluteness of truth and reality from the absoluteness of the correctness of assertion: since the correctness of assertion does not vary with time, he concludes that truth and reality cannot vary with time either. In this paper, I argue that Evans’s argument fails and diagnose why it fails. In doing so, I aim to shed some new light on the relationship between the temporality of judgment and that of reality. To understand this relationship fully, we must attend not only to the temporality of the correctness of judgment but also to the temporality of the act of judgment itself.

Christopher Brown argues that Russellian physicalism can solve the hard problem of consciousness by reconciling physicalism with non-physicalist intuitions. In this paper, I challenge this claim. I argue that Russellian physicalism cannot satisfactorily accommodate intuitions about the subjectivity of conscious experience. I distinguish two conceptions of subjectivity, epistemic and experiential, and argue that Russellian physicalism lacks explanatory usefulness with respect to both. On this basis, I reconstruct Thomas Nagel’s argument against physicalism in a form that cannot be easily deflected by Russellian physicalism. I conclude with some general remarks on the relationship between subjectivity and the hard problem.

According to the Anscombean thesis, when one is doing something intentionally, one must know that one is doing it. Such agential knowledge of what one is doing is often called ‘practical knowledge’. According to the inferential account of practical knowledge, practical knowledge is inferred from knowledge of intention. Kieran Setiya famously argues that the inferential account cannot square with the Anscombean thesis. I propose two different readings of his argument and contend that neither of them works. I then present a new argument to demonstrate the incompatibility between the inferential account and the Anscombean thesis by focusing on their temporal aspects.

Ismael argues that the potential for negative interference creates a kind of instability in our representations of the future, thus preventing us from regarding the future as stable or fixed. However, this account of the sense of openness relies on an unjustified assumption that links instability of representations to representations of instability. In this paper, I argue that this assumption should be rejected, as its acceptance threatens to undermine our conception of the past as fixed. Towards the end of this piece, I draw a comparison between Ismael’s account and the so-called ‘antirealism about the past’. This comparison will shed some light on how we can appreciate Ismael’s insight about the practicality of openness without relying on her notion of negative interference.

This paper focuses on Schellenberg’s Capacitism about Phenomenal Evidence, according to which if one is in a phenomenal state constituted by employing perceptual capacities, then one is in a phenomenal state that provides phenomenal evidence. This view offers an attractive explanation of why perceptual experience provides phenomenal evidence, and avoids difficulties faced by its contemporary alternatives. However, in spite of the attractions of this view, it is subject to what I call “the alien experience problem”: some alien experiences (e.g. clairvoyant experience) are constituted by employing perceptual capacities, but they do not provide phenomenal evidence. This point is illustrated by a counterexample which is similar to, but also different in some important respects from, Bonjour’s famous clairvoyant Norman example. At the end of the paper, I sketch a restricted version of Capacitism about Phenomenal Evidence by putting some etiological constraint on the perceptual capacities employed.