This article compares early nineteenth-century English and Scottish theories of the mind and the way that it develops to findings in today's developmental psychology and neuroscience through a close observation of the work of Elizabeth Hamilton (1756–1816). Hamilton was a Scottish writer and philosopher who produced three pedagogical works in her lifetime, consisting of her carefully formulated philosophy of mind and practical suggestions to caretakers and educators. Although Hamilton has received relatively little attention in modern philosophical literature, her understanding of the mind and the way it develops—based on her nuanced understanding of associationism and Scottish faculty psychology—is overwhelmingly supported by empirical findings today. In addition to utilizing Hamilton's work for the sake of understanding early nineteenth-century philosophy of mind, I argue that a large portion of Hamilton's work should be used to inform future research programs, early caregiving guides, and educational methods.

I argue that experiences can have microphenomenal structures, where the macrophenomenal properties we introspect are realized by non-introspectible microphenomenal properties. After explaining what it means to ascribe a microstructure to experience, I defend the thesis against its principal philosophical challenge, discuss how the thesis interacts with other philosophical issues about experience, and consider our prospects for investigating the microphenomenal realm.

Ian Stoner has recently argued that we ought not to colonize Mars because (1) doing so would flout our pro tanto obligation not to violate the principle of scientific conservation, and (2) there is no countervailing considerations that render our violation of the principle permissible. While I remain agnostic on (1), my primary goal in this article is to challenge (2): there are countervailing considerations that render our violation of the principle permissible. As such, Stoner has failed to establish that we ought not to colonize Mars. I close with some thoughts on what it would take to show that we do have an obligation to colonize Mars and related issues concerning the relationship between the way we discount our preferences over time and projects with long time horizons, like space colonization.

Just as the existence of practical akrasia has been treated as important evidence for the existence of our practical agency, the alleged absence of epistemic akrasia—cases in which a believer believes some proposition contrary to her considered judgments about what she has most reason to believe—has recently been marshaled as grounds for skepticism about the existence of similar forms of epistemic agency. In this paper, I defend the existence of epistemic agency against such objections. Rather than argue against the impossibility of epistemic akrasia, I argue that the impossibility of epistemic akrasia is actually compatible with the existence of epistemic agency. The crucial mistake, I argue, is that skeptics about epistemic agency are failing to distinguish carefully between differences in the structure of believing and acting and differences in the structure of normative reasons to believe and normative reasons to act. I show that once these ‘environmental’ differences are properly distinguished, we can see that absence of epistemic akrasia provides no reason to doubt that practical and epistemic agency are on a par with one another.

I argue that the debate between proponents of substance causation and proponents of causation by powers, as to whether substances or their powers are causes, hinges on whether or not powers (as properties) are self-exemplifying or non-self-exemplifying properties. Substance causation is committed to powers being non-self-exemplifying properties while causation by powers is committed to powers being self-exemplifying properties. I then argue that powers are non-self-exemplifying properties, in support of substance causation.

According to Steven Nadler's novel interpretation of Spinoza's much discussed ‘free man’, the free man is not an unattainable ideal. On this reading, the free man represents an ideal condition not because he is passionless, as has often been claimed, but because even though he experiences passions, he ‘never lets those passions determine his actions’. In this paper, I argue that Nadler's interpretation is incorrect in taking the model of the free man to be an attainable ideal within our reach. Furthermore, I show that Spinoza's moral philosophy has room for another ideal yet attainable condition, which is represented by the wise man. On my reading, becoming a wise man consists not in surmounting human bondage, but in understanding ourselves as finite expressions of God's power and, thereby, coming to terms with the ineliminability of bondage for us due to our very human or modal condition in the Spinozistic universe.

Expressivists about normative thought and discourse traditionally deny that there are nondeflationary normative propositions. However, it has recently been suggested that expressivists might avoid a number of problems by providing a theory of normative propositions compatible with expressivism. This paper explores the prospects for developing an expressivist theory of propositions within the framework of cognitive act theories of propositions. First, I argue that the only extant expressivist theory of cognitive propositions—Michael Ridge's ‘ecumenical expressivist’ theory—fails to explain identity conditions for normative propositions. Second, I argue that this failure motivates a general constraint—the ‘unity requirement’—that any expressivist theory of propositions must provide a unified nonrepresentational explanation of that in virtue of which propositional attitudes have the content that they have. Third, I argue that conceptual role accounts of content provide a promising framework in which to develop an expressivist theory of cognitive propositions.