What makes a choice hard? I discuss and criticize three common answers and then make a proposal of my own. Paradigmatic hard choices are not hard because of our ignorance, the incommensurability of values, or the incomparability of the alternatives. They are hard because the alternatives are on a par; they are comparable, but one is not better than the other, and yet nor are they equally good. So understood, hard choices open up a new way of thinking about what it is to be a rational agent.

Seneca twice argues that the wise person (sapiens) outstrips or surpasses (antecedat) God. On its face, this claim seems both starkly impossible and rankly impious, the kind of thought antithetical to Stoic wisdom. However, a case may be made that the thought is a natural outgrowth of Stoicism's value theory and is part of the broader Stoic aspirational ethical program.

How are we to understand the phenomenology of imagining? Attempts to answer this question often invoke descriptors concerning the ‘vivacity’ or ‘vividness’ of our imaginative states. Not only are particular imaginings often phenomenologically compared and contrasted with other imaginings on grounds of how vivid they are, but such imaginings are also often compared and contrasted with perceptions and memories on similar grounds. Yet however natural it may be to use ‘vividness’ and cognate terms in discussions of imagination, it does not take much reflection to see that these terms are poorly understood. In this paper, I review both some relevant empirical literature as well as the philosophical literature in an attempt to get a handle on what it could mean, in an imaginative context, to talk of vividness. As I suggest, this notion ultimately proves to be so problematic as to be philosophically untenable.

In this paper I mobilize the Heideggerian concept of poetic saying [Dichtung] to describe features that pertain to the accomplishment of an artwork in the institutional setting of an artworld. Following Binkley and Davies, I first describe performances generative of artworks as ‘piece-specification’. I argue that a condition of ‘artistic creativity’ bears upon piece-specification that is insufficiently accounted for by these authors and that Heidegger's concept of poetic saying can help flesh it out. To that end, I show that it is at least coherent with some of Heidegger's phenomenological insights to argue that (1) poetic sayings are not necessarily tied to the advent of ‘great artworks’ and that (2) poetic sayings thus lend themselves to an analysis that views them as the intentional accomplishment of a meaning-event [Sinnereignis]. I then use the intentional structure of poetic sayings to describe how one can intend to achieve piece-specification in a creative yet recognizable manner.

I contrast an ecological account of natural agency with the traditional Cartesian conception using recent research in bacterial cognition and cellular decision making as a test case. I argue that the Cartesian conception—namely, the view that agency presupposes cognition—generates a dilemma between mechanism, the view that bacteria are mere automata, and intellectualism, the view that they exhibit full-blown cognition. Unicellular organisms, however, occupy a middle ground between these two extremes. On the one hand, their capacities and activities are too adaptive to count as mere machines. On the other hand, they lack the open-ended responsiveness of cognitive agents to rational norms. An ecological conception of agency as the gross behavioral capacity to respond to affordances, I argue, does not presuppose cognition and allows for degrees of agency along a continuum, from the simplest adaptive agents, such as unicellular organisms, to the most sophisticated cognitive agents. Bacteria, I conclude, are adaptive agents, hence not mere automata, but not cognitive agents.

Meursault, the protagonist of Camus's The Stranger, was unable to experience grief at his mother's death—and was in fact condemned for this inability. Should Meursault's inability to grieve be pitied, or should it be welcomed inasmuch as grief is a painful and highly distressing experience? With the assistance of Augustine's remarks on grief in his Confessions, I argue that Meursault's plight is to be pitied. The emotional pains of grief are genuine and cannot be recast either as masochistic pleasures or as instrumental costs to be borne in exchange for grief's benefits. These pains are instead experienced as good inasmuch as they are components of a complex valuable experience. More specifically, because we experience grief at the deaths of those with whom we stand in identity-constituting relationships, grief is both a powerful source of, and motivator for, substantial self-knowledge.

Typical accounts of imagistic content have focused on the apparent analog character or continuous variability of images. In contrast, I consider the distinctive features of digital images, those composed of finite sets of discrete pixels. A rich source of evidence on digital imagistic content is found in the content-preserving algorithms that resize and reproduce digital images on computer screens and printers. I argue that these algorithms reveal a distinctive structural feature: digital images are always compositional (their parts contribute systematically to overall content), but never inverse compositional (atomic parts may be replaced nonsynonymously without changing content). This indicates a sharp contrast with linguistic representations, which may or may not be compositional, and may or may not be inverse compositional. I argue this result sheds new light on the claim that imagistic content is inherently perspectival.

In the above mentioned article on page 376, in the third paragraph, after the sentence ‘These prejudices are not simply the inevitable consequence of our imperfect knowledge, but rather are akin to, in contemporary terms, implicit biases.’, the author would like to add the following footnote: Amy Schmitter, in her “Cartesian Prejudice and Critique of Gender in Poulain de la Barre,” presented at the Pacific APA in March 2016, helpfully aligns Poullain's notion of prejudice with implicit bias. The responsibility of all errors and omissions rests with the author.

We sincerely regret this omission from the original text and any problems that have resulted for the authors and readers.