What is the source of epistemic normativity? In virtue of what do epistemic norms have categorical normative authority? According to epistemic teleologism, epistemic normativity comes from value. Epistemic norms have categorical authority because conforming to them is necessarily good in some relevant sense. In this article, I argue that epistemic teleologism should be rejected. The problem, I argue, is that there is no relevant sense in which it is necessarily good to believe in accordance with epistemic norms, including in cases where the matter at hand is completely trivial. Therefore, if epistemology is normative, its normativity won’t come from value.

Extant accounts, both old and new, of the wrongfulness of lying are all inadequate. The common problem with each consists in its unitary structure. Such analyses presuppose that all lies are wrongful in the same way, for the same unifying reason. This assumption, however, does not do justice to the phenomena of lying. This is because lying can be morally objectionable in diverse ways. Thus, I argue for a dialectical shift towards a pluralist approach to the wrongfulness of lying. We should not force unity upon the moral structure of lying when there is actually diversity.

This paper is devoted to a fundamental aspect of Diderot’s materialist philosophy: the fact that psychological identity does not exactly correspond with the material individuals we are because the memories on which psychological identity relies are always partial. This is complicated by the fact that even the material individual is denied reality since, as is stated in the Rêve de d’Alembert, the only individual is the «whole». By relating these two approaches, I try to show how one can develop a theory of the individual that takes into account the gap between individuation as a physical process and the constitution of a psychological individual.

Terence Cuneo has recently argued that we have to be committed to the existence of epistemic facts insofar as they are indispensable to theorizing. Furthermore, he argues that the epistemic properties of these facts are inextricably ‘ontologically entangled’ with certain moral properties, such that there exist ‘moral-epistemic’ facts. Cuneo, therefore, concludes that moral realism is true. I argue that Cuneo’s appeal to the existence of moral-epistemic facts is problematic, even granting his argument for the existence of indispensable epistemic facts. I conclude, therefore, that Cuneo’s argument fails to justify moral realism.

According to David Rosenthal’s higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, a mental state is conscious just in case one is aware of being in that state via a suitable HOT. Jesse Mulder (2016) recently objects: though HOT theory holds that conscious states are states that it seems to one that one is in, the view seems unable to explain how HOTs engender such seemings. I clarify here how HOT theory can adequately explain the relevant mental appearances, illustrating the explanatory power of HOT theory.

In this paper, I demonstrate the pivotal function of consciousness in the second part of Phenomenology of Perception. A new meaning of the notion avoids the alternative between empiricism and intellectualism that gives this second part its structure. Consciousness, bogged down with the world, is neither only a state, nor only an act; in other words, it conveys life, conceived by Merleau-Ponty as a ‘living’ and a ‘making.’ Thus, it has a metaphysical dimension that renders it irreducible to experience. Consciousness, which I show is both ‘original’ and ‘philosophical,’ corresponds to an effective comprehension of contradiction in everything.

For three centuries the primary aspiration of Western governments has been constant economic growth but with the Industrial Revolution this objective became troublesome. In the 20th century unprecedented levels of industrial production and social consumption caused palpable harm to humans and the environment. Hannah Arendt and John Kenneth Galbraith turned their pens to such concerns and Bill Mollison and David Holmgren advocated a permaculture approach to growth, one that strives to limit human interference in natural growth processes. Today’s precarious economic and ecological imbalances could be stabilized by a shift in applied growth paradigms, from capitalist to permaculturist.