Epistemological disjunctivism is usually defended in connection with visual perception. The claim is that, in ideal cases, when one knows that p directly through visual-perceptual knowledge, one has rational grounds for believing that p that are both factive and reflectively accessible. This chapter explores the link between epistemological disjunctivism and religious perception. It is argued that, so long as there is indeed a perception of God, there is no clear reason why one should not hold that target religious beliefs likewise enjoy rational grounds that are factive and reflectively accessible. Call this view “religious epistemological disjunctivism.” The view is defended against two objections, and two of its unique advantages are discussed.

The account developed in Chapter 2 may seem to conflict with Kant’s view that the judgment of taste is a distinctive sort of judgment requiring critical investigation. It has been argued, on the other hand, that Kant’s view is confused: there is no sense of “subjectivity” that sets the judgment of taste apart from other judgments (such as judgments of color) that also lay claim to normativity but present no special problem. This chapter addresses both objections. My reading suggests a requisite sense of “subjectivity.” The judgment of taste is subjective for two related reasons. The first has to do with its essential singularity, which, as I elaborate it, is more radical than the denial of principles or the holism of reasons associated with aesthetic or moral particularism. The second reason is tied to the distinctiveness of the judgment of taste’s claim to normativity. I argue that the judgment of taste represents its object as calling for recognition, where aesthetic recognition should be understood as akin to the acknowledgment of a person. My account yields an explanation of the “autonomy” of taste, according to which one’s judgment of taste must be grounded in one’s own experience of the object.

Hubert Dreyfus and Charles Taylor contrast knowledge as ‘contact’ with knowledge as ‘mediation’. They refuse the pre-modern mode of contact as continuity of form (eidos or morphē) between material things and spiritual mind, and seek to substitute contact as haptic knowledge through the body.

In “Bald Naturalism and McDowell’s Hylomorphism,” Rorty distinguishes between two views of the mind’s relation to the world. One view, which he calls “bald naturalism” and attributes to Donald Davidson, sees the mind as a network of intentional states profitable to attribute to certain complexly behaving objects to predict and control their interactions with the environment. The other view, which he dubs “naturalized Platonism” or “hylomorphism” and attributes to John McDowell, sees the mind as a device for getting the world right, where this process consists in the reproduction of the world in the mind. Rorty then uses the distinction to assess the force of McDowell’s criticisms of Davidson’s bald naturalism in Mind and the World. He argues, first, that those criticisms rely on attributing to Davidson a set of views only expressible in terms for which there is no place in his bald naturalism. Second, Rorty holds that those terms belong to McDowell’s hylomorphism and that this view needs to be abandoned, along with the intuitions it expresses. The paper makes this case by pointing to various counterintuitive consequences of McDowell’s view, such as its implication that the world has its own language.

I seek to establish the claim that we are fundamentally and distinctively the meaning-seeking animal through an exploration of the engaged standpoint from within our human form of life, where it can be seen that our human form of life is shaped by “strong evaluative meaning,” that is, meaning or value that involves qualitative distinction (e.g., between higher and lower, noble and base, sacred and profane, etc.) and places normative demands upon us. I also show how this dimension of meaning is overlooked by the dominant neo-Aristotelian approach because of its emphasis on a disengaged standpoint on our human form of life rather than an engaged standpoint and, thus, it does not provide us with an adequate philosophical anthropology and along with this it does not provide us with an adequate account of our reasons for the life of virtue. Moreover, I seek to counter a disenchanting move made by such neo-Aristotelians that involves denying any special realm of obligation. There is such a realm, I argue, and it is the whole realm of strong evaluative meaning, which includes more than just the domain of “the moral” narrowly construed as concerned with what we owe to others.

I make the case that neo-Aristotelian virtue ethicists need to address the question of the meaning of life (i.e., the question of how our lives fit into the grand scheme of things and whether there is a cosmic or ultimate source of meaning to which we must align our lives). I examine Bernard Williams’ forceful challenge that evolutionary science has done away with the sort of teleological worldview that is needed in order to make sense of an Aristotelian ethical perspective. I consider Hursthouse’s response to Williams’ challenge and argue that it is not sufficient. I also argue against McDowell’s quietism according to which we should remain content with the strong evaluative meanings that arise for us within a particular acquired ethical outlook (e.g., our sense of the noble) and not seek to provide any ontological grounding or justification for them beyond appealing to our second nature. I contend that what we need is in fact a teleological worldview. Against Williams, I argue that there is no necessary incompatibility between evolutionary science and a teleological worldview, and indeed there is some good reason to affirm such a worldview.

A core philosophical use of the term “objectivity” is to talk about a central metaphysical ideal. The term is employed to pick out aspects of the world that are there in the sense that any thinker who fails to register them can be said to be missing something. If we speak in this connection of a guiding concept of objectivity, we can ask what can be said about the nature of the things that fall under it. We might then speak in this further connection of different possible conceptions of objectivity. Today, thought about objectivity is dominated by a conception on which objectivity is taken to have as its hallmark the exclusion of everything subjective. Starting from a description of the relevant conception of objectivity, this chapter criticizes the kinds of considerations most commonly adduced in the conception’s favor. Along the way, the chapter uses passages from the later philosophy of Wittgenstein as its main reference points. A notable virtue of this method is that it sheds light on the transformative significance of Wittgenstein’s thought for how we construe the concept of objectivity.

What is the relation between meaning and use? This chapter first defends a non-reductionist understanding of Wittgenstein’s suggestion that ‘the meaning of a word is its use in the language’; facts about meaning cannot be reduced to, or explained in terms of, facts about use, characterized non-semantically. Nonetheless, it is contended, facts about meaning do supervene on non-semantic facts about use. That supervenience thesis is suggested by comments of Wittgenstein’s and is consistent with his view of meaning and rule-following. Semantic supervenience is then defended against two criticisms: first, John McDowell’s suggestion that the supervenience thesis falsifies the epistemology of meaning and fails to accommodate common-sense truths about meaning; second, a series of counter-examples proposed by Stephen Kearns and Ofra Magidor, who argue that worlds may differ semantically without differing non-semantically. It is argued that neither criticism is convincing: we should accept the thesis that semantic facts supervene on non-semantic facts.