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According to a traditional view, whether a subject is in an epistemic state like knowledge (justified belief, etc.) depends only on epistemic, truth-related factors like reliability or evidence. According to a relatively recent view, the pragmatic encroachment view, this also depends on non-epistemic, pragmatic factors like what is practically at stake for the subject. If […]

Stephen Small on defining other people and ourselves. We live our lives in the shadow of other people. Others fill and to a significant degree constitute our world. After many centuries of history we remain social animals, but our identity and its origins remain an issue for us. Although we easily imagine ourselves alone on

This is a research monograph suitable for professional philosophers and graduate students working on any of the first order issues in metaphysics, but also (importantly) those interested in metaphilosophical issues, especially as these arise in metaphysics — addressing the latter issues is the core aim, though not to the exclusion of the former. The first

Michael Rockler scrutinizes the private investigator’s existentialist credentials. Perhaps the most popular existential work of the 20th century was written by a man who has not usually been identified as a philosopher, but whose work clearly embodies existential themes. Dashiell Hammett, creator of the hard-boiled detective novel, applied an existential viewpoint to his writing. His

This is a collection of essays most of which have been published before, between 2001 and 2018. They all deal with John Rawls’ political philosophy, defending it against various criticisms and what Freeman takes to be misinterpretations. The essays are of admirable clarity, arguing for their positions in meticulous detail. For those interested in a

Understanding the imagination was central to Sartre’s attempts to understand what it is to be human, and how we should live. Maria Antonietta Perna thinks he had important insights which are still worth considering. What is imagination? The word itself seems to be used in at least two different ways, and as this ambiguity is

What are actions? In this densely-argued and thought-provoking work, David-Hillel Ruben sets out to answer this question, by way of an examination of some of the ideas that have gained currency over the last 50 years or so of philosophy of action — including what is usually called ‘the standard story’; the view that actions

Matthew Coniam says that Groundhog Day explains existentialism more entertainingly than Sartre. Groundhog Day (1993) was one of the most critically acclaimed and popular American film comedies of the nineteen-nineties, admired both for its warm-hearted romance and for the delightful comic absurdity of its central premise. In this article I aim to show that it

How do we know what we believe, want, intend, or feel? In other words, how do we come to possess knowledge of our own minds? One historically influential answer to this question is that we know the contents of our minds via introspection. We “look inward” to determine what mental states we token. And when

An introduction to our existential special issue by Anja Steinbauer. Existentialism as a philosophical movement stretches from the mid 19th to the mid 20th century. Its leading figures included such giants as Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger, Karl Jaspers, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus and, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre. These thinkers had very different approaches and