Many philosophers think that doing philosophy cultivates valuable intellectual abilities and dispositions. Indeed this is a premise in a venerable argument for philosophy’s value. Unfortunately, empirical support for this premise has heretofore been lacking. We provide evidence that philosophical study has such effects. Using a large dataset (including records from over half a million undergraduates at hundreds of institutions across the United States), we investigate philosophy students’ performance on verbal and logical reasoning tests, as well as measures of valuable intellectual dispositions. Results indicate that students with stronger verbal abilities, and who are more curious, open-minded, and intellectually rigorous, are more likely to study philosophy. Nonetheless, after accounting for such baseline differences, philosophy majors outperform all other majors on tests of verbal and logical reasoning and on a measure of valuable habits of mind. This offers the strongest evidence to date that studying philosophy does indeed make people better thinkers.

While there is an enormous literature on friendship, next to nothing has been written about enemyship. This neglect may be due to the assumption that enemyship is simply inverted friendship. We reject that assumption and argue that although enemyship shares some important structural relations with friendship (such as dispositions to act and the presence of significant interactions), there are crucial differences. Unlike friendship, enemyship does not require reciprocity, mutual acknowledgment, or equality in any degree. If we are right, enemyship is a sui generis category of human relationship, in need of further exploration. To that end, we offer a conceptual analysis and taxonomy of enemies before turning to two normative questions: is there anything intrinsically good about having an enemy? Would a good person ever have enemies, of any kind?

Loneliness, while a common human experience, is something to which people often respond quite differently. Here, I examine how an individual’s social position, as well as his socialization into a particular cultural milieu, can shape his response to the fact of his loneliness (as well as the features of human existence that loneliness makes salient). Specifically, I argue that in cases where the individual experiencing loneliness has been socialized to disvalue the features of existence that loneliness makes salient (e.g., our dependence on and vulnerability to others) and/or to feel entitled to the social goods that they are, or perceive themselves to be, lacking (e.g., recognition or intimate connection), loneliness may catalyze the vicious, extremist attitude of ressentiment. This analysis allows us to see how loneliness may play a role in catalyzing vicious, extremist attitudes—though I contend that loneliness never warrants such attitudes.

A welfare subject is an entity with a good of its own. Welfare subjects have interests. Things matter to them. It is uncontroversial that typical adult humans are welfare subjects. It is uncontroversial that rocks are not welfare subjects. Just what makes this so is a matter of controversy. The default view is that sentience is necessary for welfare subjecthood. A competing view is that teleological organization suffices for welfare subjecthood. This article challenges both views by developing a third view that sits between them. An autopoietic entity is one that engages in self-production in a way that is adaptive to its environment. An autopoietic entity sustains, maintains, and renews itself on an ongoing basis. This article argues that all autopoietic entities are welfare subjects. This view explains why sentient entities such as animals are welfare subjects. It explains why merely teleologically organized entities such as automobile engines are not.

Interest in objective list theories is driven by the difficulties faced by both hedonism and desire theories: in particular, the scarce plausibility of their attitude-dependence and the poor consistency with our considered moral judgments. Objective List Theories, however, are often charged with not offering any clear explanation of the goodness of objective goods and the related allegation of providing no principled way to decide which elements should feature in the list. It is argued that an explanatory account centered on the notion of ‘desirability’ can overcome these difficulties, as well as weaken another standard objection, that Objective List Theories alienate people from their desires.

Our received theories of self-deception are problematic. The traditional view, according to which self-deceivers intend to deceive themselves, generates paradoxes: you cannot deceive yourself intentionally because you know your own plans and intentions. Non-traditional views argue that self-deceivers act (sub-)intentionally but deceive themselves unintentionally and unknowingly. Some non-traditionalists even say that self-deception involves a mere error (of self-knowledge). The non-traditional approach does not generate paradoxes, but it entails that people can deceive themselves by accident or by mistake, which is rather controversial. I argue that a functional analysis of human interpersonal deception and self-deception solves both problems and a few more. According to this analysis, my behavior is deceptive iff its function is to mislead; I may but need not intend to mislead. In self-deception, then, the self engages in some deceptive behavior and this behavior misleads the self. Thus, while it may but need not be intended, self-deception is never an accident or a mistake.

Putnam’s Twin-Earth thought experiment has been hugely influential as an argument in favor of semantic externalism. In this article, I argue that the Twin-Earth thought experiment relies on some previously unnoticed metaphysical assumptions about how to individuate words. My aim is not to argue that semantic externalism is false. Rather I aim to show that Putnam’s thought experiment is only effective as an argument for semantic externalism if we also are committed to certain additional highly controversial and/or implausible claims within the metaphysics of words. I close by arguing that a similar argument for semantic externalism by Burge also relies on unnoticed metaphysical assumptions in the metaphysics of words.

A simple view about “now” is that it picks out the time of the speech act in which it is used. A major advantage of this view is that it incorporates a semantical claim about reference in the larger framework of speech acts. However, the view cannot account for uses of “now” in so-called “answering machine” cases of speech acts, where we lack both clear intuitions and a widely accepted metaphysical view about their temporal locations. I first show that this problem is not limited to indexicals and answering machines. I then propose a different token-reflexive, speech act-friendly view: that speakers set detonation conditions for tokens of “now”, which, when the conditions are met, pick out the time of their detonation.

Both classical phenomenology and contemporary first-person realism accord a special metaphysical status to perspectives. Yet ‘inegalitarian’ forms of first-person realism are, I argue, vulnerable to Sartre’s response to the problem of other minds in Being and Nothingness. After discussing the special status Sartre accords to the first-person perspective (‘ipseity’) and signaling its affinities with first-person realism, I argue that Sartre’s description of encountering the other undermines Giovanni Merlo’s argument for metaphysical solipsism. I then show how a metaphysical notion of standpoint borrowed from the first-person realist literature irons out a wrinkle in Sartre’s transcendental argument regarding other minds. I close by suggesting a kinship between Sartre’s notion of a ‘detotalized totality’ and the ‘fragmentalist’ idea embraced by some first-person realists that reality does not form a coherent whole.

Modern market economies use competitions to distribute a range of social goods. Some theorists maintain that such competitions ought not to generate winner-takes-all outcomes. But the arguments that have been given against competitions with winner-takes-all outcomes fail to find fault with winner-takes-all outcomes per se (or so I argue). Is there, then, anything wrong with winner-takes-all outcomes? I argue that there is: winner-takes-all outcomes are wrong, in at least most distributive competitions, because they do not give people what they deserve.