*Indicates a student co-author.
Basu, Rima. “Bullshit Philosophy.” Synthese, vol. 206, number 106, 2025, pp. 1-17.
Abstract: Academic journals and peer review serve dual roles in the academic ecosystem: advancing knowledge and advancing careers. This duality can lead researchers to employ strategic opportunism to game the system through a variety of means ranging from fraud to plagiarism. This paper highlights another strategy that can seem instrumentally rational in the face of these pressures: bullshitting. With respect to philosophical research, such an approach is especially troublesome because the bullshitter takes advantage of the degree to which philosophical practice, in aiming at understanding, relies on the principle of charity. As I demonstrate in this paper, this extension of charity to others is not just something we do for moral reasons, it has an important epistemic purpose as well, one closely tied to an epistemic aim of philosophy. In undermining charity, the bullshitter undermines the philosophical enterprise itself. Bullshit philosophical inquiry thus risks leaving us both morally and epistemically worse off.
Basu, Rima. “The Ethics of Belief.” The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, 3rd Edition, edited by Kurt Sylvan, Matthias Steup, Ernest Sosa, and Jonathan Dancy. Wiley-Blackwell. 2025.
Abstract: This chapter is a survey of the ethics of belief. It begins with the debate as it first emerges in the foundational dispute between W. K. Clifford and William James. Then it surveys how the disagreements between Clifford and James have shaped the work of contemporary theorists, touching on topics such as pragmatism, whether we should believe against the evidence, pragmatic and moral encroachment, doxastic partiality, and doxastic wronging.
Basu, Rima. “Spectacle and Silence: The Ethics of Memory.” The Arnold L. and Lois S. Graves Awards in the Humanities, 2025, $14,209.
Frigault, Joseph. Whiteness, Fair Play, and Reparation: Toward A Political Inroad. Palgrave Macmillan, 2025.
Abstract: Focused on some of the most conspicuous forms of social, psychological, and ideological resistance to the very idea of reparations, Whiteness, Fair Play, and Reparation develops a new fairness-based argument designed to help sensitize opponents to the force of more familiar calls for racial redress. Drawing on a range of empirical literature on whites’ attitudes toward race-conscious policy, and related sociological analyses of the white moral imagination, the book argues that the lens of 'fair play' can help provide socially and morally threatened whites with a psychologically viable route toward appreciating their personal enmeshment within structures of racial hierarchy.
Frigault, Joseph. “Fair Play Externalism and the Obligation to Relinquish.” Journal of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 11, issue 1, March 2025, pp. 211-229.
Abstract: This essay defends a new account of wrongful benefiting based on the principle of fair play. In particular, I argue that certain structurally-conferred group-based benefits or privileges can ground obligations on the part of innocent beneficiaries to relinquish specific gains for purposes of redistribution regardless of whether their receipt is sourced in wrongdoing or involves the imposition of harm upon relevant others. I call this approach to fair play reasoning externalist insofar as it turns on a novel conception of free-riding that eschews necessary appeal to beneficiaries’ mental states or volition. After presenting an empirical example to help illustrate the sort of benefiting at issue and distinguishing my account from arguments rooted in the notion of structural injustice, I defend it via what I call the extension argument, respond to two salient objections, and close by suggesting its potential political utility in the American context specifically.
Frigault, Joseph. “Putting Whiteness First? Why Reparations Discourse Needs a Critique of White Advantage.” Into the Fire: The Intersection of Race and Communication, edited by Leland Harper. Vernon Press, 2025
Abstract: Apart from being one of the most controversial ideas in the contemporary American context, Black reparations, as a political proposal, faces a number of unique socio-argumentative challenges. In many discursive contexts, simply uttering the phrase is enough to send reasonable conversations flying off the rails. This is particularly true for American whites, whose enduring opposition to reparations and other forms of race-conscious policy is well-known, and whose difficulty talking openly about race and racial injustice is well-documented in the social sciences and beyond. What do these facts mean for how reparations advocates should approach reparations discourse? Should direct reparative justice arguments be withdrawn, or reformulated somehow? This essay considers prominent examples of each approach and argues that both fail to properly consider the potential political value of more active engagement with the white moral imagination on the issue of reparations. Against this backdrop, I suggest a tactical re-orientation of at least some reparations discourse around the notion of structural white advantage. Drawing on recent empirical work on how whites manage a privileged social identity, I show how we might strive to incrementally sensitize oppositional whites to the reality of structural white advantage in a way that enables them to retain a grip on their personal and collective esteem by taking up the task of dismantling the various systems that afford those advantages. The idea is to chart a realistic psychological route by which advantaged whites can come to see themselves as non-voluntary beneficiaries of long-standing racialized structures in ways that help minimize the risk of inflaming familiar kinds of defensiveness and reactivity while simultaneously laying the groundwork for more stable and effective public engagement with the issue of reparative justice in the longer term.
Frigault, Joseph. Review of Reconsidering Reparations, by Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò. Philosophy Today, vol. 69, issue 2, Spring 2025, pp. 385-389.
Hurley, Paul. “Kantian Ethics and the Dutilitarian Compromise.” Asian Journal of Philosophy, vol. 4, issue 2, 2025.
Abstract: Martin Peterson explores a compromise between what he characterizes “textbook” Kantian ethics and utilitarianism. But what if the textbook Kantian is not in crucial respects the Kantian; indeed, what if the textbook Kantian’s duty ethics is an ethical theory purged of precisely those elements of Kantian ethical theory that not only eliminate any such drive to compromise, but even demonstrate why the quest for such a compromise might be deeply misguided? In what follows, I will take up just such an alternative interpretation of Kant, focusing in particular upon the version of this interpretation developed by Barbara Herman. I demonstrate first that on this alternative interpretation, Kantian ethical theory, although undeniably an ethics of duty, is not in Peterson’s sense a duty ethics. I then demonstrate that because Kantian ethics thus interpreted does take consequences into account, it need not compromise with utilitarianism to do so. Finally, I argue that this alternative Kantian has reasons to reject utilitarianism as a theory that appeals fundamentally to the wrong rather than the right kinds of reasons, a theory that distorts the quest in ethical theory for good reasons of the right kind.
Hurley, Paul. “Practical Truth via Practical Soundness.” Practical Truth: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives, edited by Christopher Frey and Jennifer Frey. Oxford University Press, 2025.
Abstract: This chapter demonstrates that there are two distinct senses of practical truth at work in Anscombe’s philosophical writings, and that she characterizes the distinction as between truth in agreement with desire and truth in agreement with right desire. It explores her strategy of articulating these distinct senses and their interrelationship via her account of practical soundness, as distinguished both from practical validity and from merely purported practical soundness. Only her thin sense of practical truth in agreement with desire, invoking merely purported practical soundness, is directly relevant to Anscombe’s accounts of intention and action. But this chapter argues that when she turns from the theory of action to ethics, her robust sense of practical truth in agreement with right desire, invoking practical soundness, takes center stage. These distinctions in turn shed light upon Anscombe’s grounds for holding that her account of sound practical inference exorcises the moral ought of her contemporaries.
Johnson, Gabbrielle M. “The hard proxy problem: proxies aren’t intentional; they’re intentional.” Philosophical Studies, vol. 182, May 2025, pp. 1383-1411.
Abstract: This paper concerns the proxy problem: often machine learning programs utilize seemingly innocuous features as proxies for socially-sensitive attributes, posing various challenges for the creation of ethical algorithms. I argue that to address this problem, we must first settle a prior question of what it means for an algorithm that only has access to seemingly neutral features to be using those features as “proxies” for, and so to be making decisions on the basis of, protected-class features. Borrowing resources from philosophy of mind and language, I argue that the answer depends on whether discrimination against those protected classes explains the algorithm’s selection of individuals. This approach rules out standard theories of proxy discrimination in law and computer science that rely on overly intellectual views of agent intentions or on overly deflationary views that reduce proxy use to statistical correlation. Instead, my theory highlights two distinct ways an algorithm can reason using proxies: either the proxies themselves are meaningfully about the protected classes, highlighting a new kind of intentional content for philosophical theories in mind and language; or the algorithm explicitly represents the protected-class features themselves, and proxy discrimination becomes regular, old, run-of-the-mill discrimination.
Johnson, Gabbrielle M. “Bias, Norms, and Function: comments on Thomas Kelly’s Bias: a Philosophical Study.” Philosophical Studies, vol. 182, 2025, pp. 3025-2025.
Abstract: This commentary on Thomas Kelly’s Bias: A Philosophical Study compares his Norm-Theoretic Account, which defines bias as involving systematic deviations from genuine norms, with the Functional Account of Bias, which instead conceptualizes bias as a functional response to the problem of underdetermination. While both accounts offer valuable insights, I explore their compatibility and differences, arguing that the Functional Account provides a more comprehensive understanding of bias by offering deeper explanatory insights, particularly regarding bias’s origins and purpose.
Kind, Amy. “Imagination as Transformative.” Handbook of Transformative Philosophy, edited by Lydia Amir. Springer, 2025.
Abstract: Intuitively, it seems that imagination plays a large role in our decision-making and thus in bringing about personal transformation. We imagine different futures for ourselves, and then we imaginatively explore which of these futures might be best. Recently, however, several philosophers have expressed skepticism about the ability of imagination to be as useful to us in these contexts as we might have thought. In particular, when the futures being imagined are radically different from anything that we have heretofore encountered, the skeptics charge that imagination is unreliable, since what the transformation will really be like is imaginatively out of reach. In this chapter, after an introduction to imagination and the role it plays in decision-making, I explore the case for pessimism. Via an exploration of two different cases for an optimistic approach, I ultimately conclude that we should reject the pessimist’s claim. Imagination indeed serves as a transformative force in our lives.
Kind, Amy. “Empathy, Imagination, and the Epistemic Value of Fiction.” Empathy and the Aesthetic Mind: Perspectives on Fiction and Beyond, edited by Katerina Bantinaki, Efi Kyprianidou, and Fotini Vassiliou. Bloomsbury, 2025, pp. 87-102.
Abstract: This paper explores an important debate about the epistemic value of fiction, namely, the debate about whether fiction can teach readers to be more empathetic. On one side of the debate are optimists who think that fiction can enlarge and refine our capacity for empathy; on the other side are pessimists who are skeptical that fiction can to do so in a consistent or meaningful way. Looking closely at a set of arguments recently put forth by Gregory Currie, Kind shows that his case fails to establish pessimism. She then suggests that we can best make progress in resolving the debate by situating the discussion within a skills-based framework. In her view, the recognition that empathy is a skill points us towards a promising line of defense of the optimist’s position.
Kind, Amy. “The Myth of Imaginative Resistance.” Art and Philosophy: Essays at the Intersection, edited by Alex King. Oxford University Press, 2025, pp. 211-225.
Abstract: In discussions of what’s become known as the puzzle of imaginative resistance, philosophers note a surprising asymmetry between our imaginings of factually deviant fictional worlds and our imaginings of morally deviant fictional worlds: While we seem to have no trouble imagining fictional worlds that deviate dramatically from the non-moral facts of actual world, we resist imagining fictional worlds that deviate dramatically from the moral facts of the actual world. Though it is commonly believed that this puzzle raises deep questions about the nature of imagination and its role in our engagement with works of fiction, this paper argues that the puzzle is a myth. Once we bring the discussion back into the fold of our general theorizing about imagination, it becomes clear that the kinds of imaginative failures that are often referred to as instances of imaginative resistance are not at all helpfully thought of in this way.
Kind, Amy. “Imaginative Optimism.” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, vol. 99, 2025, pp. 22-40.
Kind, Amy. “The Goldilocks Dilemma: Commentary on Josh Weisberg’s Explanatory Optimism about the Hard Problem of Consciousness.” Journal of Consciousness Studies, vol. 32, numbers 7-8, 2025, pp. 175-185.
Abstract: In Explanatory Optimism about the Hard Problem of Consciousness, Josh Weisberg attempts to debunk the hard problem of consciousness. The hard problem arises from the thought that consciousness has exceptional properties inexplicable by science. Defending what he calls the automated compression theory (ACT), Weisberg argues that we have an easy explanation of consciousness that does not require us to posit any exceptional properties but yet fully accounts for why we would be so naturally led to think that such exceptional properties exist. In this commentary, I offer a challenge to Weisberg’s argument that is best seen as taking the form of a dilemma: either his account of the properties of consciousness do not adequately capture its exceptional features, or, if it does, then ACT does not adequately explain why consciousness would seem exceptional even if it weren’t (that is, ACT fails to do the debunking work Weisberg wants it to do). Call this the Goldilocks dilemma, as the problem arises from the fact that it’s hard for the explanatory optimist to find a specification of the exceptional properties of consciousness that are just right — either they are too ‘small’ to capture exceptionalness, or they are too ‘big’ to be debunked.
Kind, Amy. “‘Religious Credence, Belief and Imagination’: A Critical Notice of Religion as Make-Believe: A Theory of Belief, Imagination and Group Identity by Neil Van Leeuwen.” Analysis, vol. 85, issue 1, January 2025, pp. 260-270.
Kind, Amy. “‘Is mental imagery everywhere?’ Commentary on Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience by Bence Nanay.” Mind and Language, vol. 40, issue 3, June 2025, pp. 310-316.
Abstract: In Mental Imagery: Philosophy, Psychology, Neuroscience, Bence Nanay argues that mental imagery is everywhere. His argument depends crucially on the way he defines “mental imagery”, namely, perceptual representation that is not directly triggered by sensory input. Nanay defends his adoption of this definition by noting that it accords with the scientific consensus. In this commentary, I explore whether and to what extent he is right about this claim. I then explore whether and to what extent this should matter—a question that will lead me to some deeper issues about the relationship between philosophy and the empirical sciences.
Kreines, James. “Reasons for the Importance of the Post-Kantian Idea of a System: Nothing Halfway, Jacobi and Schelling.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies, vol. 32, issue 5, March 2025.
Abstract: The post–Kantian idea of a system demands complete intelligibility, taking systematicity all the way. Many would prefer more moderate or balanced forms of philosophy, indifferent to this ‘nothing–halfway’ idea of a system. But I argue that post–Kantian reasons for the importance of their idea are surprisingly strong. Some at the time advance what I call ‘system–critique’: defending the idea’s importance while yet rejecting systems. Jacobi is a paradigm, influencing Kierkegaard and later system–critique. He shows that reasons for the idea’s importance are not contingent on defense or acceptance of a system—and are stronger for this independence. Such reasons are shared with post–Kantians taking a more positive view of systems, as in Schelling’s ‘Vom Ich’. So there are surprisingly strong reasons to prefer both nothing–halfway system–critique and system–building over more moderate, balanced, or indifferentist philosophy.
Locke, Dustin. “Readiness Testing in the Philosophy Classroom.” Innovations in Teaching Philosophy, edited by Brynn F. Welch. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2025.
Abstract: In a traditional classroom, a student’s grade is often determined in part by a (weighted) average of their exam grades. Decades of research, however, indicates a better way: readiness testing. A readiness test is a check on whether a student has mastered a set of material to the point that it makes sense for the student to move on to more sophisticated material. Readiness tests are graded on a binary scale (complete/not yet) and a student’s grade is determined, not by a (weighted) average of their test scores, but by how far through the readiness tests they progress by the end of the semester. This paper explains how I use readiness testing in the philosophy classroom.
Martin, Adrienne M. “Hope in Moral Psychology.” The Oxford Compendium of Hope, edited by Steven C. van den Heuval and Anthony Scioli. Oxford Academic, December 2025, pp. 239-254.
Abstract: This chapter presents a novel distinction between “definition-first” and “virtue-first” approaches to the moral psychology of hope in philosophy. The author demonstrates that her concept of interpersonal hope is a definition-first approach carrying ethical implications for the respectful investment of hope in people, at the levels of both personal relationships and sociopolitical institutions. She then argues that Cornel West’s concept of the habits of hope is a virtue-first approach carrying implications about the psychology of oppression. The chapter concludes by synthesizing these two approaches to the moral psychology of hope, arguing that democratically aspirational states must prioritize supporting the development of the habits of hope for the most disadvantaged members of society, using a grassroots approach that builds on the cultural and social practices of those communities.
Schroeder, S. Andrew. “The Influence of Values on Medical Research.” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Medicine, edited by Alex Broadbent. Oxford University Press, 2025.
Abstract: Mainstream views of medical research tell us it should be a fact-based, value-free endeavor: what a scientist (or her funding source) wants or cares about should not influence her findings. At the same time, we also sometimes criticize medical research for failing to embody certain values, e.g. when we criticize pharmaceutical companies for largely ignoring the diseases that affect the global poor. This chapter seeks to reconcile these perspectives by distinguishing appropriate from inappropriate influences of values on medical research. It divides this broad question into two narrower ones, the Role Question (at what points in the research process is value influence potentially acceptable?) and the Content Question (when value influence is potentially acceptable, what specific values should researchers use?), and then draws on the philosophical literature on values in science to explore answers to each of them.
Toole, Briana. “Standpoint Epistemology as Ideology Critique.” The Oxford Handbook of Social Epistemology, edited by Jennifer Lackey and Aidan McGlynn. Oxford University Press, 2025, pp. 562-579.
Abstract: Scholars addressing ideology acknowledge that ideology plays a key role in sustaining certain (often oppressive) social relations. Many take it to be the case that in critiquing unjust social relations, we must also critique the ideology responsible for producing and maintaining those unjust relations. This chapter proposes reconceiving standpoint epistemology—an epistemological methodology grounded in Marx and devised for the purpose of analyzing the epistemic influence of power relations—as a project of ideology critique. Standpoint epistemology, with its invitation to start thought from the lives of the marginalized, can be a powerful tool for critique. Standpoint epistemology has much to offer in explaining how the development of a critical social consciousness can emerge and, moreover, how such a consciousness can allow one to envision alternatives to, and form judgments independent and critical of, the operative ideology. To motivate the analysis of standpoint epistemology as ideology critique, the chapter begins by examining the role of ideology in reproducing unjust social conditions. It then suggests that what is needed to dislodge ideology from this reproductive role is a form of ideology critique that analyzes the delusory impact of ideology in structuring our understanding of social reality. The chapter next develops an account of standpoint epistemology as one such tool for disruption. It concludes with what this analysis reveals about the historical project of ideology critique, focusing in particular on Marx and Hegel, ultimately suggesting that this project allows us to reimagine the dialectic between the social, the material, and the ideological.