What are epiphanies, and might they be of use in doing philosophy? This essay explores how a great deal of philosophy – and in particular ethics – adopts methods that make no room for epiphanies and the insights they can provide.

This article presents a short account of the practice of vice-charging within the domain of vice epistemology. It briefly examines two pervasive epistemic vices – closed-mindedness and insouciance – and then explores some of the issues surrounding when and how to go about charging others with an epistemic vice.

New technologies don’t just change how we act – they can also reshape our moral beliefs, practices, norms and values. Technological innovations like the mechanical ventilator, autonomous weapons and gene editing challenge existing concepts, such as death, responsibility and health, and create situations our conceptual frameworks can no longer fully explain. As these technologies disrupt familiar ideas and beliefs, they push us to rethink our ethical norms and values. Understanding how technology drives these shifts is necessary if we want to respond thoughtfully to the moral challenges of the future.

Could you be a brain in a vat, with all your experiences of people, plants, pebbles, planets and more being generated solely by computer inputs? It might seem difficult to know that you aren’t, since everything in the world would still appear just as it is. In his 1981 book, Reason, Truth, and History, Hilary Putnam argues that if you were in such a predicament, your statement ‘I am a brain in a vat’’, would be false since, as an envatted brain, your word ‘vat’ would refer to the vats you encounter in your experienced reality, and in your experienced reality, you are not in one of those but are instead a full-bodied human being with head, torso, arms, and legs living in the wide open world. The following extended thought experiment is intended to illustrate that, contrary to Putnam’s view, you, as an envatted brain, could truthfully believe that you are a brain in a vat.

This article examines Georges Bataille’s thoughts on sacrifice and its connection with the sacred. Bataille sees sacrifice as a powerful act that breaks down the boundary between life and death, revealing something profound beyond everyday life. The article highlights his belief in sacrifice as a potent challenge to social norms, deepening our understanding of human existence.

Democracies may be defined as civic arrangements wherein all citizens have equal political standing. The problem is that no real-world democracy has successfully achieved this arrangement. Are they really democracies, then? For that matter, are there any democracies at all? Aikin and Talisse propose that ‘democracy’ is an aspirational concept, one that holds those who strive to achieve particular ends to exceedingly high standards. This makes democracies intelligible as democracies in their collective aspirations, but it also makes their failures instructive parts of what they are as democracies.

In this short piece, I invite readers to think about whether expertise is something as real as trees and mountains, or whether it is our own creation as a society. I discuss the challenges that a purely social view of expertise raises: inconsistent relativism, contradictions, frauds, epistemic and social anarchy. As a way out of these difficulties, I suggest that we must opt for an objective take on expertise. Of course, possessing expertise is relative in the sense that it is a consistent relational property between various levels of expertise. However, this relation is ‘objective’. It is an ‘objective relational property’. Taking this realist view on expertise can shed light on some difficulties, such as the expertise status of Newton in comparison to contemporary physicists and the English proficiency of native English speakers compared to monolingual non-English speakers.

Does mathematics describe something real, or merely a sort of fictional world, like Narnia, or Middle Earth?

An exploration of the ethical issues surrounding assisted dying, in the form of a dialogue.

Has science really shown that there are more than two sexes? Is it really time to redefine sex? A well-known article claims just that. In this short essay, I respond and show that there is nothing particularly surprising about these scientific data on sex, and that people with a traditional, binary definition of sex should not be moved by the data to change their view.

One set of policies that have been suggested to address climate change are carbon prices. Pricing carbon makes it more expensive to make polluting or unsustainable choices and less expensive to make cleaner or sustainable choices. This article explains why, if well designed, carbon prices can provide systematic signals to the market and make societies fairer. The article also defends carbon prices from several objections.

What are wishful thinking and self-deception, and what is the difference between them? This article looks for answers to these questions with reference to a real-life case.

We quite often play the game of wondering what our older self would say to our younger self. Usually by way of advice. Mistakes to avoid. This seems true. But here it is suggested that our younger self may have important things to say of a similar sort to our older self, and in a sense can by our remembering when older what we were like when we were younger and what mattered to us. The process of wondering what might be said goes both ways.

In this article I question a long-established, common-sense belief. Namely, that words contain meanings. This belief is the absolute presupposition underpinning the familiar question: ‘What does that word mean? Backed by John Locke, I argue that words don’t mean. Or as Locke puts it: ‘Words are an insignificant noise.’ Words become significant, meaningful, once we have each processed them through our own minds. In short, we subjectively make our own meanings. The role of words is to trigger the meanings we have made for ourselves. This is where the inescapable roots of misunderstanding lie. The words that do the triggering are public. The meanings we create for those words are unavoidably private and mobile. The bulk of the rest of the article addresses the question: ‘How far can we curb misunderstanding?’

In the preceding article, Terence Moore argues that the meanings of words are private and hidden, and that using language meaningfully involves private processes that are ‘little understood’. In this response I explain why Wittgenstein would, I believe, reject this way of thinking about meaning.