INTRODUCTION
VOLUME 43
From the literature of 2023
As in past years, the editors of the Philosophers Annual tried to identify the ten best articles published in philosophy: an endeavor that is as easy to state as it is arguably impossible to achieve. Articles are nominated by a broad team of nominating editors, who are then asked to read and rate as many of the nominated articles as they desire. Four primary editors then spend a few months reviewing and discussing the nominated articles to ultimately provide a narrow selection of winners. These ten articles, which we introduce below, are ones that we recommend as phenomenal works of philosophy, of interest to philosophers of all stripes and specializations.
Two very different papers in ethics struck us as making especially innovative and creative contributions this year. The first, Jacob M. Nebel’s “Ethics Without Numbers,” takes a radically new approach to the analysis of wellbeing. The second, Bradford Cokelet’s “Competitive Virtue Ethics and Narrow Morality” turns the way we think about virtue ethics upside down.
A well-known problem for extending single-agent rational choice theory to a multi-agent social choice theory is known as the problem of interpersonal comparisons. Put roughly, because individual utility functions are thought to be invariant to positive affine transformations, it is widely held to be impossible to compare utility functions across agents in order to generate an all-things-considered social welfare function while simultaneously obeying several other intuitively plausible constraints. In his insightful paper “Ethics Without Numbers,” Jacob M. Nebel rhetorically drops the assumption that wellbeing is numerically representable, re-evaluating intuitively plausible yet mutually unsatisfiable constraints for social welfare functions within a non-cardinal framework. He compellingly argues that the plausibility of the invariance constraint—which requires a social welfare function to deliver the same results even when individual utility functions undergo positive affine transformations—becomes dubious in such a framework. He demonstrates how this lesson extends to the cardinal case. Nebel’s careful arguments against the invariance constraint offer a high reward: dropping the overly restrictive invariance constraint offers hope for salvaging the possibility of social choice theory in the face of several infamous and seemingly problematic impossibility results.
What would Jesus do? One should give the religious folk credit for coining a simple slogan that encapsulates central approaches in ethics, such as the popular claim that we should act as a virtuous person would. Philosophers and folk alike, however, may have often found themselves dissatisfied with how demanding this approach is. While there is broad disagreement about who the virtuous people to emulate are, most candidates may seek to perform many supererogatory actions that we consider good but merely optional. Bradford Cokelet’s “Competitive Virtue Ethics And Narrow Morality” offers help to overburdened virtue ethicists. Rather than wonder what action a virtuous moral agent would perform, he wonders what action a virtuous moral patient would object to on the receiving end. Consider, for example, seeing me drown in a tempest. Risking your life to save me would undoubtedly be noble but would hardly be morally required. Now, I may complain if you let me drown. But mentally, replace me with a more virtuous person, and the complaint may disappear: the virtuous person would not ask you to risk your life, even if theirs is at stake. So instead of wondering what the virtuous person of your choice would do, ask yourself: what would they complain about.
On the historical side, we believe we have identified two papers that are exemplars of communicating both the views of our philosophical predecessors and their contemporary significance.
In Posterior Analytics I, Aristotle advocates for a seemingly radical constraint on understanding (epistēmē): he argues that the fact that comes to be understood “could not be otherwise.” This is commonly interpreted as a perplexing assertion that what we understand is necessary and not contingent. Why does Aristotle assert such a radical claim? In his rich paper “Aristotle’s Argument for the Necessity of What We Understand,” Joshua Mendelsohn answers this puzzling question by means of first answering another. Mendelsohn explores the tension between Aristotle’s characterization of the understanding as both A) metaphysically dependent on the object that is understood (Category 7) and also B) a largely durable state (Category 8). According to Mendelsohn, in order to maintain that understanding is both metaphysically dependent and durable, Aristotle must deny that we can have cases in which contingent facts change, yet our opinions about them do not. This is possible only if we either vigilantly monitor matters of fact and align our opinions accordingly or—as in the case of the kind of scientific understanding that many commentators take to be Aristotle’s target in the Analytics—if the facts which we understand “could not be otherwise.” Indeed, Mendelsohn insightfully argues that Aristotle makes an explicit argument to this effect in a perhaps surprising text—Nicomachean Ethics 6.3.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is undoubtedly a divisive figure, often reputed among analytical philosophers to be inaccessible or even incomprehensible. In “Untrue Concepts in Hegel’s Logic,” Mark Alznauer shows that this complaint need not hold for contemporary scholarship on Hegel. Alznauer argues that Hegel proposed a highly revisionary logic in which concepts are the primary truthbearers. In developing this claim, Alznauer attempts to achieve two aims: firstly, to show that his proposed reading is the most plausible interpretation of Hegel’s work, and secondly, that Hegel’s proposal is plausible on its own merit. We were struck by the vivid clarity of Alznauer’s paper. Insofar as you believe work by and on Hegel to be too obscure or inaccessible to be a worthwhile pursuit in analytic philosophy, we invite you to read Alznauer’s lucid paper. We think it should change your mind.
This year, we received many exquisite submissions in more formal areas of philosophy. The selected articles represent some of the very best work leveraging formal apparatus to make progress in various debates, from causal decision theory to polarization.
A supposed dilemma for the would-be Causal Decision Theorist (CDT) involves two cases where the bets one chooses are not independent from the states of the world that obtain. In the first case, suppose that D is a proposition about what laws obtain. Such laws will predict what bets a CDT-er will take. Plausibly, if the CDT-er has no information about how D is related to the bets they will take, and thinks that the laws are more likely to be as described by D than by ~D, they should prefer a positive bet on D to a same-valued positive bet on ~D. But the second case indicates a catch: such an intuition seems to prevent a CDT-er from two-boxing in relevant Newcomb-style problems. 1 In her ambitious paper “Absolution of a Causal Decision Theorist,” Melissa Fusco takes a new approach to absolving the causal decision theorist from this purported dilemma. Fusco notes that the dilemma only arises if we assume that the CDT-er approaches the two problems with the same priors regarding what D predicts and what they themselves will do. But, according to Fusco, there is reason to challenge this assumption. In particular, the information you learn about the decision problem might change your priors. The main insight of Fusco’s paper thus proceeds in two steps. First, drawing on a deliberation dynamics inspired by Brian Skyrms, Fusco shows how one might rationally update their priors in light of information about the decision problem set up, such that, at the end of the dynamic deliberation, one approaches the two problems that generate the supposed dilemma with different priors. Second, Fusco argues that the same result can be generated even if one doesn’t take on board all the assumptions of the Skyrmsian dynamical picture. Indeed, as Fusco impressively argues, only a bare-bones dynamical account is required to absolve the CDT-er from the purported dilemma.
Meteors! Pandemics! Killer AI! Humans have long been apt to worry about all kinds of horrible things that can happen that we can barely affect. It has been a more recent trend to embrace even minuscule chances of success when we attempt to avoid sufficiently bad outcomes—such as when deciding to invest in averting hard-to-predict existential risks. Jeffrey Sanford Russell’s “On Two Arguments for Fanaticism” tackles the question of how to handle extraordinarily high stakes and tiny probabilities. Fanaticism holds that there are disastrous alternatives so terrible that we should try to avert them, even if the chance of doing so is ever so slight. Of course, Fanaticism is controversial, but straightforwardly rejecting it is difficult. Russell discusses Fanaticism in conjunction with Separability and Reflection principles. He skillfully shows that no consistent combination of independently attractive principles seems very plausible and provides three combinations of principles that warrant further study. Russell provides a highly accessible, clearly written overview of central positions and arguments in the debate before offering objections in a sympathetic but decisive manner. He argues that all of the consistent options end up being very strange.
It’s a familiar story: two people’s political opinions polarize given different lived
trajectories—going to a liberal university in a liberal city, for example, as opposed to working a blue-collar job in a conservative town. Both people could have predicted that their views would develop in radically different ways. In “Rational Polarization,” Kevin Dorst points out that standard Bayesian assumptions imply that we must be dealing with irrationality on at least one side in cases of predictable polarization like this, since a rational agent’s current opinion must always match their estimate of their future rational opinion. That doesn’t seem right, since divergence in these kinds of cases seems to be a product of epistemic circumstances rather than irrationality on either side. Developing a series of technical results, applied with intuitive examples, Dorst attempts to understand the rationality of predictable polarization in terms of confidence asymmetries in processing ambiguous evidence.
This year’s edition includes three papers remarkable for questioning foundational assumptions of the debate they engage in. They do so in different ways—by drawing upon experimental work, by rejecting central tenets of the debate, and by radically rethinking our norms of rationality.
In the paper “Eros and Anxiety,” Vida Yao gives us a thoughtful critique of L. A. Paul’s idea that transformative experiences must always be approached with rational mastery, arguing that this perspective overlooks, restricts, and potentially distorts the richness found in aspects of life, such as love, passion, intuition, and the acceptance of life’s inherent uncertainties. Instead, Yao advocates for embracing the unpredictability of life, in which the unknown offers deeper authenticity and self-discovery. Rather than being bound by the chains of rationality, we might embrace the unpredictability of love, the thrill of passion, and the allure of the unknown. The perspective provided by this paper encourages us to see life and love as less of a problem to be solved with reason and more as an adventure to be lived with open arms, where the risks and uncertainties are not merely obstacles but gateways to deeper authenticity and self-discovery, and the freedom to embrace the wildness of human experience.
In “Disagreement and Alienation,” Berislav Marušić and Stephen J. White challenge standard views on peer disagreement, particularly the Equal Weight View and the Total Evidence View, arguing that these approaches treat disagreement as inherently alienating, distancing individuals from their own beliefs and others’. They propose instead an Interpersonal Reasoning View, suggesting that we should focus on the original evidence in a shared inquiry while also honoring the relationship with our fellow thinkers. This paper inspires a shift from viewing disagreement as a threat to reimagining it as an opportunity to deepen our collaborative inquiry. It fosters a respectful and connected approach to differing perspectives while preserving the potential for genuine epistemic collaboration.
‘Every frog is green.’ Should this be understood as expressing a second-order
relation—between the set of frogs and of green things? Or are we dealing with a
restricted quantifier—restricted to frogs—with the property of being green attributed to
each frog? The relational view is currently standard, inspired by Frege and Russell and
developed in Lewis and Montague. The restricted quantifier view is an older alternative.
Taken as psychological hypotheses, the two views generate different predictions
regarding representations in linguistic understanding. In “Psycholinguistic Evidence for
Restricted Quantification,” Tyler Knowlton, Paul Pietroski, Alexander Williams, Justin
Halberda, and Jeffrey Lidz present results from a series of experiments that support the restricted quantificational view. Their work carries implicit
questions for both logic and philosophy of language.
Were one able to read only ten articles from the philosophical literature of 2023, we think these would be a wonderful ten to read. Across a range of current topics of interest, we consider these to be excellent representatives of different ways to do great philosophy, whether addressing old problems or new.
Patrick Grim
Malte Hendrickx
Lindy Ortiz
Alison Weinberger |
1. [This dilemma appears in Adam Elga, 2022, “Confessions of a Causal Decision Theorist,”Analysis 82(2), 203-213.]↩
|
