Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The following seems to be a truism in modern day philosophy: No agent can have had other parents (IDENTITY). IDENTITY shows up in discussions of moral luck, parenting, gene editing, and population ethics. In this paper, I challenge IDENTITY. I do so by showing that the most plausible arguments that can be made in favor of IDENTITY do not withstand critical scrutiny. The paper is divided into four sections. In the first, I document the prevalence of IDENTITY. In the second, I examine a defense of IDENTITY on the basis…

Extensionalism is, roughly, the view that perception occurs in episodes that are temporally extended (and thus capable of accomodating in their entirety phenomena taking a nonzero lapse of time to occur). This view is widely acknowledged to be incompatible with thin presentism, the second most popular position in temporal ontology. In this paper, I argue that extensionalism is also incompatible with several other positions in temporal ontology, namely those positing the existence of non-present times that host sentience—positions I collectively refer to as the sentient non-present view. Most notably, extensionalism…

According to presentism, only what is present exists. According to eternalism, all past, present and future things exist. Hence, in presentism, although there was pain, past pain does not exist. In contrast, in eternalism, it is not only the case that there was pain; past pain exists. Given the intrinsic obnoxiousness of pain, presentism is therefore morally or existentially more desirable that eternalism. An argument along these lines has been proposed by Orilia and several objections to it have been put forward. A dialogue between a presentist who defends the…

The article examines the ethics of musical interpretation, focusing on the performer’s responsibility in faithfully recreating a work from the score. Drawing inspiration from conductor Daniel Barenboim’s reflections (2016), it analyzes the delicate balance between personal expression and fidelity to the work, highlighting how interpretation involves not only technical skill but also moral responsibility. This notion develops through the importance attributed to history, authenticity, and the present in interpretation. These concepts are explored in the relationship between the score and the performer, addressing the ethical challenges involved in balancing fidelity…

Fictional characters may raise serious troubles about their identity even within one and the same story. Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, for instance, depicts a world pretty much like ours, in which there seems to be no indeterminate identity, yet leaves it open whether the Shade character is the same as the Kinbote character. On the contrary, in Murakami’s The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, there seems to be two characters, Kumiko and the Woman in the hotel room, that are indeterminately identical. Worse still, there are also cases of inconsistent identity: in…

In this text I intend to show to what extent a certain epistemological understanding of psychoanalysis (fundamentally Freudian) finds parallels with the so-called liberalization process of epistemological naturalism. My thesis is that the sui generis epistemological modalities created by Freud not only coincide with this process, but to a significant degree were precursors of the methodological and ontological innovations that LN (liberal naturalism) proposes to defend and theorize. I begin by reviewing the process of liberalization of epistemic naturalism, from a predominantly physicalist model to a liberal version that takes…

Naïve Realism has become increasingly popular as a theory about veridical perceptions. At the heart of this view is the idea that conscious perceptions are relational events, in which mind-independent aspects of the environment are actual constituents of the experience. Despite its growing popularity, several aspects of the naïve realist proposal regarding the nature of veridical perception and its phenomenal character remain unclear. Naïve Realists sometimes disagree on some of their central claims or have yet to fully articulate their commitments on key aspects of the view. In this paper,…

In this paper, I endorse the view defended by Hochman and others that there are no races but rather there are only racialized populations. The distinction between “race” being real but socially constructed and being its being non-existent or a ‘myth’ might seem of little importance. But aside from conceptual clarity, the view that there are only racialized populations makes better sense of how racialized populations came into being, how racialization has the profound impacts that it does, and what kind of worlds we might imagine (and work towards) where…

One of the primary objections to the biological approach revolves around what is known as the transplant intuition. That is, the allegedly widely shared intuition that if we had our cerebrum transplanted into a different body, we would be transferred to that body along with our cerebrum. Drawing upon our understanding of brain death, this paper argues that either (1) the transplant intuition should be rejected, and the biological approach has the advantage of being consistent with that rejection; or (2) the psychological approach, the biological approach’s main rival, cannot…

A traditional conception of ontology takes existence to be its proprietary subject matter—ontology is the study of what exists (§ 1). Recently, Jonathan Schaffer has argued that ontology is better thought of rather as the study of what is basic or fundamental in reality (§ 2). My goal here is twofold. First, I want to argue that while Schaffer’s characterization is quite plausible for some ontological questions, for others it is not (§ 3). More importantly, I want to offer a unified characterization of ontology that covers both existence and…