{"title":"Descartes, Principal Attributes, and God","authors":"Eric Stencil","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70045","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70045","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Scholars generally agree that René Descartes's God has no principal attribute. In this paper, I argue against this consensus. More specifically, I argue that Descartes's God's principal attribute is infiniteness <i>qua</i> ontological independence. Descartes's God is a <i>res infinita</i> in very much the same way as a mind is a <i>res cogitans</i> and a body is a <i>res extensa</i>. In order to make my case, I begin in section 1 with Descartes's account of principal attributes and argue that nothing about this account precludes God's having one. In section 2, I offer a prima facie case for the view that God's principal attribute is infiniteness <i>qua</i> ontological independence. And in section 3, I consider several passages which reveal the central role ontological independence plays in Descartes's account of God's nature and other attributes. I conclude that Descartes's God's principal attribute is infiniteness <i>qua</i> ontological independence.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 2","pages":"576-598"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148202997","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Neo-Hegelian Idealism","authors":"Kevin Richardson","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70047","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70047","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In <i>Idealism and the Harmony of Thought and Reality</i>, Thomas Hofweber argues for what he calls a reformed neo-Kantian approach to metaphysics. On this approach, we can make substantive conclusions about reality on the basis of reflections about language alone. He appeals to what he calls inescapable concepts, concepts that humans cannot rationally dispense of, for the purpose of rational inquiry. He argues that such concepts – like the concepts of TRUTH and FACT – must apply to reality, independently of further non-linguistic facts. In this paper, I argue that Hofweber's reformed neo-Kantianism faces a historicist objection: purportedly inescapable concepts are more plausibly understood as historically contingent concepts; they are neither timeless nor inescapable. If the historicist objection is correct, neo-Kantianism is infeasible. Nonetheless, I argue that a version of the idealist project is still worth pursuing. On the neo-Hegelian approach to metaphysics, there are inescapable conceptual functions, where different concepts satisfy these functions throughout history. Neo-Hegelians retain the basic idealist insight while making sense of the historical contingency of our conceptual repertoire.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 2","pages":"441-453"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148202981","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Questions Should Have Answers","authors":"Michael Deigan","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70042","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70042","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Making sense of the world often requires one to come up with new ideas, including ideas one had previously been unable to think of. How and when should this be done? I propose and defend a norm of rationality linking wondering, belief, and abilities to conceive: one must not both wonder a question and reject all answers to it that one can conceive. This norm explains judgements about an array of cases, some of which cannot be explained by appeal to more familiar doxastic norms or zetetic instrumental norms. It suggests that rationality governs not only the relations among our attitudes, but the relations among our attitudes and our abilities to have attitudes.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 2","pages":"423-440"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.70042","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203042","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Appreciation Game: A Monist Ontology of Works of Art","authors":"Enrico Terrone","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70070","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70070","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A pluralist ontology of art states that works of art can belong to distinct ontological categories whereas a monist ontology states that all works of art belong to one ontological category. A monist ontology would be preferable since it is more informative about the nature of art, and may pave the way for a definition of art. Yet, monist conceptions struggle to deal with cultural practices of art appreciation. In the first part of the paper, I will discuss the main monist strategies in the ontology of art, and I will argue that all these strategies find it hard to deal with the relevant cultural practices. Then, I will propose a new monist ontology according to which all works of art are norm-constituted entities. Finally, I will show that this account deals better than its competitors with the relevant cultural practices.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 2","pages":"531-544"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.70070","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203063","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Mathematical Imaginings and Pictures","authors":"Jeremy Morris, Eva Morris","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70053","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70053","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper explores some of the ways that pictures embedded in the prose of mathematics may mislead the mathematician; in particular, the pictures surrounding Cantor's diagonal argument. This work takes up themes from Floyd and Mühlhölzer's recent work and aims to expand upon what it means to be a non-extensionalist within the context of Cantor's proof. The use of different pictures or conceptions are discussed in relation to Objects of Comparison in Kuusela's sense of the term and are then used to compare the different conceptions of the infinite involved in discussions of the differential calculus on the one hand and of the real numbers on the other, with particular reference to the continuum and the notion of ‘sizes’ of infinity.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 2","pages":"454-469"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203106","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Immaterial Turn in Medieval Latin Theories of Sensation","authors":"Jordan Lavender","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70057","url":null,"abstract":"<p>According to a venerable historical narrative, a crucial step in the development of the modern picture of the mind occurred when Descartes argued that sensing occurs in the immaterial human mind, together with thought and volition. The mind, the story goes, had once been the home only of rational thought and volition, with sensations being embodied phenomena, much like digestion, growth, or weaving. However, I show in this article that the view that human sensations are immaterial, non-extended modifications of the immaterial human intellect rose to prominence in the second quarter of the fourteenth century. In Section 1, I examine the background for this fourteenth-century immaterial turn in the more familiar views of sensation prominent in the thirteenth century. In Section 2, I show how the view that human sensation is just as immaterial as thought emerged in the work of some of William of Ockham's associates in England. In Section 3, I bring to light two important developments in the way philosophers thought about the nature of sensation that led to the Immaterial Turn. In Section 4, I briefly discuss a puzzle about the way scholastics in the Immaterial Turn conceived of sensation.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 2","pages":"559-575"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148202972","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Hole Within Being: Consciousness as Nothingness in Sartre's Being and Nothingness","authors":"Jacob McNulty","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70033","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70033","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Among Sartre's best-known theses in Being and Nothingness is his claim that the world of experience contains what he calls “négatités,” little pools or pockets of nothingness. The most famous example of a négatité is Pierre, the friend who is absent from the café. Sartre's conviction that there are négatités all around us has another side, often obscured from view: I mean his (apparent) conviction that we ourselves are a kind of non-being or nothingness. In this paper I try to shed some light on this Sartrean thesis by connecting it to perennial problem in metaphysics concerning the status of holes, shadows or absences — in short, non-beings. However I see more than mere analogy here. Sartre's view, as I understand it, is that we literally are a type of hole. We are holes in the sense that we are the kinds of nonbeings that require beings as our hosts. More accurately, it is being and not beings that host the holes that we are. Ordinary holes have some particular material thing as their hosts: cheese or fabric. Yet our “host” is not any particular being (cheese or fabric) but being itself: the in-itself [en soi].</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 2","pages":"703-716"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203103","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Kierkegaard on the Reasons for Neighborly Love","authors":"Michael Au-Mullaney","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70043","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70043","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Some Kierkegaard scholars view him as endorsing a bestowal account of neighborly love. In this view, love is not grounded in the lovability of the neighbor but freely bestows value on the neighbor. Others interpret him as endorsing a qualities-responsive view, in which love is a response to the neighbor's intrinsic value. I argue both readings miss a distinction Kierkegaard makes between the normative justification for love and its motivation. I suggest Kierkegaard held that love was normatively justified by the intrinsic value of being human, but not motivated by perception of this value. This is because Kierkegaard held to a “principle of engaged observation,” i.e., that the perceiver always perceives others in light of her love or lack of love for them. In his view, only sincere love for the neighbor allows a person to perceive her value. Thus, Christian love cannot be motivated by perception of the neighbor's value. The motivation for love, for Kierkegaard, is an inchoate urge to love that is constitutive of being human. This urge is typically obstructed by false concepts of love, but can be directed toward the neighbor by adopting the mere belief that every human being is worthy of love.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 2","pages":"673-690"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203100","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Mind Your Own Business!” Relationships and Standing to Give Reasons","authors":"Emma R. Duncan","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70076","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70076","url":null,"abstract":"<p>The rebuke “mind your own business!” often serves to deflect what would otherwise be an acceptable intervention. It charges that the addressee lacks standing to intercede as they have. Theorists have argued that blame, which can function as a form of influence via the provision of (moral) reasons, is inappropriate if the matter is not the blamer's business. Others have argued that even addressing reasons in the form of advice-giving, requesting, and the like, is also subject to the so-called business condition. On this view, to address certain kinds of reasons one must have a stake in the matter or stand in the right kind of relationship to the addressee. However, what constitutes such a stake and how relationships make it one's business to intercede in various ways, is less than clear. In this paper I offer a novel articulation of the business condition that illuminates how interpersonal relationships both ground a stake in influencing others and affect the appropriateness of influencing them in certain ways.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 2","pages":"517-530"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203068","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Embarrassment and the Social Dimensions of Moral Agency","authors":"Shawn Tinghao Wang","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70069","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70069","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Unlike guilt and shame, embarrassment is rarely considered by philosophers to be a morally relevant emotion.This downplaying of embarrassment is well justified, given traditional views on moral agency. However, recent theorists have argued that the traditional views are too individualistic and overlook the external social conditions that they believe are part and parcel of our moral agency. Their alternative approach is often referred to as the “socially scaffolded accounts” of moral agency. In this paper, I argue that, if the socially scaffolded accounts are on the right track, then we should re-examine the moral value of embarrassment. More specifically, I propose a moral alerting model to account for embarrassment's moral value and risks. The basic claim is that a kind of embarrassment—what I will refer to as moral embarrassment—plays an attention-directing role in the process of responding to an audience's evaluative feedback. The moral alerting model demonstrates an intriguing tension between moral embarrassment's value and risks: though it is valuable in contributing to moral agency by virtue of its attention-directing role, it causes systematic risks when it comes to successfully engaging with the social feedback that one is sensitive to.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 2","pages":"483-499"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-06-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.70069","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"148203092","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}