Online public shaming—the practice of using the Internet to criticise perceived moral transgressions and transgressors—is commonplace. And much of it is wrongful. Its targets often suffer disproportionate harms and face abuse, doxing, and other forms of impermissible treatment. One question this raises is what should be done in response to the prevalence of wrongful public shaming online. This paper offers one part of an answer to this question. It argues that there is a compelling case for social media platforms themselves to be active in tackling wrongful online public shaming, as well as fo ..read more

Power is central to the social sciences, the humanities, and to understanding the political sphere. However, despite its significance, it has not been considered a central concept in analytic philosophy. To overcome this shortcoming, I turn to contemporary social ontology, where the concept of social power is gaining attention. I identify and define two types of social power: deontic and telic. Deontic powers are our institutional rights (positive deontic powers) and obligations (negative deontic powers), and they concern what we can demand of each other. By contrast, telic powers are about id ..read more

What is the structure of thought? Many philosophers and cognitive scientists think we've moved past the language of thought (LoT). They believe that instead of symbolic, logical, abstract cognition, we can simply posit deep neural nets, associative models, sensory representations, embodied/extended/etc. cognition, or some other more fashionable approach. However, experimental evidence from the study of perception, infant and animal reasoning, automatic cognition in adults, and computational modeling tells a different story: the LoT hypothesis now enjoys more robust empirical support than ever ..read more

Imagine a situation in which a subject has some good reasons for believing that p is true, but the subject also knows that she could obtain conclusive reasons as to whether p is the case if she investigated a little further. It seems that in this kind of situation, the subject in question must suspend judgement and acquire the additional reasons. As some authors have pointed out, this is an intuition that classical evidentialism has difficulty accounting for. In my paper, I attempt to account for this intuition by drawing on the distinction between synchronic and diachronic reasons to F. Brief ..read more

When we formulate theories, we make decisions about what to count as theoretically primitive and what to count as theoretically derivative. For example: when we are doing arithmetic, we might treat "+" as a primitive and we might define "<" in terms of "+". Metaphysicians might want to ask whether our decision---about what to treat as theoretically primitive (or derivative)---kept track of what is metaphysically primitive (or derivative). I doubt the question makes sense. To explain why, I'll offer some general considerations, a particular case study (about space), and a logical argument th ..read more

Some people experiencing obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) or generalized anxiety disorder (GAD) are engaged in excessive worries about specific questions; they are inquirers. It is widely accepted in psychiatry that there is something deeply irrational about these sorts of anxious worries. However, the proposed accounts of what makes such worries irrational aren’t convincing. I argue for a novel answer based on a new norm for inquiry: the Success Norm for Inquiry. I show how this norm falls out of attractive positions in theory of action, metaepistemology and the debate about the constituti ..read more

Early modern philosophers in the Cartesian tradition often tended to oppose the workings of rational thought to the workings of the imagination. My aim in this paper is to show that Margaret Cavendish’s conception of the imagination poses an intriguing counterpoint to such views. Through an exploration of Cavendish’s Poems and Fancies (1653), I argue Cavendish posits her poetic depictions of nature as a counterpoint to a gendered rejection of the imagination, while at the same time laying the foundation for her critique of Baconian experimentalism ..read more

I have argued for some time that biological Individuals, including humans, should be seen as processes rather than substances or things. This has implications both for understanding the boundaries in time and space of the human individual, and for the nature of the kinds into which we tend to sort humans—notably races and sex and gender. In this talk I shall briefly explain the process view of life, and outline some of these implications for basic questions about human beings ..read more

I will present some key ideas from a book I’m currently co-authoring with David Liebesman: Copredication and Property Versatility. Most familiar properties are versatile: there are many different ways to have the same property. For example, a light-blue object and a dark-blue object can both have the property of being blue, even if they have it in different ways. Our key claim is that this observation should be extended: many properties are far more versatile than theorists typically take them to be. I’ll show this insight can be incredibly fruitful in addressing a wide range of philosophical ..read more

A talk given by David Enoch at the Moral Sciences Club on 24th October 2023 ..read more