Most theories of slurs appeal to the notions of derogation and offensiveness to account for the complex nature of slurs. In this paper we argue that, in addition, a further dimension is needed – coarseness – too often conflated with offensiveness. Once we understand derogation as the bigoted things slurs do or convey in virtue of the conventions regulating their use, and offensiveness as the psychological reaction that a subject may have when confronting with a slur, depending on their values and psychological make-up, we can analyze coarseness as the property that certain terms (including some slurs) have in triggering a certain arousal – an automatic emotional response that strongly depends on the phonetic/orthographic realization of the lexical item. Unlike the psychological reaction of offense, the effects of coarseness do not heavily rely on the speaker’s values and beliefs, but are more tied to their linguistic competence, i.e. on their awareness of which words are coarse in a language. Our triplet doesn’t exhaust the plethora of phenomena that are at play in assessing what’s problematic with slurs, but it provides a good starting point to elucidate the discussions that have been going on over the last few decades and yields a fruitful framework where future research can locate the concepts it mobilizes. Moreover, once the notion of coarseness is carefully distinguished from offensiveness and derogation, many interesting empirical questions arise: is coarseness preserved in reclaimed uses of slurs? What is the locus of coarseness? What factors can affect its triggering power?

There is little discussion of epistemic autonomy in current literature on epistemic normativity, which is particularly surprising in light of the fact that since epistemic consequentialism has come under fire, there has been a renewed interest in non-consequentialist accounts. Even more notably, the few epistemologists who have attempted to explore Kantian inspired alternatives to epistemic consequentialism don’t seem to have considered the potential of epistemic autonomy, limiting their discussions to epistemic versions of deontology or respect for truth instead. I believe that this lack of enthusiasm for epistemic autonomy can be accounted for by the fact that recent discussions of it describe it as an account that champions epistemic individualism to the point that the subject is the only legitimate source of her beliefs. If this is an accurate description of epistemic autonomy, then there are obvious reasons we should be suspicious of it. While different reasons have been put forward in the literature, they tend to converge on the claim that insofar as human knowledge requires epistemic cooperation, epistemic autonomy, insofar as it champions epistemic individualism, is at best an unreachable ideal, and at worst a non-starter. The aim of this paper is to put forward a Kantian account of epistemic autonomy that doesn’t fall prey to these objections and thus show that it is a promising way of thinking about epistemic normativity. To support this claim, I argue that epistemic autonomy rightly understood isn’t individualistic; nor is it self-reliance, epistemic independence, or even seeing the subject as the only legitimate source of belief, as is often portrayed. Rather, on the Kantian proposal I defend, the exercise of epistemic autonomy requires the epistemic contributions of others as well as an epistemic community. Epistemic autonomy and epistemic communitarianism are thus two sides of the same coin. In this sense, and contrary to what is usually thought, not only is epistemic autonomy compatible with epistemic communitarianism, the latter is a necessary condition of the former. Being a responsible epistemic agent consists in seeing myself as part of a community of agents who share a world (i.e., epistemic communitarianism) and are equally committed to reason’s demand (i.e., epistemic autonomy).

Hobbies are a special kind of leisure. Hobbies include train-spotting, golf, and pottery classes but not watching TV or surfing the internet. Hobbies lie between leisure and work, but are they worklike leisure or leisurely work? And is having a hobby to be admired or mocked? Answering these questions requires a philosophy of hobbies. This talk will sketch the history of hobbies, develop a definition of hobbies, and set out the idea of an “ultimate hobby”. The goal is an argument that hobbies are uniquely valuable activities with implications for politics, gender, and capitalism.

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 for government regulation of these platforms to stimulate such activity. The paper makes a positive case for this claim and responds to several objections.

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 ideals or standards that we sometimes try to live up to and hold ourselves and other agents responsive to. Positive telic power is about being perceived as an exemplar of a kind, as a woman or citizen, i.e., as fulfilling the ideal of womanhood or citizenship. Negative telic power is about being perceived as failing to live up to the ideal, i.e., being perceived by other agents as substandard in relation to the ideal. Deontic and telic power can both reinforce and conflict with one another. I conclude by drawing out the features the two forms of power have in common and suggest a general definition of social power.

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 before. In the course of defending this claim, I'll also outline six properties that are suggestive of an LoT. I'll go through one case study, focusing on implicit cognition, showing how acquisition and change conditions of implicit attitudes display their LoT structure. The presence and absence of these properties open up possibilities for taxonomizing differences in minds and mental processes in terms of their expressive power, thus giving us a guide for mapping the many languages of thought, both within and across species.

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. Briefly, the subject has a diachronic zetetic reason to suspend judgement in this kind of situation.

Philosophers often give the following advice: Think for yourself. In this talk I argue this is unhealthy: it takes two to think. In particular, I motivate the need for an epistemology of ‘thinking together’ and argue it cannot be subsumed under other projects within social-collective epistemology. To foreshadow, thinking together is a matter of perspectival alignment, sharing a way of looking at the world. This cannot be reduced to sharing beliefs or knowledge. I end by highlighting how this picture challenges core assumptions of standard epistemology.

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 that you can't hope to avoid some artefacts of representational choices.

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 constitutive aim of inquiry. Not only does the Success Norm help to see what’s irrational about OCD- or GAD-worries, it also, I suggest, affords us a new reply to the philosophical sceptic.

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.