Peter van Inwagen (2001) has given a probabilistic answer to the fundamental question ‘why is there something rather than nothing?’: There is something, because the probability of there being nothing is 0. Some philosophers have recently examined van Inwagen's argument and concluded that it does not really work. Three points are central in their criticism: (i) the premise which states that there is only one empty possible world is false, (ii) the premise which states that all possible worlds have the same probability is not plausible and (iii) the argument is not significant for the question it sets out to answer. In this paper, I shall show that (i) even if there are many empty worlds, this does not necessarily invalidate the argument in its general lines, (ii) the examples they offer to support the intuition that possible worlds may have different probabilities fail, and (iii) even if the conclusion of the argument does not really answer the question van Inwagen sets out to answer, it is still not an insignificant response to the question.

In this paper I argue that there is a significant but often overlooked metaphysical distinction to be made between contextualism and contrastivism. The orthodox view is that contrastivism is merely a form of contextualism. This is a mistake. The contextualist view is incompatible with certain naturalist claims about the metaphysical nature of concepts within whichever domain is being investigated, while the contrastivist view is compatible with these claims. So, choosing one view over the other will involve choosing to affirm or deny a significant metaphysical claim. As such, a demarcation ought to be put in place between contextualism and contrastivism.

When involved in a disagreement, a common reaction is to tell oneself that, given that the information about one's own epistemic standing is clearly superior in both amount and quality to the information about one's opponent's epistemic standing, one is justified in one's confidence that one's view is correct. In line with this natural reaction to disagreement, some contributors to the debate on its epistemic significance have claimed that one can stick to one's guns by relying in part on information about one's first-order evidence and the functioning of one's cognitive capacities. In this article, I argue that such a manoeuvre to settle controversies encounters the problem that both disputants can make use of it, the problem that one may be wrong about one's current conscious experience, and the problem that it is a live possibility that many of one's beliefs are the product of epistemically distorting factors. I also argue that, even if we grant that personal information is reliable, when it comes to real-life rather than idealized disagreements, the extent of the unpossessed information about one's opponent's epistemic standing provides a reason for doubting that personal information can function as a symmetry breaker.

I argue for a novel understanding of the nature of agent-regret. On the standard picture, agent-regret involves regretting the result of one's action and thus regretting one's action. I argue that the standard picture is a flawed analysis of agent-regret. I offer several cases of agent-regret where the agent feels agent-regret but does not regret the result itself. I appeal to other cases where an agent's attitude towards something depends upon whether or not they are involved in that thing. I argue that the same applies to actions: sometimes an agent's attitude towards a result differs from their attitude to their involvement in bringing about that result. Agent-regret is regret about my own action, but it need not involve regret about something in the world. I end by considering how this picture of agent-regret allows us to respond to a particular criticism of agent-regret.

Dominant interpretations of Plato's Crito attempt to reconstruct the text deductively, taking the arguments in the famous Laws’ speech as consisting solely in the application of general principles to facts. It is thus conceived that the principles and facts are grasped independently of each other, and then the former are applied to the latter, subsequently reaching the conclusion that Socrates must not escape. Following the lead of Cora Diamond, who argues against this ‘generalist interpretation’, I argue that the Laws’ speech essentially involves an exercise of our moral imagination through which both principles and the facts to which they apply are grasped. This is not to say that a deductive argument is absent from the Laws’ speech. Rather, for the first time, we understand how the deductive arguments in the Laws’ speech can function through imagining a life in which these arguments make sense. The Crito is an attempt to exercise the readers’ imagination, thereby presenting ethics that is both personal and objective. Understanding the Laws’ arguments essentially requires the readers’ imaginative involvement with Socrates’ personal story, but they still have objective import.

There is a longstanding and widely held view, often associated with Catholicism, that intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts are intrinsically immoral. Some philosophers who hold this view, such as Edward Feser, claim that they can defend the view on purely philosophical grounds by relying on the perverted faculty argument. This paper argues that Feser's defense of the perverted faculty argument does not work because Feser fails to recognize the full implications of the species-dependence of natural goodness. By drawing on the work of Peter Geach and Philippa Foot, this paper presents a view of natural goodness that adequately accounts for the species-dependence of such goodness. Using this adequate account, the paper argues that at least some intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts contribute to human flourishing.