Eating meat can be ethical, but only when it does not violate rights. This requires that the ways in which meat is produced and prepared for human consumption satisfies certain standards. While many current practices may fall short of this standard, this does not justify the position that eating meat cannot be ethical under any circumstances and there should be no principled objection to its possibility.

In this article, I argue that Berkeley's master argument is not the worst argument in the world – more like third or fourth.

This piece considers the role of memory in personal identity, but specifically how we can choose and manipulate individual memories in order to take control of self-identity. The ideas of Locke and Ricoeur are briefly included, along with some questions about the implications of memory on identity in the age of social media.

Many philosophers maintain that a being's moral status depends on its capacities, for example, whether the being is rational or sentient. In the notorious ‘argument from marginal cases’, animal rights advocates make use of this received view by arguing that because infants and the severely cognitively disabled have no more capacities than many animals, animals have status equivalent to humans and are entitled to equal moral consideration. But although capacities may be relevant to moral status, they do not determine it. Ultimately, we need to consider the objectives of morality in determining what obligations we have towards any group of beings, whether they are aliens, humans, or animals.

Christian philosopher Alvin Plantinga wants everyone to agree that while sceptics will always be with us, no one is irrational in accepting what only the stubborn sceptic denies. Plantinga claims no one should be considered irrational for accepting what the religious sceptic denies either. Rather, the claim goes, belief in God should be as uncontroversial as any other properly basic belief sensible people happily hold without absolute proof sufficient to silence the sceptic. The legitimacy of placing theistic belief alongside other properly basic beliefs is challenged by the Sesame Street Objection: ‘one of these things is not like the others’.

Alvin Plantinga dealt a significant blow to the ‘sufficient evidence’ standard of rational accountability when he showed that many beliefs are, as he puts it, ‘properly basic’ – rationally permissible despite appearing to lack an evidential basis. Why, Plantinga asks, can't belief in God be considered properly basic? In this article, I provide a workable account of proper basicality, thereby repairing a long-standing problem with evidentialism. This deepens our understanding of what it means to be rationally responsible, and allows a definitive answer to the theological question: God-belief, it turns out, cannot be considered properly basic.

In this essay I survey some recent empirical findings in vision science and show how they matter for philosophical issues in the epistemology of perception. First, I draw on some data which suggest that our visual system is a bull-shitter. Typically we call someone a bull-shitter when they don't care about whether what they say is true or false, they just care about some other goal – such as winning the argument. The bull-shitter will say some true things and some false things as long as they satisfy a truth-irrelevant end. Similarly, some empirical work suggests that the visual system, for truth-irrelevant evolutionary purposes, presents us with mostly illusory experiences which, while accurately conveying to us that an object is present, inaccurately attribute some properties to an object. Like the bull-shitter, the visual system presents us with partially accurate and partially inaccurate experiences for truth-irrelevant reasons. I then discuss what we would be justified in believing on the basis of our perceptual experiences, if our visual system is a bull-shitter.

There exists today an infinite variety (literally) of formal logics, different systems with incompatible properties. One way to explain the existence of many logics is to posit logical pluralism: to suppose that there is in fact more than one correct logic. In this selective guide – designed for non-logicians – we look at some examples of how different logics come into apparent conflict with each other. Then we look at different ways of understanding the idea of logical pluralism. Our question throughout will be a basic one: does logical pluralism have any limits?

Finding an adequate definition of ‘life’ has proven to be a tricky affair. In this article, I discuss the idea that nothing is really alive: we only say so. I shall argue that ‘being alive’ is not a genuine property of things, and that it only reflects the way we think and talk about things. An eliminativist strategy will then allow us to free ourselves from the burden of having to find a definition of life, and will allow us to focus on the genuinely interesting properties of living (and non-living) entities.

As an evaluative view in the philosophy of life, nihilism maintains that no lives are, all things considered, worth living. Prominent defenders of the view hold that, even so, it can be all-things-considered better for us to continue living than for us to cease living, thus endorsing a ‘soft’ nihilism that appears more palatable than its ‘hard’ counterpart. In support of an intuitive assumption about what nihilism implies, I argue that soft nihilism is incoherent.