The great Scottish Enlightenment man of letters David Hume (1711–76) offered an account of causation in terms of regularities: repeated pairings of certain kinds of events. Anything more than this, a supposed ‘secret connexion’ binding individual causes and effects, is not something we could ever experience. This, at least, is the view traditionally ascribed to him. Here the account, and its empiricist motivation, is outlined, and a fundamental problem identified: his account of causation is in tension with his account of the way in which we acquire the concept of a distinctive connection between causes and effects. To explain both our experience of causation, and causation's intimate connection with time, we need to appeal to singular causation: the connection between individual events which Hume found so elusive.

Most academics in philosophy departments accept that the discipline needs to change for the better. In this piece, Rebecca Buxton and Lisa Whiting offer several proposals for how to make philosophy a more inclusive place for everyone.

There is an ongoing public debate about sex, gender and identity that is often quite heated. This is an edited transcript of an informal lecture I recorded in 2019 to serve as a friendly guide to these complex issues. It represents my best attempt, not to score political points for any particular side, but to give an introductory map of the territory so that you can think for yourself, investigate further, and reach your own conclusions about such controversial questions as ‘What does mean to be a man or a woman?’

What is time? Just like everything else in the world, our understanding of time has changed continually over time. This article tracks this question through the history of Western philosophy and looks at major answers from the likes of Aristotle, Kant, and McTaggart.

Maybe we should think of it like this: trans women/men are to women/men as adoptive parents are to parents. There are disanalogies of course, and the morality of adoption is a large issue in itself which I can't do full justice to here. Still, the analogies are, I think, important and instructive.

Is the brain a digital computer? What about your own brain? This article will examine these questions, some possible answers, and what persistent disagreement on the topic might indicate. Along the way we explore the metaphor at the heart of the question and assess how observer relativity features in it. We also reflect on the role of models in scientific endeavour. By the end you should have a sense of why the question matters, what some answers to it might be, and why your preferred answer is highly pertinent to any discussion.

Introductions to epistemology routinely define knowledge as a kind of belief which meets certain criteria. In the first two sections of this article, I discuss this account and its application to religious epistemology by the influential movement known as Reformed Epistemology. In the last section, I argue that the controversial consequences drawn from this account by Reformed Epistemology offer one of the best illustrations of the untenability of a conception of knowledge as a kind of belief. I conclude by sketching an alternative account of cognition which also provides a different framework for religious epistemology.

In the twentieth century, most PhD-trained academic philosophers in both the United States and United Kingdom were white men. The first black woman to earn a PhD in Philosophy was Joyce E. Mitchell Cook (1933–2014). A preacher's daughter from a small town in western Pennsylvania, Cook earned a BA from Bryn Mawr College. She went on to earn degrees in Psychology, Philosophy and Physiology from St Hilda's College at Oxford University before earning a PhD in Philosophy from Yale University in 1965. At Yale she served as Managing Editor of the Review of Metaphysics and was the first woman appointed as a teaching assistant in Philosophy. She taught at Howard University for nearly a decade and held positions in national government service in Washington, DC, before retiring to a life of independent study of the black experience. Although she did not publish much in her lifetime, Cook deserves to be remembered as: first, an academic trailblazer who proved that race and gender are not barriers to excellence in philosophy; second, a public philosopher who broke barriers as a foreign and economic affairs analyst and presidential speech writer; third, among the first philosophical bioethicists of informed consent and experimentation on humans; and, fourth, an analytic philosopher of race, opposing claims that blacks suffer from inherited intellectual inferiority. Cook's achievements can inspire women of all backgrounds who love philosophy to pursue graduate studies and academic careers.

In this article, I consider my relationship with my father who developed Alzheimer's disease and criticize dominant models of social interactions and relationships. I argue that the point of a relationship is not what we exchange or achieve within it. The point is not even that we depend on others for our vital needs. The point is simply that a relationship is valuable in and of itself.

A ‘complex’ theory of personal identity analyses a person P2 being the same as an earlier person P1 in terms of some particular degree of physical or mental continuity between them. All such theories are open to an objection that the postulated degree of continuity is an arbitrary one, and many of them are open to the objection that more than one subsequent person could satisfy them. Necessarily, any subsequent person is either totally the same person as P1 or not at all the same as P1. P2 is identical with P1 if and only if P2 has the same (non-physical and indivisible) soul as P1.

Many of the decisions mothers face are morally intense. They're experienced as highly morally significant, and they are also often very morally complex, meaning that there aren't black-and-white, obvious answers to questions about what one morally may or must do. For example, I suggest that breastfeeding is complex in this way, despite a good deal of cultural pressure in favour of trying to do it. Acknowledging many of the decisions of motherhood as complex or as ‘grey areas’ is accurate, and also good for mums. But it also burdens mums with the responsibility of researching, discussing, thinking through, and ultimately making significant, complex moral decisions for themselves. I call this the moral load, taking inspiration from Emma's ‘mental load’. In the last section I consider what we could or should do to try to lessen the moral load as a burden on mums.

Every one of us has had some interaction with pregnancy, having been pregnant ourselves or having been the result of someone else's pregnancy. Pregnancy is a source of fascinating philosophical issues, yet has been historically underexplored. In this article, I examine why this might be, and propose how to proceed in the investigation within the context of philosophizing today.

Iris Murdoch (1919–99) was a philosopher and novelist who wrote extensively on the themes of love, goodness, religion, and morality. In this article, we explore her notion of ‘moral vision’; the idea that morality is not just about how we act and make choices, but how we see the world in a much broader sense.

In this short piece, I argue in favour of the practice of imagining ‘others’ in a global way and taking universal moral thinking seriously. We are in need of a sense of global identity which can then create global moral thinking. In this way, we can start to see and treat global challenges, such as the environment, social justice, poverty, racism and Covid-19, more effectively.

1. Since I don't know who you are, dear reader, and since I know that some people don't have hands, I don't know whether you have hands. Probably you do, but knowing that something is probable is rarely, if ever, a way of knowing that thing. By contrast, I know that I have hands. Let me check. Yes, here is one of my hands; and here is another. Since I know that here is one of my hands and that here is another, and since I know that it follows from those two claims that I have hands, I can deduce that I have hands. So, I know that I have hands.

In this article, I argue that we need to reconsider some of the stylistic principles that (explicitly or implicitly) govern writing in analytic philosophy. I suggest that the rules are (i) much more difficult to justify than might be thought at first sight; and (ii) may possibly be gendered, given what we know about the reading preferences and writing styles of men and women.

This article addresses the question of whether certain experiences that originate in causes other than bereavement are properly termed ‘grief’. To do so, we focus on widespread experiences of grief that have been reported during the Covid-19 pandemic. We consider two potential objections to a more permissive use of the term: (i) grief is, by definition, a response to a death; (ii) grief is subject to certain norms that apply only to the case of bereavement. Having shown that these objections are unconvincing, we sketch a positive case for a conception of grief that is not specific to bereavement, by noting some features that grief following bereavement shares with other experiences of loss.