Philosopher’s Annual for 2025

The articles that made it into the latest edition of Philosophers Annual have been announced.

The list aims to “select the ten best articles published in philosophy each year—an attempt as simple to state as it is admittedly impossible to fulfill.”

This volume—the 45th—covers the literature from 2025.

The selections are:

Evan Behrle (Harvard), “Desert and Economic Interdependence” from the Journal of Philosophy.

Outside of philosophy, the idea that workers deserve to be paid according to their productive contributions is very popular. But political philosophers have given it relatively little attention. In this paper, I argue against the attempt to use this idea about desert and contribution to vindicate significant income inequality. I claim that reward according to contribution fails on its own terms when the following condition holds: the size of each worker’s contribution depends on what other workers only together do. When workers only together make another more productive, that is not reflected in the sum of their own contributions. Thus reward according to contribution recognizes individual accomplishments without recognizing their dependence on collectives, dependence that is, in complex economies, ubiquitous.

Sam Berstler (MIT), “The Structure of Open Secrets” from the Philosophical Review.

In conversation, we often do not acknowledge what we jointly know to be true. This article identifies a distinctive kind of non-acknowledgment norm, open secrecy norms, and analyzes how such norms constrain our speech. First, the author argues that open secrecy norms are structurally different from other everyday non-acknowledgment norms. Open secrecy norms iterate: when  is an open secret, then there’s a norm not to acknowledge that ⁠, and this norm is itself an open secret. Then, the author argues that the non-acknowledgment at issue in open secrecy norms motivates a more complex understanding of discourse structure. When interlocutors are conforming to open secrecy norms, they rely on at least two disjoint common grounds, one of which has a privileged status. To understand why and how it is privileged, the author develops Erving Goffman’s notion of defining a social interaction. Finally, the author shows how strategic speakers can exploit the structure of open secrecy norms in order to both communicate about the open secret and shield themselves from retaliation for what they communicate.

Kyle Blumberg (Melbourne) and Ben Holguín (Johns Hopkins), “Fictional Reality” from the Philosophical Review.

This article defends a theory of fictional truth. According to this theory, there is a fact of the matter concerning the number of hairs on Sherlock Holmes’s head, and likewise for any other meaningful question one could ask about what’s true in a work of fiction. This article argues that a theory of this form is needed to account for the patterns in our judgments about attitude reports that embed fictional claims. It contrasts this view with one of the dominant approaches to fictional truth, which originates with David Lewis. Along the way it explores the relationship between fiction, counterfactuals, and vagueness.

Liam Kofi Bright (LSE), Nathan Gabriel (UC Merced), Cailin O’Connor (UC Irvine), and Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò (Georgetown), “On the Stability of Racial Capitalism” from Ergo.

What is the connection between capitalism and racial hierarchy? In line with the tradition known as ‘the theory of racial capitalism’ we show that the latter can functionally support the former. As a social construction, race has just those features which allow it to facilitate the sort of stable, inequitable distributions of resources that tend to emerge in capitalist systems. We support this claim using techniques from evolutionary game theory and cultural evolutionary theory, and end by discussing the normative political consequences of this relationship.

Colin Chamberlain (UCL), “How To Eat a Peach: Malebranche on the Function of the Passions” from Mind.

Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) holds that the senses, imagination, and passions serve the body’s needs. In this paper, I explain how the passions keep us alive by situating them in Malebranche’s account of ordinary bodily action. Malebranche holds a consent-based view of action. An agent translates her inclinations or motives into action only when she consents to them. The passions contribute to the preservation of life by helping the agent close the gap between inclination and action. The passions, according to Malebranche, are complex psychophysiological phenomena whose various elements—perceptions, shifts of attention, evaluations, bodily preparation, feelings, and so on—work together to elicit the agent’s consent.

Dai Heide (Simon Fraser), “The Transcendental Aesthetic and the Leibnizian Theory of Space” from the Journal of the History of Philosophy.

In considering Kant’s response to the Leibnizian theory of space in the Transcendental Aesthetic, scholars have overwhelmingly emphasized Kant’s response to Leibniz’s relationalism. They have largely missed the metaphysically realistic aspects of Leibniz’s theory with which Kant is primarily concerned. As such, scholars have failed to appreciate the threat Leibniz’s theory poses to Kant’s idealism, a point made publicly as early as 1786 by H. A. Pistorius. I argue that the Aesthetic does indeed contain a compelling argument against the Leibnizian theory of space. This argument crucially depends upon Kant’s claim that space is monistic: that the whole of space is prior to the parts of space and, as such, spatial representations are not decomposable.

Elselijn Kingma (KCL) and Fiona Woollard (Southampton), “Can You Do Harm to Your Fetus? Pregnancy, Barriers, and the Doing/Allowing Distinction” from Ethics.

When pregnant persons do not behave in the way deemed optimal for their fetus, they are often framed as doing harm. This framing acts as a justificatory bypass for defenses of widespread expectations of pregnant persons, allowing such defenses to avoid substantial questions about special obligations in pregnancy. Our main claim is that this justificatory bypass is unwarranted: in many cases either the pregnant person does not count as doing harm or substantive questions about special obligations cannot be avoided. Our secondary claim is that direct engagement with these substantive questions is unlikely to justify widespread expectations on pregnant people.

Alexander Meehan (Wisconsin) and Snow Zhang (UC Berkeley), “Bayes Is Back” from the Philosophical Review.

A core tenet of Bayesian epistemology is that Bayesian conditionalization is the rule of rational credal revision. But it has been pointed out in the recent literature that if learning can be nontransparent, then Bayesian conditionalization does not universally maximize expected accuracy. This result raises an explanatory challenge for any externalist Bayesian who does not want to give up on a connection between accuracy and epistemic rationality: Why is Bayesian conditionalization the rule of rational credal revision, despite the fact that it does not universally maximize expected accuracy? This article proposes an answer to this challenge. The article argues that an updating rule can be evaluated, not only on the basis of its expected accuracy in particular learning situations, but also on the basis of its total expected accuracy across different learning situations. The article proposes a notion of global evidential constancy, and shows that, out of all globally evidentially constant rules, Bayesian conditionalization has the highest total expected accuracy across all learning situations, including nontransparent ones. Bayes is back!

Paulina Sliwa (Vienna), “Changing Minds and Hearts” from Russ Shafer-Landau, ed., Oxford Studies in Metaethics, vol. 20.

Suppose you are uncertain about some moral question. Are you falling morally short, if you rely on moral advice? A popular line of thought is that the problem with relying on moral testimony is that it can change beliefs but not feelings. An agent who forms a moral judgment based on testimony will be emotionally alienated from the moral judgment they accept. They may come to believe—even know—that a given course of action is right or wrong. But they won’t feel it. The aim of this chapter is to challenge this diagnosis: that moral deference will leave the agent emotionally disconnected from the features that matter. It does so by examining the phenomenon of hermeneutical advice: this is moral testimony that aims at helping an agent to make sense of her moral situation. Hermeneutical advice, it is argued, has the power to change minds and hearts.

Quinn White (Harvard), “Love First” from Philosophy and Phenomenological Research.

How should we respond to the humanity of others? Should we care for others’ well-being? Respect them as autonomous agents? Largely neglected is an answer we can find in the religious traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Buddhism: we should love all. This paper argues that an ideal of love for all can be understood apart from its more typical religious contexts and moreover provides a unified and illuminating account of the the nature and grounds of morality. I defend a novel account of love for all that avoids serious worries about the incoherence or impossibility of loving everyone. Doing so requires countenancing a neglected form of love. Love admits as its object not just individual entities like people and groups; we can also bear a love for the Fs in general—for all the Joneses, all the philosophers, or even all the human beings. I go on to argue that while it is possible for ordinary agents like us to love all, we shouldn’t. Instead, we should approximate love for all. The minimal approximation of love for all is, surprisingly, respect; I derive the basic, structural features of deontological ethics (including anti-paternalism and anti-aggregation) from the ideal of loving all.

The editors of Philosopher’s Annual are Daniel J. Singer (University of Pennsylvania), Lila Graham, Lorenzo Manuali, Brett Thompson (University of Michigan). The executive editor is Patrick Grim (Center for the Study of Complex Systems, University of Michigan; Logic & Formal Semantics, Philosophy, Stony Brook).

The nominating editors this year were: Jc Beall, John T. Bengson, Brian Berkey, Ned Block, Ben Bradley, Liam Kofi Bright, Tyler Burge, Victor Caston, Andrew Chignell, Kathleen Creel, Roger Crisp, Cian Dorr, Elizabeth Edenberg, Adam Elga, Iskra Fileva, Branden Fitelson, Will Fleisher, Graeme Forbes, Aaron Garrett, Michael Glanzberg, Alexander Guerrero, Alan Hájek, Ned Hall, Gary Hatfield, Christopher Hitchcock, Des Hogan, Lily Hu, Simon Huttegger, Gabbrielle Johnson, Simon Keller, Zoë Johnson King, Niko Kolodny, Marc Lange, Harvey Lederman, Brian Leiter, Ernie Lepore, Neil Levy, Martin Lin, Ting-an Lin, Colin McLarty, Jeff McMahan, Lauritz Munch, Derk Pereboom, Duncan Pritchard, Theron Pummer, Greg Restall, Geoffrey Sayre-McCord, Anat Schechtman, Barry Schein, Ted Sider, Scott Soames, Roy Sorensen, Quayshawn Spencer, Katie Steele, Una Stojnić, Eric Swanson, Johan van Benthem, Mark van Roojen, Sergio Tenenbaum, Peter B. M. Vranas, Eric Watkins, Daniel Wodak, Gideon Yaffe, José Zalabardo, and Kevin Zollman.