One popular reason for rejecting moral realism is the lack of a plausible epistemology that explains how we come to know moral facts. Recently, a number of philosophers have insisted that it is possible to have moral knowledge in a very straightforward way-by perception. However, there is a significant objection to the possibility of moral perception: it does not seem that we could have a perceptual experience that represents a moral property, but a necessary condition for coming to know that X is F by perception is the ability to have a perceptual experience that represents something as being F. Call this the 'Representation Objection' to moral perception. In this paper I argue that the Representation Objection to moral perception fails. Thus I offer a limited defense of moral perception.

Most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God take the following form:  If God exists, the world would not be like this (where ‘this’ picks out some feature of the world like the existence of evil, etc.)  But the world is like this.  Therefore, God does not exist. Skeptical theists are theists who are skeptical of our ability to make judgments of the sort expressed by premise (1). According to skeptical theism, if there were a God, it is likely that he would have reasons for acting that are beyond our ken, and thus we are not justified in making all‐things‐considered judgments about what the world would be like if there were a God. In particular, the fact that we don’t see a good reason for X does not justify the conclusion that there is no good reason for X.1 Thus, skeptical theism purports to undercut most a posteriori arguments against the existence of God. What follows is an account of the nature of skeptical theism, an application of skeptical theism to both the argument from evil and the argument from divine hiddenness, and a review of the cases for and against skeptical theism.

One of the primary motivations behind moral anti-realism is a deep-rooted scepticism about moral knowledge. Moral realists attempt counter this worry by sketching a plausible moral epistemology. One of the most radical proposals in the recent literature is that we know moral facts by perception -we can literally see that an action is wrong, etc. A serious objection to moral perception is the causal objection. It is widely conceded that perception requires a causal connection between the perceived and the perceiver. But, the objection continues, we are not in appropriate causal contact with moral properties. Therefore, we cannot perceive moral properties. This papers demonstrates that the causal objection is unsound whether moral properties turn out to be secondary, natural properties; non-secondary, natural properties; or nonnatural properties. 1

Some philosophers have argued that the paucity of evidence for theism – along with basic assumptions about God's nature – is ipso facto evidence for atheism. The resulting argument has come to be known as the argument from divine hiddenness. Theists have challenged both the major and minor premises of the argument by offering defences. However, all of the major, contemporary defences are failures. What unites these failures is instructive: each is implausible given other commitments shared by everyone in the debate or by theists in particular. Only challenges which are plausible given both common sense and other theistic commitments will undermine the argument from divine hiddenness. Given that such defences universally fail, the best hope for a successful challenge to the argument comes from more general sceptical responses. This sort of response is briefly sketched and defended against four independent objections.

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Many people are attracted to the idea that plants experience phenomenal conscious states like pain, sensory awareness, or emotions like fear. If true, this would have wide-ranging moral implications for human behavior, including land development, farming, vegetarianism, and more. Determining whether plants have minds relies on the work of both empirical disciplines and philosophy. Epistemology should settle the standards for evidence of other minds, and science should inform our judgment about whether any plants meet those standards. We argue that evidence for other minds comes either from testimony, behavior, anatomy/physiology, or phylogeny. However, none of these provide evidence that plants have conscious mental states. Therefore, we conclude that there is no evidence that plants have minds in the sense relevant for morality.

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There has been a remarkable push for the use of positionality statements—also known as reflexivity statements—in scientific-journal articles and other research literatures. Grounded in reputable philosophical traditions, positionality statements are meant to address genuine concerns about the limits of knowledge production. However, there are at least three reasons why they should be avoided in scholarship. First, it is impossible to construct credible positionality statements because they are constrained by the very positionality they seek to address. Second, positionality statements are unnecessary because reducing bias—positional or otherwise—in scientific literatures does not hinge on the biographical details of individual scholars but on the integrity of the collective process of truth-seeking. Third, by asking scholars to disclose information about themselves, positionality statements undermine the very norms and practices that safeguard the impartiality of research. Instead of asking individual scholars to issue subjective declarations about their positionalities, scholarly communities should focus on improving the rules of intersubjective competition at the heart of scientific progress. In our view, the most productive path to increasing representation and reducing positional bias in research is to protect the freedom of scholarly inputs while insisting on methodological transparency and rigor.