Abstract The purpose of this study is to suggest and explain an engaging approach to three distinct types of (alleged or genuine) semantic paradoxes, the White-Horse-Not-Horse Paradox, the Ultimate-Unspeakable Paradox, and the Liar Paradox, in a unifying way that is sensitive to distinct features of them. Although the three types of semantic paradoxes address distinct types of objects, and although their seemingly paradoxical features are different (alleged or genuine), their distinct structures and contents can be understood and treated on the same common ground, which is jointly conceived in people’s pretheoretic understandings of truth and of the double-reference feature of people’s basic employment of language (saying something about an object), and from the unifying vantage point of a double-reference approach.

Abstract Gamification has been touted as a revolutionary technique for promoting education, fitness, work, and more, but has also been argued to harm the very areas it claims to improve. Thus, the importance of reflection on gamification in different contexts is clear; in this article, I examine gamification within games themselves. While it may be thought that gamifying a game is either impossible or trivial, articulating its possibility allows us to uncover its impacts. I first explore some definitions of gamification within the literature (Section 1). After introducing the prospect that a game might be gamified despite this being either impossible or trivial on existing definitions, I then redefine gamification such that gamifying games is meaningfully possible (Section 2). I next distinguish kinds of gameplay, building on Thi Nguyen’s achievement play and striving play to defend two additional kinds: roleplay and authorial play (Section 3). Finally, I combine the preceding strands to identify a potential harm of the gamification of games: a gamified game encourages certain kinds of gameplay over others, producing play under constraints, whereas gamification as a trend across gaming culture creates an impoverished play environment by establishing game design norms that prevent players from deciding how they play, producing inhibited play (Section 4).

Abstract In this article, I show that, when denialists attempt to deny a certainty in Wittgenstein’s sense, they do not even deny anything at all because they are articulating mere nonsense. To clarify this point, I start by providing a brief introduction to Wittgenstein’s conception of “certainty,” paying particular attention not only to the distinction between seeming and genuine doubt, but also to the nonsense generated when violating a certainty. Then, I analyze why we cannot even understand denialists when they try to deny certainties about the existence of the Holocaust and the sphericity of Earth. To this end, I consider the consequences of delegitimizing research procedures, regarding the case of doubt as the normal case, and formulating the denialist doubt through words whose use is incompatible with such doubt. Subsequently, I describe the main tactics used by denialists to try to substitute scientific certainties with alternative ones. Lastly, although denialism concerning certainties cannot even be refuted because it is nonsense, I propose to make deniers as well as the general public aware of such nonsense by asking questions that revolve around incongruences such as those I have previously noted concerning Holocaust denialism and the flat-Earth “theory.”

Abstract Deguchi’s “WE-turn” adds to a smorgasbord of recent theories privileging immanent metaphysics over dualistic, or reductivist, philosophies. This contribution situates the WE-turn alongside biosemiotic, ecosemiotic, and expanded versions of cognitive science approaches to agency, which emphasize distributed, mutualist, and contingent relationality. Focusing on tensions in Deguchi’s ontological pluralism – grounded in our inevitable epistemic limitations – I draw on biosemiotics’ relational ontologies and Jakob von Uexküll’s umwelt theory to show that any attempt to enumerate the contributors to a single act of agency will necessarily over- or underdetermine the actual actors involved. Building on a threefold agenda, this article first reconstructs Deguchi’s meta-scientific challenge to autonomy and then explores (1) the ecological resonances and dissonances between the WE-turn and J. J. Gibson’s affordance theory alongside 5EA (embodied, embedded, extended, enactive, ecological, and affective) cognitive science; (2) the epistemic vagueness that renders responsibility inherently indeterminate even under ideal knowability; and (3) the ethics of niche construction, contrasting living systems’ fluid, feedback-sensitive world-making with the rigid, algorithmic shaping of nonliving artifacts. In so doing, I argue that a truly nondual, biologically grounded WE-philosophy must embrace both the excess and opacity of agency while charting normative pathways toward collective flourishing.

Abstract We revisit the notion of vicarious causation in Graham Harman’s Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO) in order to first show that Harman has articulated two iterations of his account that are in tension with one another; one is found in his earlier paper “On Vicarious Causation,” while the other is contained in his later writings following the publication of Object-Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything. This involves a critical assessment of his developing theory of metaphor in a way that encourages sympathetic revision in the service of improving his non-correlationist view of intra-objective relations.

Abstract Latin and English are good examples of languages in which temporal information is expressed to a significant extent by the tense system of verbs. Medieval speculative grammar dealt extensively with the grammar of tensed sentences and temporal adverbs. And starting in the 1960s, there was an explosion of theorizing about linguistic temporal indicators, principally tense systems and temporal adverbs, in anglophone linguistics and philosophical logic focused on semantics for natural language. I argue that despite important differences with respect to methodology and underlying assumptions, there is significant agreement about the underlying structure of constructions involving tense and the ontological commitments that follow from a semantic analysis of these constructions. I use as examples Modi Significandi by Boethius of Denmark and Events in the Semantics of English by Terrence Parsons.

Abstract This article concerns existents as a contentious issue in contemporary Abelardian scholarship. More precisely, it concerns the ontological standing of forms in Abelard’s metaphysics. Take, for example, the apple on my desk. What ontological standing does its redness have? Is it an actual entity over and above the apple or is it in some sense “reducible” to it? Abelard, famously, was a nominalist, so the question is not about some purported universal redness. Rather, it is about the particular redness of the particular apple on my desk. The issue is contentious in that the best current accounts of Abelard’s metaphysics disagree strongly about how to answer this question. Here, rather than focusing on Abelard’s own writings – which so far have yielded no definitive answer – I will consider some anonymously transmitted and mainly unedited logical texts from the twelfth century and show how his contemporaries understood Abelard’s view and how the followers of his philosophical nemesis, Alberic of Paris, reacted to it.

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Abstract This article traces the idea of domesticity through the work of Emanuele Coccia to explain his conception of happiness. Coccia argues that it is only by taking domestic concerns seriously that philosophy can begin to theorize the possibility of happiness today, claiming that rather than beginning with the polis, “philosophy must think the city from the home, and the home from the kitchen.” The article begins by situating Coccia's work in the tradition of Giorgio Agamben's critical project and then explores the idea of the home from his 2016’s The Life of Plants through 2020’s Metamorphoses to understand the reason for devoting an entire book to the topic in 2021’s Philosophy of the Home. The final sections of this article turn to Philosophy of the Home itself to explain his conception of happiness more concretely, focusing on his conceptions of love and interdependency, as well as the fundamental importance of nourishment and the kitchen.

Abstract This study explores the pivotal concept of “objective possibility” within Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, a concept that has received less attention compared to more prominent ideas such as reification or totality. Lukács frequently refers to “objective possibility” and related terms in essays like “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” and “Class Consciousness,” emphasizing its importance in understanding class consciousness theoretically. The term’s roots for Lukács derive from Max Weber’s methodological writings, which drew from John Stuart Mill and Johannes von Kries and applied to historical and social causation. However, Lukács diverges from Weber’s use, focusing not on counterfactual historical events but on latent historical tensions in the present that can be actualized through collective action. The study argues that Lukács integrates Weberian objective possibility with Marxist and Hegelian language, utilizing it within a modal social ontology. This approach allows Lukács to theorize key questions of class consciousness, historical action, and revolution. By drawing on Hegel’s dialectics of possibility, actuality, and necessity, as well as Marxian contradictions in material conditions, Lukács reconfigures objective possibility from a heuristic tool for the writing of history to an ontologically significant element in the field of historical action.