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Winning a lottery, being hit by a stray bullet, or surviving a plane crash, all are instances of a mundane phenomenon: luck. Mundane as it is, the concept of luck nonetheless plays a pivotal role in central areas of philosophy, either because it is the key element of widespread philosophical theses or because it gives rise to challenging puzzles. For example, a common claim in philosophy of action is that acting because of luck prevents free action. A platitude in epistemology is that coming to believe the truth by sheer luck is incompatible with knowing. If two people act in the same way but the consequences of one of their actions are worse due to luck, should we morally assess them in the same way? Is the inequality of a person unjust when it is caused by bad luck? These two complex issues are a matter of controversy in ethics and political philosophy, respectively. A legitimate question is whether the concept of luck itself is worthy of philosophical investigation. One might think that it is not given (i) how acquainted we are with the phenomenon of luck in everyday life and (ii) the fact that progress has been made in the aforementioned debates on the assumption of a pre-theoretical understanding of the notion. However, the idea that a rigorous analysis of the general concept of luck might serve to make further progress in areas of philosophy where the notion plays a fundamental role has motivated a recent and growing philosophical literature on the nature of luck itself. Although some might be skeptical that investigating the nature of luck in general can help shed some light on long-standing philosophical debates such as the nature of knowledge—see Ballantyne 2014—it is hardly sustainable that no general account of luck will be able to ground any substantive claim in areas of philosophy where the notion is constantly invoked but left undefined. This article gives an overview of current philosophical theorizing about the concept of luck itself.

AbstractThis paper proposes a methodological turn for the epistemology of disagreement, away from focusing on highly idealized cases of peer disagreement and towards an increased focus on disagreementsimpliciter. We propose and develop a normative framework for evaluating all cases of disagreement as to whether something is the case independently of their composition—i.e., independently of whether they are between peers or not. The upshot will be a norm of disagreement on which what one should do when faced with a disagreeing party is to improve the epistemic properties of one's doxastic attitude or, alternatively, hold steadfast.

Cover -- Half Title -- Series Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- Preface -- 1 The Philosophy of Polarization Phenomena -- 2 The Psychology of Group Polarization -- 3 The Epistemology of Group Polarization -- 4 Four Models of Group Polarization -- 5 The Reductive Virtue/Vice Model -- 6 The Collective Heuristic/Bias Model -- 7 The Reductive Heuristic/Bias Model -- 8 The Collective Virtue/Vice Model -- 9 Mitigating the Epistemic Pitfalls of Group Polarization -- Conclusion: Future Directions -- References -- Index.

AbstractThis paper critically assesses Sosa's normative framework for performances as well as its application to epistemology. We first develop a problem for one of Sosa's central theses in the general theory of performance normativity according to which performances attain fully desirable status if and only if they are fully apt. More specifically, we argue that given Sosa's account of full aptness according to which a performance is fully apt only if safe from failure, this thesis can't be true. We then embark on a rescue mission on behalf of Sosa and work towards a weakened account of full aptness. The key idea is to countenance a distinction between negligible and non-negligible types of risk and to develop an account of full aptness according to which even performances that are endangered by risk can be fully apt, so long as the risk is of a negligible type. While this alternative account of full aptness solves the problem we developed for Sosa earlier on, there is also bad news for Sosa. When applied to epistemology, the envisaged treatment of barn façade cases as cases in which the agent falls short of fully apt belief will no longer work. We show that, as a result, Sosa faces a new version of a familiar dilemma for virtue epistemology. Either he construes full aptness as strong enough to get barn façade cases right in which case his view will run right into the problem we develop. Or else he construes full aptness as weak enough to avoid this problem but then he will not be able to deal with barn façade cases in the way envisaged.