It seems that epistemically rational agents should avoid incoherent combinations of beliefs and should respond correctly to their epistemic reasons. However, some situations seem to indicate that such requirements cannot be simultaneously satisfied. In such contexts, assuming that there is no unsolvable dilemma of epistemic rationality, either (i) it could be rational that one’s higher-order attitudes do not align with one’s first-order attitudes or (ii) requirements such as responding correctly to epistemic reasons that agents have are not genuine rationality requirements. (...) This result doesn’t square well with plausible theoretical assumptions concerning epistemic rationality. So, how do we solve this puzzle? In this paper, I will suggest that an agent can always reason from infallible higher-order reasons. This provides a partial solution to the above puzzle. (shrink)

There are two extreme poles in the literature on akrasia. Internalists hold that it's impossible to act intentionally against your better judgment, because there's a necessary internal relation between judgment and intentional action. To the contrary, externalists maintain that we can act intentionally against our better judgment, because the will operates independently of judgment. Critics of internalism argue that it fails a realism test—most people seem to think that we can and do act intentionally against our better judgment. And critics (...) of externalism argue that it flirts with incoherence by severing the intimate link between judgment and action. Drawing on resources from phenomenology, the cognitive sciences, analytic action theory, and recent “hybrid models” of skilled action, I argue that one route beyond this theoretical impasse is to understand akrasia as a form of skillful pre-reflective intentional action. This strategy, I argue, preserves the internalist insight that there is indeed an intimate relation between judgment and intentional action; and it also confirms the externalist claim that this relation is defeasible, but it does so without falling into incoherence. (shrink)

This essay critiques or engages a wide range of existing works on the ancient and well-contested issue of weakness of will, from a new perspective of comparative philosophy combined with a focus on a largely neglected Davidsonian paradox of irrationality. It aims at revealing the interplay between the descriptive and the normative in the very notion of critical interpretation, as well as a special relation between holding-true and making-true which helps to explain the non-accidentalness of the descriptive coat of the (...) Plato Principle and some of the Mencian paradigmatic tenets. By the same token, it also sheds light on some holistic picture about a certain implicit type of dynamic normativity, which seems evidently applicable to, for example, the Mencius-Xunzi 荀子 dispute on human nature, but scarcely noticed or articulated in contemporary contexts of comparative philosophy. (shrink)