This paper shows that a careful reading of Laozi’s The Way and Its Power enables one to come up with a metaphysics of awareness. This is done by rejecting those accounts that paint Laozi as a mystic or cosmologist and by arguing for the human-centeredness of his approach. It is shown that three central ideas in Laozi’s work can all be understood as referring to properties of awareness. These three ideas are the Way (Dao), return (gui gen, fa, fan), and non-action (wuwei). The “Way” refers to awareness itself, “return” refers to the way in which awareness oscillates between activity and stillness, and “non-action” refers to how awareness expresses itself in action. This interpretation fits with the Daoist project of articulating a way of living that brings human existence into harmonious relation to the world.

According to Thomas Christiano, autonomy-centered arguments for democratic rights are not successful. These arguments fail to show that there is anything wrong with citizens who want to trade-off their political rights in exchange for more autonomy regarding their private affairs. The trade-off problem suggests that democratic participation is not necessary for leading a free life. My reply employs recent work in the republican tradition. The republican conception of freedom as non-domination supports the incommensurability of the public and the private aspects of autonomy. Christiano overlooks that trading-off the normative conditions of one’s public autonomy results in agents who are mere subjects to the dominating will of those citizens who retain their democratic rights. Since democratic decisions apply to all citizens, the privatized members end up being dominated, especially with respect to the collective determination of the very border separating the private from the public realm.

Richard Dawkins has popularized an argument that he thinks sound for showing that there is almost certainly no God. It rests on the assumptions (1) that complex and statistically improbable things are more difficult to explain than those that are not and (2) that an explanatory mechanism must show how this complexity can be built up from simpler means. But what justifies claims about the designer’s own complexity? One comes to a different understanding of order and of simplicity when one considers the psychological counterpart of information. In assessing his treatment of biological organisms as either self-programmed machines or algorithms, I show how self-generated organized complexity does not fit well with our knowledge of abduction and of information theory as applied to genetics. I also review some philosophical proposals for explaining how the complexity of the world could be externally controlled if one wanted to uphold a traditional understanding of divine simplicity.

I propose an Aristotelian approach to agent causation that is consistent with the hypothesis of strong emergence. This approach motivates a wider ontology than materialism by maintaining (1) that the agent is generated by the brain without being reducible to it on grounds of the unity of experience and (2) that the agent possesses (formal) causal power to affect (i.e., mold, sculpt, or organize) the brain on grounds of agent-directed neuroplasticity. These claims are motivated by recent evidence in neuroscience. The broader theoretical implication is that the agent is not an impotent by-product of the brain but rather something that makes an explanatory difference in virtue of the unity of experience and the capacity to affect the brain. Therefore, the agent cannot be eliminated on parsimonious grounds alone.