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Here are 10 philosophy articles I liked in 2020, in no particular order (a THREAD with links).
1: Do animals have a concept of death? @Susana_MonsO sets out what it takes to have a "minimal comprehension" of death and explains how we can test for it. https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10670-019-00187-2
2: @aliboyle6 on conjoined twins and biological individuality: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007%2Fs11098-019-01316-x. AB had another excellent paper, on episodic memory, but I will allow only 1 paper per author.
3: Tim Bayne, @anilkseth and Marcello Massimini on "Islands of awareness" - this paper is terrifying, horror movie-esque. You'll see what I mean if you read it. If you dare. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tins.2019.11.003
4: Can we perceive goal-directedness? Joulia Smortchkova argues that we can, and gives a plausible account of how it works. https://philpapers.org/archive/SMOSGA.pdf
5: Hanna Pickard on addiction and the self. To escape addiction, you have to imagine a new social identity for yourself - an identity other than "addict". A strikingly lovely paper that made me think of @newnoteorc, which puts this into practice. https://doi.org/10.1111/nous.12328
6: "Virtue signalling is virtuous". I suspect a lot of what is called "virtue signalling" is in fact quorum sensing. It is saying: "I want to change the prevailing social norms on this issue - how many of us are there? Do we have a critical mass or not?" https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-02653-9
7: Conscious states are ethically significant. If a strong illusionist view of consciousness is correct, a massive whole is blown in the core of ethics. The challenge of repairing the hole is one illusionists should take on (says Francois Kammerer). https://doi.org/10.3998/ergo.12405314.0006.032
8: @KatalinBalog on the "hardest" problem of consciousness (for materialists) - the problem of explaining how "phenomenal consciousness" could refer to a single, determinate physical property. https://philarchive.org/archive/BALHHH
9: @dioscuri on the "specificity problem". Popular theories of consciousness, such as global workspace theory, don't specify the properties they take to confer consciousness in enough detail to allow application of the theory to animals. That's a problem. http://henryshevlin.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/01/Specificity.pdf
10: Saul Smilansky on replies. This paper points out a gap between how philosophy publishing works and how it should work - a gap that had been bothering me for a while. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11406-020-00294-3
