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Phenomenology questions the centrality that Kant attributes to the “I think.” It claims that on the pre‐reflective level experience is selfless as unity is given. I call this the “unity argument.” The paper explores the significance of this claim by focusing on the work of Edmund Husserl. What interests me is that although the unity argument claims that we can account for the unity of experience without appealing to the an “I think,” Husserl agrees with Kant that experience must be owned. Moreover, he endorses Kant's dictum that ‘the “I think” must be capable of accompanying all my presentations’. The aim of the paper is to explore how Husserl can consistently appeal to Kant's account of the “I think” and at the same time contend that on the pre‐reflective level experience is selfless. The thesis I wish to advance is that although the unity argument acknowledges that experience is necessarily mine, it reveals that it is a necessary feature of self‐reference that I have never taken absolute ownership over my experience. This may explain why our sense of self can often be out of tune with the way we live our lives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper makes a case for treating the boundary between what counts as practical reasoning and what does not as essentially indeterminate. The idea that there is an “essential indeterminacy in what can be counted as a rational deliberative process” was put forward by Bernard Williams in his well‐known discussion of statements about an agent's reasons for action. But in contrast to the more familiar argument of that paper, the idea has received almost no attention. To understand and defend the idea, I first offer a somewhat novel reconstruction of the more familiar argument against making statements about a person's reasons intended on an “external” interpretation. On my reading, the argument shows how making such statements runs afoul of ideals of honesty in our interpersonal dealings. I then argue for countenancing an essential indeterminacy in what counts as practical reasoning, in a manner that involves a re‐application of these same ideals of honesty, albeit at a higher level of abstraction. One advantage of understanding the entire discussion of reasons statements and reasoning along these lines is that it highlights the deeply anti‐rationalistic flavor of Williams' own interest in these topics. Unsurprisingly, Williams' treatment displays a deep affinity with the anti‐rationalistic ethics advanced by Hume. It also turns out to be at cross purposes with the far more rationalistic ethical vision that animates more recent attempts to advance a “Humean Theory of Reasons,” which is sometimes mistakenly seen as following in Williams' and Hume's footsteps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kierkegaard's pseudonym Johannes Climacus famously defines faith as a risky "venture" that requires "holding fast" to "objective uncertainty." Yet puzzlingly, he emphasizes that faith requires resolute conviction and certainty. Moreover, Climacus claims that all beliefs about contingent propositions about the external world "exclude doubt" and "nullify uncertainty," but also that uncertainty is "continually present" in these very same beliefs. This paper argues that these apparent contradictions can be resolved by interpreting Climacus as a belief‐credence dualist. That is, Climacus holds that beliefs and credences (i.e., degrees of belief) are two irreducibly distinct types of mental states. Beliefs are resolutions that close inquiry, thereby excluding doubt and reflecting subjective certainty by disregarding the possibility of error. Credences, by contrast, reflect assessments of evidential probabilities, thereby encoding a recognition of "objective uncertainty" by acknowledging the possibility of error. In addition to solving a vexing interpretive puzzle and showing how Kierkegaard anticipates contemporary views about the nature of belief and credence, this paper demonstrates that Kierkegaard developed a sophisticated account of the nature of belief, doubt, and certainty that merits serious philosophical consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Up until the early 1970s, Quine argued that the underdetermination of theories by observations is a reason for the indeterminacy of translation. This is the so‐called argument "from above," which is still today often thought of as Quine's main reason for the thesis. His 1975 analysis of underdetermination, however, rendered that argument invalid. This paper explains why. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In Western democracies, people harbor feelings of disgust or hatred for politics. Populists and technocrats even seemingly question the value of politics. Populists cry that they are not politicians and that politics is necessarily corrupt. From the opposite side, technocrats view politics as a pointless constraint on enacting the obviously right policies. Are Western democracies facing a rejection of politics? And is politics worth defending? This paper offers a vindicatory genealogy of politics, vindicating the need human beings have for this practice and clarifying the extent of its contemporary rejections. To achieve these contributions, the paper connects the literatures on pragmatic genealogy and on political realism, revealing how they can complement each other. Following pragmatic genealogy, the practice of politics is vindicated, because it meets an inevitable functional need for collectively binding decision‐making. However, and importantly, political realism allows us to see that the functional mechanisms through which politics fulfills this need vary contextually and thus require careful empirical scrutiny. The paper thus dispels confusion about seeming rejections of politics by clarifying what is unavoidable, and what is revisable about politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper addresses the question “what connection is there between our answer to the question of what we are, and the question, what our actions are?” Suppose that actions are reflexive changes of agents. On that supposition, there would be a direct connection between the answers to those two questions. An action of mine will be a reflexive change of me, and what I am will fix the nature of those changes. I hold that supposition to be true and consider reasons in favor of believing it. However, the paper is not primarily aimed at defense of that thesis. It rather concerned with exploring what consequences accepting it has for the competing notions of what we are, given what we ordinarily think actions are, and bringing to light a tension between thinking of actions as reflexive changes of agents in this way, and a kind of causal understanding of actions that is prevalent. What emerges is that we should shift where we start our theorizing: we cannot assume that action theory primarily involves the task of characterizing the relation between an agent and changes caused, rather than a characterization of a particular kind of relation between the agent and herself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a new interpretation of Michel Foucault's critical project. It is well known that Foucault's genealogical critique does not focus on issues of justification, but instead tackles "aspectival captivity," that is, apparently inevitable limits of thought that constrain the subject's freedom but that, in fact, can be transformed. However, it has not been recognized that, according to Foucault, critique can proceed along two distinct paths. In a key passage of "What Is Critique?," Foucault states that critique is tasked with questioning truth about its effects of power and with questioning power about its discourses of truth. We show that this "double movement" organizes Foucault's critical project as a whole, giving it a significantly wider scope and a more complex structure than has been previously acknowledged. At the heart of the above‐mentioned bifurcation lies an apparent tension between two contrastive roles Foucault assigns to truth‐telling in the context of critique: on the one hand, truth‐telling (as avowal) is a target of critique; on the other, truth‐telling (as parrhesia) is one of critique's methods. We argue that combining these two dimensions in a unified account is crucial for understanding and re‐evaluating Foucault's critical project as a whole. By showing that truth‐telling remains an essential element of Foucauldian critique, this paper also rectifies some influential misinterpretations according to which Foucault's critical project seeks to eliminate truth from the picture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a new approach to the study of Paleolithic minds. It is developed on the basis of the phenomenological concept of intentionality: the mind's central characteristic of being about or directed at something. In phenomenology, the world is considered not qua fact, but qua appearance, as a correlate of the mind's intentional activity. Both world‐appearance and the mind's directedness are further considered from a first‐person viewpoint, and in a scaffolding fashion, with more complex acts disclosing new types of objects or aspects of them. This paper develops a framework for applying intentional analysis to minds of the past. This way, the subjective "world‐having" of past subjects can be systematically reconstructed in a manner consistent with the empirical data available. This discloses a new field of inquiry that thus far has not been clearly grasped, even though the questions belonging to it are everywhere recognized as being of the greatest importance to the discipline. The intentional analysis of the scaffolding of acts and what they disclose can help to clarify essential concepts in cognitive archaeological debates, and to better understand the evolution of the hominin mind. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I explore the idea of justice in relation to Rancière's key theoretical insights – and ask whether Rancière has a concept of justice in his own work. The overarching concern that motivates this paper is whether Rancière does provide us with the tools to properly conceptualize the demands for justice that occur within contemporary social movements, or whether we must look elsewhere for such a conceptual framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I develop a new version of the acquaintance view of the nature of introspection of phenomenal states. On the acquaintance view, when one introspects a current phenomenal state of one's, one bears to it the relation of introspective acquaintance. Extant versions of the acquaintance view neglect what I call the phenomenal modification problem. The problem, articulated by Franz Brentano in his Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint, is that drawing introspective attention to one's current conscious experience may modify its phenomenology. Failing to take phenomenal modification into account affects the adequacy of extant versions of the acquaintance view. The purpose of this paper is to develop a better version, the integration account, that meets the phenomenal modification challenge while preserving the merits of other versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to present and evaluate Brentano's account of the individuation of mental acts. In his early works, Brentano assimilated mental acts to tropes; however, he encountered difficulties in explaining their individuation, since the usual solutions for the individuation of tropes were not readily applicable to his theory of mental acts. In a later period, Brentano introduced into his psychology what he called the "soul," and this allowed him to explain the individuation of mental acts. Finally, after his "reistic" turn, he excluded mental acts from his ontology, for he rejected abstracta of any kind, including abstract particulars, and admitted only things, or res (in Latin), that is, concrete particulars; in his late philosophy, there are no "thinkings," but only "thinkers." However, he still needed to explain what individuates different thinkers, and this was again the soul. In the conclusion, the paper critically compares the different theoretical options considered by Brentano. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the debate on epistemic injustice, it is generally assumed that testimonial injustice as one form of epistemic injustice cannot be committed (fully) deliberately or intentionally because it involves unconscious identity prejudices. Drawing on the case of sexual violence against refugees in European refugee camps, this paper argues that there is a form of testimonial injustice—willful testimonial injustice—that is deliberate. To do so, the paper argues (a) that the hearer intentionally utilizes negative identity prejudices for a particular purpose and (b) that the hearer is aware of the fact that the intentionally used prejudices are in fact prejudices. Furthermore, the paper shows how testimonial injustice relates to recognition failures both in terms of a causal as well as a constitutive claim. In fact, introducing willful testimonial injustice can support the constitutive claim of such a relation that has so far received little attention. Besides arguing for a novel form of testimonial injustice and contributing to the recent debate on the relation between epistemic injustice and recognition failures, this paper is also motivated by the attempt to draw attention to the inhumane conditions for refugees at the border of Europe as well as elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper begins with the thought that there is something out of place about offloading inquiry into one's own mind to AI. The paper's primary goal is to articulate the unease felt when considering cases of doing so. It draws a parallel between the use of algorithms in the criminal law: in both cases one feels entitled to be treated as an exception to a verdict made on the basis of a certain kind of evidence. Then it identifies an account of first‐person authority that can make good on this: agentialism. Thus, the paper constitutes an argument in favor of an agentialist treatment of self‐knowledge and first‐person authority. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What role do human relationships play within the moral domain? There appears to be a lot of agreement that relationships play an important role in and for morality, but certainly not any foundational one. Yet, there has been a recent interest in seeking to explain the foundation of morality in relational terms. According to these relational proposals, the very foundation of impartial morality, and in particular the domain of "what we owe to each other" can be found in the same normative structures that are characteristic of interpersonal relationships and the partial reasons they give rise to. This suggestion has been met with serious criticism, according to which any seeming appeal to a so‐called moral relationship does no work in grounding morality and the obligations that we owe to each other. The present paper intends to challenge this conclusion by arguing that the objections rendered are not decisive, as a result of which we can begin to make sense of the idea that we do share a reason‐giving relationship with each other in the moral sphere. The moral relationship, the paper argues, is one we simply share with each other in virtue of our shared vulnerability to attitudinal injury as rational agents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An important yet often unacknowledged aspect of moral discourse is the phenomenon of moral impossibility, which challenges more widely accepted models of moral discussion and deliberation as a choice among possible options. Starting from observations of the new possibilities of anti‐immigrant attitudes and hate crimes which have been described by the press as something being "unleashed," the paper asks what it means for something to enter or not the sphere of possibility in the moral sense, and whether it is ever desirable for something to remain or be pushed back outside the realm of the morally possible. Three forms of moral impossibility are identified: the unconceived, the unthinkable, and moral incapacity. Through the discussion of a stark fictional example of moral impossibility, the paper concludes that while the category of moral impossibility cannot settle disagreement, it sheds light on some of the most fundamental aspects of moral life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper aims to contribute to the ongoing conversation on critical phenomenology with reflections on its method. The key argument is that critical phenomenology should be understood as a form of historico‐transcendental inquiry and therefore it cannot forgo the phenomenological reduction. Rather, this methodological step should be centered in critical phenomenology, and appropriated in problematized and rethought forms. The methodological assessment of critical phenomenology has implications also for how we read its canon. The paper shows that while Simone de Beauvoir did not adopt the phenomenological reduction in its full Husserlian meaning, her analyses of experience did not remain on the level of personal or experiential description either. The contention is that if we want to read her as a critical phenomenologist, we should focus on her seminal modification of the historico‐transcendental method of phenomenology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In section 24 of The Antichrist, Nietzsche notes a problem namely "the origin of Christianity." He offers two propositions toward its solution: the first is that "Christianity can only be understood on the soil where it grew:" and the second is that "the psychological type of the Galilean is still recognizable, but it had to assume a completely degenerate form (simultaneously mutilated and full of alien features) before it came to be used as a redeemer of humanity" (A 24). Significantly this passage suggests that the origins of Christianity rest on a reinterpretation of the type of the redeemer. This paper seeks to clarify the nature of such a modification and to identify some of its key ramifications. After clarifying the type, the paper argues that the type, thus understood, serves as a link between the texts On the Genealogy of Morality and The Antichrist and, as such, reveals the connection between Nietzsche's genealogical methods and the wider project of reevaluation. Though this reading is not the standard interpretive strategy, the paper argues that it is the strategy that Nietzsche himself recommends. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper has two main goals. The first is to defend a particular account of answerability according to which a person is (morally or criminally) answerable for their conduct if it is (morally or criminally) wrongful under the same description under which it is imputable to their agency. Negating defences in law aim to defeat criminal answerability by negating some element of the charged offence while their moral analogues aim to defeat moral answerability by defeating the aptness of the description under which an action is imputed. In contrast, affirmative defences and their moral analogues aim to defeat the move from answerability to liability to sanction by offering an exculpatory explanation for the wrongful conduct. The second goal of this paper is to argue that there are important differences between the way that ignorance functions in negating defences and their moral analogues and affirmative defences and their moral analogues. Specifically, when ignorance functions to defeat answerability, it need only be sincere, but it is typically limited to matters of fact, whereas both moral and non‐moral ignorance can excuse one from liability but only if non‐culpable. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Instrumentalism as a theory of practical reasoning has been both widely held and difficult to dethrone. The theory holds that good practical reasoning need only involve determining suitable means to pre‐determined ends. The theory is difficult to dethrone because critiques of it tend to specify aspects of reasoning that either do not seem practical, strictly speaking, or can be re‐described as a series of episodes of means‐end reasoning. Either way, instrumentalism dodges these criticisms raised against it. This paper presents a phenomenological argument that cannot be so dodged. The argument is this: practical reasoning is not merely instrumental because our considering an exemplary means to some end sometimes modifies our concept of that end within one and the same episode of practical deliberation. Such modification is possible because in any exercise of reason in which we apply a concept to a particular, the exemplarity of the particular can imbue our concept with new meaning. If exemplary means can modify our practical ends in this way, then instrumentalism is false. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent discussions of moral testimony have focused on the acceptability of forming beliefs on the basis of moral testimony, but there has been little acknowledgement of the limits to testimony's capacity to convey moral knowledge. In this paper I outline one such limit, drawing on Iris Murdoch's conception of private moral concepts. Such concepts, I suggest, plausibly play an important role in moral thought, and yet moral knowledge expressed in them cannot be testimonially acquired. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is divided into two parts. In the first I outline and defend Elizabeth Anscombe's claim that consequentialism is a shallow philosophy by considering how two contemporary consequentialists reach opposing but equally outlandish moral conclusions on a matter as fundamental as whether it is good or bad that the human race continues. In the second I argue that in order to show what is wrong with the consequentialist arguments presented in part one, we need to deploy a wider range of critical resources than what typically appears in contemporary analytic moral philosophy. One example of a relevant and under‐appreciated resource I then consider is satire as a mode of moral thought. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper attempts to clarify the relationship between conscience and bad conscience in the Second Essay of the Genealogy of Morality (GM II). Conscience, which Nietzsche calls the “will's memory” (GM II, 1), is a faculty that enables agents to generate and sustain the motivation necessary to honor commitments, while bad conscience is that “other gloomy thing” (GM II, 4), gloomy because it is a self‐punishing faculty that produces feelings of guilt. In addition to having different functions, conscience and bad conscience have distinct causal origins. Conscience originated as a memory of “I will nots” inculcated by punishment (GM II, 3), whereas bad conscience is produced by the process of “internalization” (GM II, 16)—not punishment (GM II, 14–15). It would seem to be possible, then, that an agent could have a conscience without having a bad conscience. The sovereign individual is sometimes interpreted in such terms. I argue that this separation is impossible, however. An agent would be incapable of generating and sustaining the motivation to honor commitments, thus having a conscience, without having undergone the process of internalization, necessitating the presence of bad conscience as well. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Much of contemporary metaethics revolves around the issue of “naturalism.” However, there is little agreement on what “naturalism” is or why it should be of significance. In this paper, I aim to rectify this situation by providing a set of necessary conditions on what positions ought to count as “naturalistic.” A metaethical view should count as an instance of naturalism only if it claims that there can be evidence for normative claims that is both public and spatiotemporal. I argue that, unlike other characterizations of “naturalism,” this view shows a clear difference between many metaethical positions and the sciences. The view thereby renders debates about naturalism philosophically significant: the division between naturalists and non‐naturalists is that between philosophers who hold that ethics is relevantly similar to the sciences and those who deny this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kant's most sustained discussion of obscure representations can be found in the first book of his Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View. What is puzzling is that in the middle of the section devoted to the topic, Kant asserts that “because this field can only be perceived in his passive side as a play of sensations, the theory of obscure representations belongs only to physiological anthropology, and so it is properly disregarded here.” So, do obscure representations belong to pragmatic anthropology or not? Kant's official position is that they do not, yet the textual evidence—we find discussions of obscure representations in 20 years of his work on pragmatic anthropology—suggests that they do, in fact, belong here. Most of the literature on obscure representations focuses on their contribution to cognition and none has clarified what it would mean to assume a “pragmatic point of view” on obscure representations, and to study them in the context of pragmatic anthropology. My aim in this paper is to provide such clarification, focusing on Kant's discussion of our propensity to “play with” obscure representations and what he calls our “art of obscuring.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that Nietzsche is deliberately imprecise in his characterization of what he calls the slave revolt in morality. In particular, none of the people or groups he nominates as instigators of the slave revolt, namely, Jewish priests, the Jewish people, the prophets, Jesus, and Paul, were literally slaves. Analysis of Nietzsche's texts, including his usage of the term “slaves,” and his sources concerning those he nominates as the instigators of the slave revolt, make clear that Nietzsche knew none of these were literally slaves. He calls it a slave revolt because he means that the propagators of that revolt preached what he takes to be the slavish values, including, humility, compassion, obedience, and lack of egoism. He uses the high loaded term “slave” both to disparage those values and, most importantly, to bring home to his readers the message that they, as inheritors of Judeo‐Christian values, actual adhere to and practice the debased slavish values preached, but not necessarily practiced, by the original instigators of the slave revolt. For Nietzsche, his readers are strangers to themselves, thus he notes “slavery is everywhere visible, although it does not call itself as such.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper defends a version of the view that agency is a causal power, the “causing view.” After sketching the view, and explaining how it differs from its rivals, various challenges are assessed. A family of objections says that causing change is neither necessary nor sufficient for acting. The second challenge centers on an Aristotelian thesis about the relation between an action (A's opening a window) and the corresponding passion (the window's being opened by A). The final objection concerns the dynamic nature of acting: the claim is that a causal view of agency cannot accommodate actions “in progress” or mere activity. I conclude that none of the objections examined presents unsurmountable problems for the causal view of agency which, at least in the version here defended, remains a highly plausible and attractive view. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do we justify the normative standards to which we appeal in support of our moral progress judgments, given their historical and cultural contingency? To answer this question in a noncircular way, Elizabeth Anderson and Philip Kitcher appeal exclusively to formal features of the methodology by which a moral change was brought about; some moral methodologies are systematically less prone to bias than others and are therefore less vulnerable to error. However, we argue that the methodologies espoused by Anderson and Kitcher implicitly appeal to the substantive principle of “moral universalism.” This sets up the positive project of the paper: an attempt to vindicate moral universalism with a pragmatic genealogy. Using resources from cultural evolutionary theory and the history of ideas we argue that the universalistic norms widely committed to in many societies today have the function of maintaining cooperation in large anonymous groups. Furthermore, while universalistic norms play this instrumental role, their functional benefits are best secured when people following such norms do so for intrinsic rather than instrumental reasons. Finally, having elaborated our pragmatic genealogy, we close by considering how this genealogy should affect our commitment to moral universalism and how it can complement the methods of Anderson and Kitcher. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Defenders of two Rationality Views of love—the Qualities View and the Personhood View—have drawn on Iris Murdoch's philosophical writings to highlight a connection between love and a “realistic” perspective on the beloved. Murdoch does not inform the basic structure of these views—she is rather introduced as a supplement who shows that in love, we pay accurate, nuanced, unguarded, and unflinching attention to the other. In this paper, I contend that these authors have failed to see that Murdoch offers a distinct view of love and is inappropriate to enlist as an ally. This is in large part because they have missed the full sense of what Murdoch means by connecting love and realism. I contend that for Murdoch, to love someone means seeing them in light of a realistic vision of what it means to be human; this includes an appreciation of the limits of freedom, the formative influence of personal history, and the nature and extent of our differences from one another. This helps us to see why Murdoch variously describes loving attention as realistic, compassionate, tolerant, and extremely difficult. It also sheds light on some important and familiar ways that we criticize one another's grounds for love. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Withdrawal involves emotional pain that motivates much addictive behavior. In this paper, I argue that the emotional pain of withdrawal compels much addictive behavior. Researchers have noticed this possibility but it is widely underappreciated. Among philosophers, only Hanna Pickard has discussed emotional compulsion in addiction, and the emotional aspect of withdrawal has been almost completely neglected. Accounts of emotional compulsion in the philosophical literature (from Tappolet, Elster, and Furrow) probably do not capture how the distress of withdrawal compels, so I propose a more suitable account of “pathodoxastic” compulsion in addiction. On this account, the emotional pain of withdrawal compels when it undermines the ability to believe that one can continue to endure it, and therefore the ability to intend abstinence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I offer an original interpretation of Marx's conception of unalienated labor, which I frame as a response to Aristotle's view of work, or technē. Both Aristotle and Marx share a particular conception of freedom as “normative self‐determination,” according to which an activity is free insofar as it does not depend for its value on externally valuable things. For instance, when my activity is a mere means for satisfying some need separate from it, it comes to depend for its value on the externally valuable effect—the “needs‐meeting”—it achieves. Or, when my activity is only causally—but not normatively—enabled by the cooperative contributions of others, it comes to depend for its value on those externally valuable contributions. On Aristotle's view, work is unleisurely (ascholos) and servile (doulos) because it is normatively dependent in both of these ways. For Marx, by contrast, work possesses the capacity to “internalize” these external determinants of its value. Unalienated work does this, first, by satisfying “internal” needs, or needs whose satisfaction does not constitute a normatively external effect of the work that satisfies them. The satisfaction of internal needs is valuable because of the manner or way in which they are satisfied. Second, unalienated work would not only be causally, but also normatively, enabled by the contributions of others, in that those contributions would help to make it the distinctively valuable act that it is. Unalienated work would be valuable because, and not despite, its cooperative character. In both of these respects, then, cooperation is essential to make work fully free. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

My aim in this paper is to show that the natural idea that humiliation is harmful calls explanation and to argue that the most straightforward ways of responding to this explanatory demand fall short in important ways. I end by considering a line of response which I take to be promising, which appeals to our need, as social animals, for interpersonal connection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Should moral blame stop at the grave? We often blame the dead for the bad things they did while alive. But blaming the dead poses a prima facie challenge to accounts which take our blaming practices to aim at communicating moral disapproval to wrongdoers or at improving their moral agency. If these kinds of aims are made definitional for blame, blaming the dead becomes impossible. But even on accounts which say that paradigmatically, blame is a form of moral engagement which aims to effect changes in the wrongdoer, blaming the dead may seem unjustified, pointless or even irrational. In this paper, I explain how blaming the dead can be made sense of and justified. However, not all cases of blaming the dead fit this explanation, because blaming the dead is not a homogenous practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The topic of imaginative resistance attracted considerable philosophical attention in recent years. Yet, with a few exceptions, no historical investigation of the phenomenon has been carried out. This paper amends this gap in the literature by constructing a Humean and a Kantian explanation. The main contributions of this historical analysis to this debate are to make room for emotions in explanations of resistance reactions and to upset the polarization between rival accounts by suggesting that our possible responses to morally flawed works can vary. In some cases, we resist imagining counter‐evaluative claims due to our unwillingness to do so, and in others, due to our inability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I defend a tripartite metaphysics of intentional mental states, according to which mental states are divided into subject, content, and attitude, against recent attempts at eliminating the attitude component (e.g., Montague, Oxford studies in philosophy of mind, 2022, 2, Oxford University Press). I suggest that a metaphysics composed of only subject and content cannot account for (a) multisensory perceptual experiences and (b) phenomenological differences between episodes of perception and imagination. Finally, I suggest that some of the motivations behind the rejection of the attitude component can be accommodated within the tripartite framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite periods of resurgence over the last decades, it is safe to say that transcendental arguments no longer enjoy a prominent presence in the philosophical landscape. One reason for their declining prominence is the sustained suspicion that despite their self‐proclaimed metaphysical neutrality, transcendental arguments are, in fact, metaphysically committed. This paper aims to revive the discussion of transcendental considerations by offering a metaphysically neutral account of transcendental arguments. I argue that a metaphysically neutral conception of transcendental arguments requires a revision of two concepts constitutive of transcendental claims, namely, transcendental necessity and the a priori. I propose a transcendental reading of Wittgenstein's On Certainty, which, I maintain, provides us with an alternative, metaphysically neutral understanding of these concepts. Thus revised, transcendental claims are suitable for what Mark Sacks once described as the "post‐metaphysical" orientation of contemporary philosophy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Perception plays a central and wide‐ranging role in the philosophy of Margaret Cavendish. In this paper, I argue that Cavendish holds a naïve realist theory of perception. The case draws on what Cavendish has to say about perceptual presentation, the role of sympathy in experience, the natures of hallucination and of illusion, and the individuation of kinds. While Cavendish takes perception to have representational content, I explain how this is consistent with naïve realism. In closing, I address challenges to the interpretation, one of which turns on whether Cavendish allows for action at a distance. I argue that she does. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What would it take for the European Union (EU) to be in the service of social justice as much as it can be required to be? This paper argues that the EU has a duty to further social justice within its member states, and that its main avenue for discharging this duty should be to incentivise and facilitate the adoption, extension, and maintenance of just welfare policies, which, so it suggests, consist of universal and egalitarian such policies. This proposals contrasts both with a more integrationist approach, according to which welfare policies within the EU should be, to a significant extent, supranationalised; and with an internationalist proposal, according to which the EU should mainly preserve, and extend, member states' freedom to act in a globalised world economy, and generate economic benefits which these states might, or might not, employ to further internal justice. The argument of the paper demonstrates that this proposal has important advantages over these two rival approaches, and that a principled and plausible justification for it is to be found within an extended internationalist framework for theorising social justice. It concludes by considering what kind of EU policies its adoption might call for, in practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What principles of social justice apply to the European Union? This paper has three parts that together challenge Philippe Van Parijs's most recent proposals for how to think about justice in Europe. For Van Parijs, the EU represents an opportunity to begin globalizing a universal basic income that should, in time, be extended to the whole planet. In the first part of this paper, I recapitulate Van Parijs's main line of argument. In the second, I query the philosophical grounds for Van Parijs's argument that the EU must become a fully‐fledged federal transfer union—a union, that is, that aims to attain an egalitarian distribution across all European citizens taken as individuals (rather than as members of nation‐states). In the third, I challenge whether a European Basic Income—the euro‐dividend—would work, as a policy, in quite the way envisaged by Van Parijs. I then conclude with some implications for how to think about justice for the EU. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anscombe distinguishes two notions of "self‐conscious": the philosophical notion, which refers to the special form of awareness one has of oneself as oneself, and the ordinary notion, which we employ when we speak of "feeling self‐conscious before another". My aim in this paper is to show that ordinary self‐consciousness cannot be understood in terms of either of the forms of intersubjective relation standardly acknowledged in the philosophical literature. It cannot be understood reductively, in terms of the psychological states of each subject nor can it be understood in terms of an irreducible second personal relation. Instead, I argue that in order to understand the phenomenological structure of ordinary self‐consciousness, we must rehabilitate Sartre's thought that when I am conscious of myself as being the object of another's gaze, I experience myself as being acted upon by them, in such a way that what I experience them as doing to me and what I experience myself as thereby undergoing are two aspects of an irreducible interpersonal transaction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I discuss the different views of the founders of descriptive psychology in the 19th century about the meaning and purpose of this discipline and sketch a new plan for connecting descriptive psychology with the language‐critical tradition of analytic philosophy. I will show that the goals Hermann Lotze, Franz Brentano, and Wilhelm Dilthey set for descriptive psychology were too lofty for different reasons. The common problem they faced was how to reconcile the ideal of autonomous philosophical knowledge with the empirical relevance that descriptive psychology should have. Faced with this dilemma, I outline a new plan to conceive of descriptive psychology as a critical project aimed at overcoming the obstacles that language places in the way of our knowledge of mental phenomena. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Brentano clearly asserts, in his Vienna lectures of 1887–1888, that his descriptive psychology is an a priori or "exact" science. Since he rejects Kant's idea of a synthetic a priori, this means that the descriptive psychologist's laws are analytic. My aim in this paper is to clarify and discuss this view. I examine Brentano's epistemology in the Psychology from an Empirical Standpoint and then its later developments. I conclude with a difficulty inherent in Brentano's psychological approach to a priori knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The motivation problem as normally conceived is a problem about explaining the special connection between moral judgment and motivation. This understanding of the problem has structured a great deal of thinking in contemporary metaethics and moral psychology. For example, claims about the special motivational import of moral judgment have figured as central premises in the most influential arguments for noncognitivism. But debates about moral motivation have eventuated in seemingly intractable disputes between internalists and externalists about, for example, the possibility of genuine amoralism. In this paper, I motivate a new way forward, which draws underappreciated insights from philosophical thinking about the irrationality of akrasia. One central lesson is that discussions of the motivation problem should move away from the focus on moral judgment specifically. A more controversial and radical proposal is that the traditional motivation problem can be dissolved. Contra externalists, there is one fundamental and necessary connection between judgment and motivation. But this connection—a connection between all things considered normative judgment and motivation in rational agents—in fact requires no special explanation at all. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues that the diagnostic import of Adorno's culture industry writings lie in their psychoanalytically rooted claim that contemporary culture is losing its ability to negate and reconfigure experience, due to the modern subject's instrumentalized relationship to culture. Adorno uses psychoanalytic ideas—namely, modified and historicized versions of Freud's theory of the instincts, ego formation, the reality principle, and the superego—to show that changes in the social organization of the psyche, which track the transition from myth to enlightenment, put the ego in a precarious position, torn between a primal fear of nature that drives it to submit to society, and internalized fear of its own internal nature, as well as of losing itself in society. This explains how culture becomes a resource capable of being mobilized by the ego's defense mechanisms of identification and introjection to shore up its own sense of solidity, thereby negating culture's potential for transcendence or transformation. This paper concludes with a coda that suggests that, while rejecting Adorno's metacritique of the reason is not sufficient grounds for rejecting the culture industry, critical theorists like Habermas and Honneth may have other tools at their disposal for contesting its conclusions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Consider two features of Hermann Cohen's critical philosophy. First, using what Cohen calls the transcendental method, critical philosophy aims to identify formal conditions of experience that are universally, and so timelessly, valid. Second, detailed, context‐sensitive surveys of the history of science and philosophy are ubiquitous in his accounts of those formal conditions. This paper argues for two claims about how those two features of Cohen's philosophy fit together. First, Cohen holds the striking view that, while philosophy aims to discover and investigate principles that are timelessly valid, it must nevertheless use historical investigation to do so. Second, Cohen has the resources to explain why, on his view, history must play this role in philosophy. This paper uses a genealogical strategy to locate that explanation in Cohen's writings: it traces views of history held by various of Cohen's teachers and shows that Cohen combines and develops those ideas to produce just the explanation needed. Ultimately, the underlying reasoning of Cohen's explanation is this. The history of science has a teleological structure, and as it unfolds, knowledge becomes increasingly universal. But then, elements of scientific theories that remain stable across a succession of increasingly universal theories will be plausible candidates for or approximations of the strictly universal formal conditions of experience. The critical philosopher is thus required to attend to the history of science to identify plausible candidates for those formal conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper offers an interpretation of Aristotle's concepts of dynamis and energeia (commonly translated as potentiality and actuality) and of the thematic progression of Metaphysics IX. I first raise the question of where motion fits in Aristotle's categories and argue that the locus of motion in the system of categories are the categories of doing and suffering, in which case dynamis and energeia in respect of motion can also be understood as the dynamis and energeia of doing and suffering. Next, I argue that the analogy that Aristotle draws in IX.6 is an analogy between the dynamis and energeia of doing and suffering and the dynamis and energeia of substance. Finally, I try to show that it is this analogy between the kinetic and nonkinetic variants of dynamis and energeia—and not the distinction between end‐inclusive and end‐exclusive activities—that provides the key to understanding the structure of Metaphysics IX. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this paper is to situate Kant in the debate on free will. Whereas Kantians often assume that Kant's views on free will cannot be brought under any of the headings of this debate, contemporary free will theorists commonly assume that Kant is an incompatibilist of the libertarian type. I argue against both assumptions: Kant can and should be characterized as a compatibilist and more specifically as a soft determinist. After removing some persistent misconceptions about Kant's position in the free will debate, I contend that Kant affirms the truth of determinism, that he rejects the possibility of libertarian free will and that he considers the sort of freedom required for moral responsibility to be compatible with determinism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we discuss the inherent temporal orientation of fear, a matter on which philosophers seem to have contrasting opinions. According to some, fear is inherently present‐oriented; others instead maintain that it is inherently future‐oriented or that it has no inherent temporal orientation at all. Despite the differences, however, all these views seem to understand fear's temporal orientation as one‐dimensional—that is, as uniquely determined by the represented temporal location of the intentional object of fear. By contrast, we present a view that introduces a two‐dimensional account of fear's temporal orientation. On such a view, we can say that fear is inherently future‐oriented, independently of its being about something in the present or the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reconstructs Sellars' theory of "sensation" or "sense impression," positioning it in relation to his theoretical distinction between the Manifest and Scientific Image. Though Sellars' account of "sensation" has been a widely neglected part of his thought, it is central not only to his theory of perception but also to understanding his confrontation with traditional accounts of sensing (from Descartes to C.I. Lewis and Husserl). In this article, I first show that Sellars' argument for introducing the notion of "sensation" into his theoretical system should be understood as distinctly explanatory, rather than transcendental or phenomenological. After outlining this argument and analyzing its significance, I explore Sellars' adverbialist construal of "sensation" and its implications in relation to contemporaneous and current forms of adverbialism. Finally, in the last part of the paper, I illuminate how Sellars situates his conceptual framework for "sensations" (correctly understood) in the Manifest Image theory of perception. Highlighting Sellars' understanding of the process by which the Manifest Image substitutes sensation in the Scientific Image, I clarify Sellars' obscure notion of "sensa," then conclude with a comprehensive account of his stereoscopic view of the phenomenon of sensing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I develop Paul Redding's suggestion that Peircean abduction and Hegel's discussion of the syllogism can be seen as a working out of Kant's treatment of the reflecting power of judgment, particularly concerning its role in conceptual change. After some historical background I regiment a use of singular terms, kind terms, and predicates across Hegel's three syllogistic figures and reconstruct an account of comprehension and extension for this system suggested by Peirce. In doing so I show that reasoning according to the ampliative syllogistic figures affects the content of these three classes of terms in precise ways. I close with a treatment of inference by analogy (associated by Hegel with the third syllogistic figure) as an exercise of reflection, and I discuss two cases in the history of science, one in astronomy and the other in biology, where a reflective exercise associated with analogical inference revised our understanding of the domain in question. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper sets out a phenomenological account of what it is to feel unable to continue as oneself. I distinguish the feeling that a particular identity has become unsustainable from a sense that the world has ceased to offer the kinds of possibilities required to sustain any such identity. In feeling unable to continue as oneself, possibilities may remain for carrying on in practically meaningful ways but not as who one is or was. I reflect on the kinds of self and feeling involved in such experiences, emphasizing the essential openness of self‐experience to transformative possibilities and the dynamic structure of feeling. To illustrate and further develop my approach, I turn to experiences of grief. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]