International Philosophical Quarterly

In this article I examine the ethical concept of responsibility as presented by Emmanuel Levinas and Karol Wojtyła. I focus throughout on questions pertaining to the relations between identity and alterity and between heteronomy and autonomy. To do so involves looking at the contrary roles that these two authors give to selfhood and freedom when accounting for our sense of obligation and responsibility toward others and toward ourselves. I then put Levinas’s phenomenological account of responsibility into dialogue with Wojtyła’s personalist account in an examination of the question of animal ethics. Specifically, I discuss the extent to which their ideas on our responsibilities toward others can be extended to the domain of non-human animals.

In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran provides a fascinating account of how we know what we believe that he calls the “transparency account.” This account relies on the transparency relation between the question of whether we believe that p and the question of whether p is true. That is, we can consider the former by considering the grounds for the latter. But Moran’s account has been criticized by David Finkelstein, who argues that it fails to explain how we know our attitudes and emotions more generally. The aim of this paper is to show how Moran’s transparency account can be extended to meet this criticism by modifying it, using insights from Davidson’s view on attitudes and emotions.

This essay touches on the following topics: imagination, caprice, relative and absolute presuppositions, language, knowledge, moral and aesthetic values, art, evolution, and dreams. Collingwood distinguished between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness and identified four features of consciousness: forms (simple or primitive, practical, and theoretical or specialized), objects, feelings, and selective attention or focus. He also spoke of the corruption of consciousness that psychologists of his day called repression. This is a way in which we can falsify consciousness that can lead to inauthentic thinking and to error. The phenomenological description of these processes that he gave us is a promising over-all account. This essay also utilizes some of the contemporary literature on consciousness to draw comparisons and contrasts with Collingwood’s account. As a historical note, it offers some parallels between Leibniz and Collingwood on attention, awareness, and consciousness.

If Wittgenstein’s later writings have implications for ontological investigations, they would appear to center on the thought that metaphysical claims, along with ontological commitments more broadly conceived, are problematically distanced from our everyday activities of language use and the contexts these involve. If they are taken in this way, it can seem natural to view them as furnishing a basis for thinking that ontological realism, at least when construed as metaphysically motivated, can be ruled out on linguistic-conceptual and/or ethical grounds as incompatible with how language figures in our lives. This paper argues against such a conclusion by claiming that on each of the currently prevalent approaches to interpreting Wittgenstein’s later thought, if we construe him as essentially an anti-dogmatic thinker, then we cannot draw such implications from his work without uncharitably attributing to him an internally inconsistent stance—one involving some sort of dogmatic commitment itself.

In this paper I argue that the right to equal respect and consideration that Rawls incorporates into the original position by means of the veil of ignorance cannot provide support for his two principles of justice independently of an appeal to considered judgments. The trouble is that this right is intolerably vague. The crucial terms are neither transparent in meaning nor clearly definable, and so they can only be understood against a background of considered judgments. To the extent that the principle is kept vague, it places no constraints on the conditions of the original position. To the extent that its meaning is specified, its interpretation presupposes the very principles and considered judgments that are supposed to be independently justified by the device of the original position. Finally, I respond to Norm Daniels’s claim that “wide reflective equilibrium” provides a way to test moral principles independently of their respective considered judgments.

Accounts of flourishing have been employed in many disciplines. Aristotelian moral philosophers have developed accounts of flourishing based on the characteristic forms of life of living things. In this paper we develop an Aristotelian account of flourishing for living things in general as part of a larger Aristotelian natural philosophy. We relate accounts of flourishing to evolutionary theory, behavioral studies, and ecology as well as to what flourishing is for individual organisms in their parts and activities. We distinguish between contingent and determinate activities by arguing that the behavior of living things are their contingent activities. We consider the structure of cognitive capacities in living things and their relation to flourishing, and we follow out the implications of the distinctively human capacities of cognition. Our consideration of humankind alloww us to show that the study and practice of human flourishing entail stewardship of nature.