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The Harvard Review of Philosophy
ONLINE FIRST ARTICLES
Articles forthcoming in in this journal are available Online First prior to publication. More details about Online First and how to use and cite these articles can be found HERE.
June 28, 2017
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Moises Vaca
The Contractualist Dilemma
first published on June 28, 2017
In moral and political philosophy many contractualist views appeal to hypothetical consent when justifying their proposed normative contents. In this paper I argue that all of them fail. In particular, I defend three claims. First, I consider and develop what I call the common objection to contractualism: that the stipulation of a hypothetical consent adds nothing to the independent reasons offered in contractualist procedures in favor of the normative content in question. Second, I hold that this objection gives rise to what I call the contractualist dilemma. Third, in light of the dilemma, I argue that contractualism should be understood in a non-justificatory way. These three claims might sound familiar to readers versed on the contractualist tradition. It is striking, however, how many contemporary authors continue to defend contractualism as a method of justification despite these arguments. This paper is thus a strong invitation to finally abandon the justificatory interpretation of this view.
June 17, 2017
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Jonardon Ganeri
What Is Philosophy? A Cross-cultural Conversation in the Crossroads Court of Chosroes
first published on June 17, 2017
Three rival conceptions of philosophy overlap, we may imagine, in the Sassinid court of Chosroes (r. 531–579). One is due to Priscian, a refugee from Athens after Justinian’s closing of the philosophical schools. A second and third are from India: the Buddhist conception of Vasubandhu and the Nyāya view of Vātsyāyana. I will argue that the rivalry between these three understandings of philosophy ultimately rests in three different conceptions of what makes an inner life one’s own.
June 14, 2017
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John Heil
Real Agency
first published on June 14, 2017
Peter van Inwagen’s Consequence Argument makes salient the difficulties facing attempts to reconcile determinism and agency. Others go further. Derk Pereboom, for instance, contends that science provides compelling evidence that no action is free, and Galen Strawson argues that conditions for genuinely free action are flatly unsatisfiable. Against such skepticism about free will, the paper introduces considerations in support of the idea that there are probably good reasons to think that conditions for free actions—real agency—are sometimes satisfied, that ascriptions of agency are sometimes true, but that truthmakers for these ascriptions could be wholly deterministic in a way that might seem to, but does not in fact, place them at odds with the possibility of genuinely free action.
June 10, 2017
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Naomi Zack
Starting from Injustice Justice, Applicative Justice, and Injustice Theory
first published on June 10, 2017
Political philosophers have traditionally focused on justice and regarded equality as an ideal despite its lack of factual support; normative universal human equality is a new, twentieth-century regulative moral construct. The theoretical focus on justice overlooks what most people care about in reality—injustice. In modern democratic society, formal or legal equality now co-exists with real inequality. One reason is that justice is not applied to all groups in society and applicative justice––applying justice to those who don’t now receive it––is a remedy. But injustice theory also includes other forms of injustice such as legal, humanitarian, and injustice without blame or responsibility.
May 23, 2017
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Maria Svedberg, Torbjörn Tännsjö
Consequentialism and Free Will The Conditional Analysis Resuscitated
first published on May 23, 2017
Many moral theories incorporate the idea that when an action is wrong, it is wrong because that there was something else that the agent could and should have done instead. Most notable among these are consequentialist theories. According to consequentialism an action A is wrong if and only if there was another action B that the agent could have performed such that, if the agent had performed B instead of A, the consequences would have been better. Relatively little attention has been given to the question of how to understand the meaning of ‘could have’ in this specific context. However, without an answer to this question, consequentialist theories fail to yield determinate verdicts about the deontic status of actions in real scenarios. It is here argued that the following conditional analysis provides the required answer and gives us the most plausible version of consequentialism: the agent could have done B instead of A if and only if, there is a decision such that had the agent made this decision, then she would have done B, and not A. Such a conditional analysis has been universally rejected as an analysis of the general meaning of ‘could have’, but we show that in the specific context of specifying the meaning of ‘could have’ in a consequentialist criterion of right and wrong action, all the standard objections to it fail.
May 10, 2017
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Guillermo Hurtado
The Dialogue as an Adventure
first published on May 10, 2017
How can believers and unbelievers engage in a fruitful dialogue? In order to answer this question from a postsecular position, it is claimed that a profound dialogue between believers and unbelievers requires them to go beyond openness and reach adventurousness.
October 26, 2016
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John R. Searle
The Ontology of Human Civilization
first published on October 26, 2016
The basic elements in the ontology of human civilization are status functions. Those are functions that can be performed not in virtue of physical structure alone but only in virtue of collective acceptance by the community of a certain status. Money, property, government and marriage are all examples of status functions. Status functions are all created by repeated applications of the same logical operation, in a preliminary formulation: X counts as Y in context C.
On examination it emerges that all status functions are created by a certain kind of representation that has a logical form of a speech act that I call a “Status Function Declaration.” These are explained.
This lecture was delivered without notes and the current publication is very informal. I hope the reader will forgive the informality.
October 18, 2016
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Aaron James
On the Philosophical Interest and Surprising Significance of the Asshole
first published on October 18, 2016
The term “asshole” might be of interest to philosophers for several reasons. It displays the power of philosophy to expose the implicit structure of ordinary thought. It suggests why we should not be able to answer certain skeptics on their own terms. It corroborates the idea of an “internal” connection between moral judgment and motivation. And it raises doubts about expressivism where it has the best chance of being true.
October 15, 2016
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Richard Moran
Stanley Cavell on Recognition, Betrayal, and the Photographic Field of Expression
first published on October 15, 2016
The ideas of expression and expressiveness have been central to Stanley Cavell’s writing from the beginning, joining themes from his more strictly philosophical writing to the role of human expression as projected in cinema. This paper explores a thread running through several different parts of his writing, relating claims he makes about the photographic medium of film and its implications for the question of expression and expressivity in film There is an invocation of notions of necessity and control in the context of cinema that should be understood in the context of related ideas in his writings on Wittgenstein and others. The paper pursues some thoughts about the power of the camera, the themes of activity and passivity in expression, and the human face as the privileged field of such activity and passivity.
October 13, 2016
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Derek Parfit
Personal and Omnipersonal Duties
first published on October 13, 2016
This paper’s main aim is to discuss the relations between our duties and moral aims at different times, and between different people’s moral aims and duties. The paper is unfinished because it was written as part of an intended chapter in the third volume of my book On What Matters, and I later decided to drop this chapter. That is why this paper asks some questions which it doesn’t answer. But though this paper does not end with some general conclusions, it defends some particular conclusions.
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