Josef Seifert and John F. Crosby are the two main proponents of applied material value-ethics. Both reject all forms of suicide and abortion. Seifert also explicitly rejects euthanasia, torture, destructive stem-cell research, genetic enhancement, in vitro fertilization, and contraception. Crosby explicitly rejects spousal in vitro fertilization and spousal contraception. In this essay I examine whether their case should be regarded as convincing. Against Seifert, and possibly also against Crosby, I show why it definitely should not.

In this paper we shall consider whether John Rawls’s treatment of Ignatius of Loyola is a fair one. Rawls claims in A Theory of Justice that Catholic theology (and Ignatius’s theology in particular) aims at a “dominant end” of serving God that overrides other moral considerations. Rawls argues that dominant end views lead to a disfigured self and a disregard for justice. We do not question Rawls on the normative issue of whether dominant end conceptions are untenable, but rather on his factual claim that Ignatian spirituality and Catholic theology in general presupposes a dominant end view as he defines it. The Loyola whom Rawls attacks in Theory of Justice is a straw-man. Ignatian spirituality and Catholic theology in general embraces something closer to an inclusive end view, since it argues that several different ways of virtuous living can lead to happiness.

To see the ethical as a space that is immune to luck, it seems that we must see it as a space that is utterly inner, locked away inside the cabinet of consciousness. If, on the other hand, we wish to see the space of the ethical as extending into the world, it seems that we must see it as being vulnerable to luck. Kierkegaard and his pseudonyms steer us through this dilemma by extending the space of the ethical into the world while also inoculating it against luck. For Kierkegaard, an action is a single thing with two aspects, one under which it is seen in terms of movements of the will, and another under which it is seen in terms of movements in the world. Given the structure of the Kierkegaardian ethical project, these movements are immune to luck since they can always achieve their ethical aims: they can always count as doing what one’s ideal self would do.

This paper argues that the structural obscurity in Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment reflects his tacit employment of three correlated but distinct notions: necessity considered as the universal validity of the judgment of taste; necessity considered as a feature of the judgment itself; and necessity considered as a feature of the mental free harmony that obtains in judging certain forms with taste. These distinctions have not been sufficiently recognized by commentators so far. Clarification of these three notions can shed new light on the structure of the first part of Kant’s third Critique as well as on debates over the plausibility of his claims regarding taste.

The relationship between Kant’s “Doctrine of Right” and his broader moral philosophy is a fraught one, with some readers insisting that the two domains are mutually supporting parts of a cohesive practical philosophy and others arguing for their conceptual and legislative independence. In this paper I investigate the reasons for this disparity and argue that both main interpretive camps are mistaken, for Kant’s Rechtslehre can neither be reconciled to his moral philosophy nor stand on its own. I argue that this failure results from Kant’s confused attempt to define the sphere of right as one that functions independently of (yet analogously to) the moral domain through the construction of non-moral yet categorical imperatives. The result is a fundamental tension in Kant’s text that can only be solved through either collapsing juridical duties into broad moral duties or denying any categorical status to duties of right.

The absence of any discussion of the virtue of piety in Plato’s Republic has been much remarked, but there are textual clues by which to recognize its importance for Plato’s construction and for the book’s intended effect. This dialogue is Socrates’s repetition, on the day after the first festival of Bendis, of a liturgical action that he undertook—at his own expense, at the “vote” of his “city”—on the previous day. Socrates’s activity in repeating it the next day is an “ethological” mimesis of properly pious liturgy. In the course of that liturgy we find that piety is specifically discussed, but in a (mimetic) mirror, and darkly (in its absence). The mirror of piety is the laws about stories of the gods. The absence is in the (missing) discussion of the best city, that is, one above aristocracy.

After the emergence of the neo-Thomist movement in the early twentieth century, the question of how best to present Aquinas’s latent epistemological realism came to the fore. Léon Noël was an important contributor to this area of neo-Thomism, but his work has unfortunately been eclipsed by that of other more recognizable authors such as Etienne Gilson and Jacques Maritain. Noël argued that Aquinas’s realism is a form of immediate realism that recognizes the challenge of modern representationalist epistemologies but does not succumb to non-realist ways of thinking. Hence Noël presented immediate realism as an epistemological position that is inspired by Aquinas but also capable of addressing philosophical concerns that emerged after his death. In this article I present Noël’s view as interesting in its own right and capable of engaging with contemporary non-Thomist trends in epistemology.

Whether and how truth is a norm of belief is a contentious issue in contemporary epistemology. In this paper I retrieve Aquinas’s conception of truth in order to advance a new answer to the question of what grounds the truth-norm. I begin by contrasting the two dominant contemporary accounts of this grounding, showing ways in which each succeeds and fails. Unlike the currently dominant accounts, my account seeks to ground the truth-norm in the nature of truth, as opposed to the nature of belief. Ultimately I argue that Aquinas’s conception of truth furnishes us with an account of the grounding of the truth-norm that satisfies three conditions of adequacy. Such an account (1) grounds the truth-norm in the nature of truth, (2) captures the breadth of epistemic evaluation, and (3) makes sense of the fact that truth is a norm specifically for the human person.

Occasionalism is the doctrine that relegates all real causal efficacy exclusively to God. This paper will aim to elucidate in some detail the metaphysical considerations that, together with certain common medieval theological axioms, constitute the philosophical steps leading to this doctrine. First, I will explain how the doctrine of divine conservation implies that we should attribute to divine power causal immediacy in every natural event and that it rules out mere conservationism as a model of the causal relation between God and nature. This leaves concurrentism and occasionalism as the only compatible options. Then I will explain the argument that since no coherent conception of divine concurrence is possible, occasionalism emerges as the only model of the causal relation between God and nature compatible with the doctrine of divine conservation.

In the Critique of the Teleological Power of Judgment Kant argues that organisms have inner purposiveness. He introduces inner purposiveness in contrast to relative purposiveness. I examine Kant’s discussion of relative purposiveness in §63. I then argue that Kant establishes three theses in §63 that he subsequently modifies in §64 and further refines in §65. In my view, his discussion of relative purposiveness serves a broader purpose than just to present a contrast from which to consider inner purposiveness. The discussion of relative purposiveness establishes a framework for a sustained thread of argument from §63 through §65, culminating in Kant’s often discussed claim that we must judge organisms to be natural ends. My interpretation exposes a more significant argumentative role for relative purposiveness than is typically recognized.

There is a growing interest in the role of non-cognitive affective responses in the philosophical literature on fiction and emotion. This flurry of scholarly interest is partly a reaction to cognitivist accounts of fiction and emotion that have been found to be inadequate. The inadequacy is particularly salient when this approach is employed to account for narrative horror. Cognitivist conceptions of the emotion engendered by narrative horror prove to be too restrictive. Cognitivist accounts also fail to give the formal devices and stylistic elements deployed in narrative horror a proper place within the spectator’s emotional engagement with it. In this paper I propose an alternative conception of the emotion “horror” that incorporates non-cognitive affective responses. I argue that this conception of “horror” is more fine-grained than the one characterized as a cognitivist approach. It captures more literary examples of the horror experience and it accommodates better the fear of the unknown. It also makes possible an aesthetics of horror in which formal devices and stylistic elements are given their proper place.

Science has uncovered many mistakes that had been hidden for centuries among implicit everyday assumptions. When we make explicit what lies implicit within language, there is no guarantee that we will arrive at truth about the world. Many therefore assume that only science delivers truth. Recent debates on this issue often refer to Wilfred Sellars’s arguments against the pre-conceptual given but conclude that his additional insistence on the exclusivity of the scientific image of the world is unfounded. In this paper I resort to Robert Brandom’s development of these arguments to show that saying a word, understanding a concept and engaging in some practices go together. Both laws of nature and social norms regulate these practices and determine the identity conditions of objects. I argue therefore that the conceptual scheme indeed reflects the nature of things because it results from our successful engagement with the world during the long sweep of evolutionary time.

Neil Levy has argued that “superlative meaning” can be attained only through “inherently open-ended” projects. This implies a two-tier system of meaning: one for elites, the other for ordinary people. It sets lives characterized by “open-ended” work over and against those that find meaning in commonplace sources, e.g., personal relationships. I argue that Levy’s argument rests on two mistakes. First, it confuses two senses of “superlative meaning”—superlative abundance and superlative safety. Even if his argument succeeds, it merely shows that certain sorts of work produce the most reliably meaningful lives rather than the most abundantly meaningful. Second, contra Levy, who assumes that only work can generate superlative meaning, I build on Thaddeus Metz’s argument that loving relationships can count as superlatively meaningful. I argue that recognition of this point undermines the philosophical basis for Levy’s two-tier system of meaning. Ordinary lives are not doomed to be second-class meaningful lives.

John Norris’s novel and compelling theory on the soul’s immortality is both a central element of his overall philosophical vision and a vital engagement with his contemporaries on the topic. Even so, it has been mostly neglected in the secondary literature. This article aims to fill this lacuna by providing a detailed analysis of how Norris arrives at two seemingly inconsistent theses: the soul is naturally immortal in the sense of being incorruptible but naturally mortal in the sense of being perishable. I focus particularly on how Norris articulates this position in dialogue with a number of Scholastic philosophers whose views he rejects. I conclude by suggesting that Norris’s arguments against these thinkers are less than fully successful.

This paper analyzes the relation between shame and a Confucian notion of yi (righteousness, rightness), especially through discussions from Confucius and Mencius. Section one clarifies Mencius’s position that righteousness is both external and internal. Although this idea includes rules, it is primarily something intended by our innate moral feelings. Section two illustrates the point that if one’s action is not right (yi), the feeling of shame spontaneously arises and motivates a self-correction. This section also clarifies the difference between the idea of shame in Max Scheler and in Confucian thought. Section three compares absolute yi with general li (ritual propriety) as well as the roles that shame and duty play in relation to ren (primarily humane love).

Kant suggests that moral metaphysics can be shown to be politically applicable by thinking of the analogically similar applicability of the principles of speculative reason to the external world of sense experience. Just as the categories of understanding, e.g., causality, substance, and so on must be schematized, i.e., given a temporal representation in order to be made applicable to the forms of sensuous intuitions, so also the principles of morality—most especially the idea of the autonomous will—must be schematized to be made politically applicable. The paper shows how Kant employs his schematism in metaphysics to make the principles of morality applicable to political experience and concludes with observations on the moral and political implications of a politics that pays homage to Kantian morality.

Alvin Plantinga’s solution to J. L. Mackie’s logical problem of evil invokes possible-worlds metaphysics. There are reasons for thinking that the solution is, at least, problematic. Difficulties emerge in the attempts to answer four related questions. (1) Can God’s necessary existence, understood in terms of possible-world metaphysics, make God’s actual existence impossible to explain? (2) Can an omniscient being with knowledge of the contents of every possible world (a being endowed with “middle knowledge”) prove ignorant of the consequences of his creative acts? (3) Can an immoral action performed by an agent suffering from “transworld depravity” also be free in the libertarian sense? (4) Does the possible-worlds interpretation of libertarian freedom generate a vicious infinite regress? Special focus is on the possibility, advanced by Plantinga, that there are possible worlds that even an omnipotent being cannot create. Plantinga’s views are contrasted with those of Thomas Aquinas.

This paper compares Plotinus’s neoplatonic conception and account of time with Bergson’s and Husserl’s phenomenologic conceptions and accounts of it. I argue that despite fundamental differences owing to their respective approaches, their conceptions and accounts are remarkably comparable, especially in considering time to play a fundamental role in the organic unity of our physical environment—in what I characterize also as the continuously and intrinsically connected sequentiality of its events, processes, and constituents—in Plotinus’s case, of our physical environment as such; in Bergson’s and Husserl’s case, as it manifests itself to us in experience and our reflective awareness of that experience.

This essay reflects on the ability of neuroscientific data to be of personal value and to enrich our lives by offering insight into our capacities for self management and choice. The theory of cognitive dualism proposed by Roger Scruton seeks to preserve rationality and allow for freedom of will, but he appears reluctant to engage with the data accruing in neural studies. I contrast this approach with a Thomistic hylomorphic approach to the philosophy of mind that is founded on participation in being. It offers the potential to draw on neurobiological knowledge for insights into rationality, motivation, and eudaimonia. The role of neural development in eudaimonia is considered and the benefits of a Thomistic hylomorphism founded on participation in esse are summarized.

Modified Theistic Activism is the view that abstract objects not essentially possessed by God fall under God’s creative activity in one way or another. Michelle Panchuk has argued that this position succumbs to the bootstrapping problem such that God is and is not logically prior to his properties—an incoherent and necessarily false state of affairs. In this essay we respond to Panchuk by arguing that our neo-Aristotelian account of substance and property possession successfully avoids the bootstrapping problem. Moreover, her own neo-Augustinian account of universals contains many conceptual deficiencies and ultimately succumbs to an epistemic iteration of the bootstrapping problem. Finally, we argue that the reasons provided for thinking only created beings need universals to ground character is unmotivated. In clarifying and defending our position, our hope is to bury once and for all the familiar claim that traditional theists cannot be realists with respect to abstract objects because of divine bootstrapping.

Should we understand the biological philosophy of Hans Jonas as a phenomenology for unveiling the phenomenon of life or as a kind of Hegelian metaphysics that presents life as a substantial principle? To answer that question, we need to deal first with the question of our access to other living beings and then with the problem of the spiritualization of the concept of evolution. This article will use an essay called “Organism and Freedom: An Essay in Philosophical Biology.”

Over the past forty years or so a critique has emerged of a long-standing interpretation of Descartes on the nature of thought. The view being rejected is that Descartes departs from his Aristotelian forbears by “mentalizing” the faculties of sensation and imagination when he includes them under the general category of “thought” and thus completely excludes them from the material domain. I focus on what is arguably the central piece of textual evidence cited in this revisionist case, the eighth paragraph of Descartes’s second Meditation. This passage contains an extensive list of acts that Descartes designates as “thought”: doubting, understanding, affirming, denying, willing or assenting, withholding will or assent, imaging and sensing. I trace the history of this revisionist reading of this list through six modern interpreters of Descartes, and for both textual and philosophical reasons I conclude that this passage provides no support for their interpretation.

This essay examines the peritrope (literally, “turning around [of the tables]”) argument within the history of philosophy and discusses its various permutations, beginning with Plato and eventually mathematized with Gödel, each of which presents a philosophical system that either stands or collapses with this “peritropic” insight. I argue that the peritrope or self-reference argument itself presupposes a certain anti-reductionism, in terms of both anthropology and metaphysics, and is ultimately grounded in Aristotle’s anthropological insight that the human being is the “rational animal” (zoon logon echon). Thus the root of the anti-reductionist, peritropic argument belongs to the self-transcendent nature of rationality itself. After discussing Aristotle’s anthropology in terms of this rational transcendence, I trace the history of the self-reference argument from Plato to Gödel and discuss its various implications as applied to any and every form of reductionism. My hope is that engagement with this most basic and often overlooked philosophic insight can counter certain anti-reductionist trends in modernity.

Kant’s theory of taste, as expounded in the Critique of Judgment, deals exhaustively with judgments of beauty. Rarely does Kant mention ugliness. This omission has led to a debate among commentators about how judgments of ugliness should be explained in a Kantian framework. I argue that the judgment of ugliness originates in the disharmonious play between the faculties of imagination and understanding. Such disharmony occurs when the understanding finds that it cannot in principle form any concept suitable to a representation as it is presented by the imagination.

In this article I address a puzzle about one of Francis Hutcheson’s objections to psychological egoism. The puzzle concerns his premise that God receives no benefit from rewarding the virtuous. Why, in the early editions of his Inquiry Concerning Virtue (1725, 1726), does Hutcheson leave this premise undefended? And why, in the later editions (1729, 1738), does he continue to do so, knowing that in 1726 John Clarke of Hull had subjected the premise to plausible criticism, geared to the very audience (mainly Christian) for whom Hutcheson’s objection to egoism was written? This puzzle is not negligible. Some might claim that Hutcheson ruins his objection by ignoring Clarke’s criticism. To answer the puzzle we must consider not only Hutcheson’s philosophy but also some theological assumptions of Hutcheson’s time.

Much ink has been spilled over the so-called problem of the “eternity of the mind” in Spinoza’s Ethics, where he writes: “Nevertheless, we feel and experience that we are eternal.” The line is striking by what it seems to assert, namely, that we are eternal, but it is yet more striking if we are attentive to Spinoza’s word choices. If Spinoza had written instead that we know or understand (even if by experience) that we are eternal, the issue might be more easily resolved. But what can it mean to feel and to experience that we are eternal? After reviewing several commentators’ interpretations, this study suggests that we simply take Spinoza at his word. The best interpretation of this troubling passage is actually not to interpret it but to take it literally.

This paper builds upon John Dadosky’s recent writings advocating a “turn to the Other” in Lonergan studies. Using a Levinas/Lonergan dialogue on intersubjectivity as a test case, I address potential difficulties accompanying an exchange between Lonergan and philosophers who emphasize alterity. It is my contention that despite various differences regarding relationality, their projects are surprisingly complementary. Lonergan accentuates interconnectedness while Levinas emphasizes the encounter with radical otherness. In order to arrive at this conclusion, I argue for a re-assessment of the relationship between alterity and similarity by dialectically reframing them as linked but opposed principles held in creative tension. Lastly, I suggest ways in which this approach might offer a foundation for further forays into the fourth stage of meaning.

Autonomy was an important political concept in ancient Greece. Kant made it the ground of morality: only acting motivated by autonomous reason is moral. But he admits that reason does not have a power to motivate us: desires can always override it. Thus it seems that human reason is not autonomous. The principle of autonomy, however, is an intrinsic part of Kant’s “Copernican Revolution” and his rationalism about the grounding of morality. Questioning the former would lead to fideism or to skepticism while rejecting the latter to reductionism. Neither course is less problematic for grounding morality than the principle of autonomy is. I suggest that Aristotle can help us to see how this dilemma can be avoided. Unlike Kant and many others, he does not seek to ground morality beyond our experience. The Aristotelian understanding of human beings as capable of evaluating one another’s actions with the language of purposefulness can explain which actions are moral without falling into the dilemma implied by the Kantian principle of autonomy.

Spinoza’s rejection of Aristotelian final causation seems to create a difficulty for his account of individuation. If causation is indeed blind, how do finite modes come to assume complex, differentiated forms? And why do we find in nature a great regularity of such forms? Several recent commentators have proposed that Spinoza maintains something of the Aristotelian conception of causation where the formal essences of individuals guide the process of individuation toward certain desirable outcomes. But this sort of approach introduces other difficulties that threaten to undermine Spinoza’s naturalistic framework and his ontology of immanence. This paper outlines a mechanistic and probabilistic account of individuation whereby modes are individuated by entering into relations that increase their mutual power of enduring. Together with conatus as the principle of individuation, this mechanistic account suffices to explain the individuation of finite bodies without introducing additional kinds of causation into Spinoza’s philosophy.

The notion that evil is not simply a privation but a privation of a due good has roots in Aristotle’s Metaphysics and implications for other areas of his thought. In making this case, I begin with a description of the standard view of Aristotle’s place in the development of the privation theory of evil and contend that the standard view does not do justice to Aristotle’s theory of evil. I then provide an interpretation of a portion of Metaphysics Theta that utilizes recent scholarship on this book of the Metaphysics in an effort to demonstrate that Aristotle thinks of evil in such a manner as to be compatible with what the later tradition describes in terms of evil as the deprivation of a due good. I then consider several of the ways in which Aristotle’s metaphysical theory of evil has impact on other areas of his thought.

This paper discusses a set of arguments launched in Salomon Maimon’s 1800 Der moralische Skeptiker against Kant’s notion of the moral law. Apart from being an almost overlooked chapter in the history of post-Kantian ethics, this work is one in which Maimon takes issue with four related aspects of the ethical thesis and methodology presented in Kant’s second Kritik. At the core of the discussion is Maimon’s emphasis on a major incongruity in the correlation of Kant’s notions of theoretical and practical reason: objectively valid statements in ethics should not qualitatively diverge from those in theoretical science. It is in this context that the paper discusses the late Maimonian thesis that Kant’s factual notion of the moral law cannot be reconciled with his notion of theoretical rigor. It also shows why, for Maimon, the highest principle of Kantian ethics should reveal itself to be theoretically untenable and dogmatic, and hence lead to skepticism.

Religious communities that speak of faith typically affirm the ideal of a highly confident faith. If we understand confidence in terms of the quality of assent to faith-claims, however, it is difficult to reconcile a high degree of confidence with intellectual virtue. As an alternative, I propose to construe confident faith as a kind of trusting perception. The sort of confidence that I envision here makes sense as a religious ideal. In addition it leaves room for the recognition of epistemic risk needed for intellectual humility as well as for the kind of openness to revising the content of faith in the light of relevant evidential considerations that intellectual integrity demands. Furthermore, someone with this type of confidence can find a particular faith compelling, while also acknowledging some faiths that make conflicting claims to be reasonable options.

The aim of this paper is to focus on certain characterizations of “I think” and the “transcendental subject” in an attempt to verify a connection with certain metaphysical characterizations of the thinking subject that Kant introduced in the critical period. Most importantly, two distinct meanings of “I think” need be distinguished: (1) in the Transcendental Deduction “I think” is the act of apperception; (2) in the Transcendental Deduction and in the section of Paralogisms “I think” is taken in its representational nature. It proves helpful to interpret the “transcendental subject” in formal terms as a concept that, mutatis mutandis, has the same function of the concept of the “transcendental object.”

Kant’s central notion of a “causality of freedom” seems inconsistent with his theoretical analysis of causation. Because of its detachment from any reference to time, it is also seriously in tension with ordinary moral ideals of individuality, efficacy, responsiveness, and personal growth in the exercise of freedom. I suggest a way of conceiving moral freedom that avoids the absurdity of practical timelessness while preserving the main strengths of Kant’s theories of theoretical and practical meaning, including his refusal to specify the content of human fulfillment. Much as Kant’s ideal of the highest good combines the supreme good of moral virtue with its necessarily desired complement of worthy happiness, a Kantian ideal of the fullest freedom can combine the transcendental freedom of the moral disposition with individual exercises of freedom in the dramatic interaction of actual moral community.

This essay critically discusses Charles Taylor’s distinctive mode of argumentation regarding ethics, phenomenology, and ontology. It also examines the meaning of Taylor’s ontological claims by putting a spotlight on the underappreciated significance of Heidegger and Murdoch for Taylor’s ontology. I argue that Taylor’s hybrid position is best understood as a phenomenological attempt to connect Heideggerian ontology and Murdochean ethics. The paper is divided in five sections: (1) Taylor’s engagement with Murdoch and his tendency towards non-anthropocentrism in ethics; (2) his unusual interwoven mode of thought; (3) his debt to Heidegger; (4) his hesitant interpretations of Heidegger and Murdoch; and (5) how these hesitations affect Taylor’s ethical view in general and its underlying ontology in particular.

In this paper I argue that Aristotle presents speech (logos) as the dynamic manifestation of the being of things and hence truth. By highlighting the role of speech, I attempt to amplify what it means to discuss being-as-the-true, one of the four senses of being that Aristotle investigates in the Metaphysics. The paper unfolds in three sections. First, I survey some influential reflections on the theme of speech and being in Aristotle. In sections two and three, I consider portions of the Metaphysics that show the intimate connection between speech and being. The first comes from the opening book of the Metaphysics, where Aristotle discusses the manner in which technê is a kind of wisdom. The second passage comes from Metaphysics Book Γ, where Aristotle defends the so-called “principle of non-contradiction.”

In the Second Treatise of Government, Locke clearly intends to construct a political order that limits the harm a tyrannical ruler can do, but his account of prerogative also effectively limits the good a ruler can do. If political and paternal power are distinct, then the standard for legitimate rule is not the public good but the good as the public understands it. The significance of this distinction becomes clear when we recognize Locke’s pessimism about our ability to adequately judge the public good. Locke’s reliance on the public’s judgment as the final authority, despite his expectation that we will judge badly, can be explained in practical or pedagogical terms. He further suggests that the limits to a ruler’s power follow from inherent limits on what human beings can know about the good.

This paper explores the question of the meaning of suffering by comparing the work of Michel Henry with that of Max Scheler. Henry’s “enstatic phenomenology” is proposed as an approach to existential disclosure that deepens our understanding of the paradoxical character of human affect in light of a phenomenology of Christ by delving into the mystery of suffering and following a path of exploration opened up by Max Scheler in his seminal essay “The Meaning of Suffering.” I suggest that our understanding of suffering needs a phenomenology of sacrifice to make possible the integration of enstatic and ecstatic ways of phenomenologically disclosing affect.

Within the Plotinian corpus the topic of audacity provides a key for explaining the hypostatic constitution of what proceeds from the One and advances towards the formation of the sensitive world. This essay will try to settle some questions about the role of audacity within the corpus of Plotinus. Doing so will allow us to argue for the following position. Even if the generation of a being separate and distinct from the One includes the notion of otherness and therefore of multiplicity, this action—a product of the Intellect’s daring—does not imply dispersion but only the constitution of a living being able to develop by its own strength the richness already contained in its germinal potency.

Richard Howard calls Roland Barthes’s The Pleasure of the Text the first “erotics of reading” in which we, as readers, “instance our ecstasy, our bliss in the text.” Yet Barthes writes as if his erotic reading of texts were an analogue to some other relationship, perhaps to an unnamed, even unwritten text. Thus his is a transcendent eroticism in which the encounter with the text points beyond the text. As alternative to an erotics of reading, this paper proposes an apapics of reading, also called Christian textualism. It seeks to establish, first, the relationship of agape and eros as substance and its shadow, and arguing, second, that every text can be read agapically, i.e., to discover the substance of which the text is a shadow. The paper concludes by exemplifying the method of Christian textualism through an agapic reading of The Pleasure of the Text’s final paragraph.

This paper takes up the Disagreement Objection to Moral Intuitionism, which is roughly this: If moral intuitions conflict, there must be falsehood somewhere. But there is no respectable way to resolve such conflict because there is no respectable way to choose between intuitions. Therefore, moral intuitions cannot serve their intended role of grounding justified moral belief and knowledge. This paper rebuts the Disagreement Objection: it recommends a doxastic interpretation of moral intuitions and argues that we have many resources to adjudicate intuitional conflict. I develop analogies between intuitional and non-intuitional disagreement, and I develop the concept of an intuitional background to show how intuitional disagreement may be resolved. The paper diagnoses the genesis of the Disagreement Objection as largely based on the Fallacy of Perspectival Infallibility and on an instance of the Justification Isolation Fallacy. The Disagreement Objection does not refute Moral Intuitionism.

A critical flaw in Kant, hitherto unremarked in the literature, is our focus here. Kant’s doctrine of the a priori form of space as a condition for human experience and that of space as a fluxion makes impossible experiences of objects that he admits constitute human awareness. Imaginative synthesis in accord with the categories provides Kant no egress from this difficulty. The Kantian critical project does not account for how we experience and for this reason fails at what it attempts, viz., a metaphysic of knowledge.

Heidegger famously appeals to Aristotle because of substantive and methodological commonalities, particularly with regard to truth. But there are three respects in which Husserl’s account of truth is more in keeping with Aristotle than Heidegger’s own account is. (1) Husserl’s account acknowledges and preserves the value of pre-philosophical experience. (2) It is more natural and less violent. (3) It recognizes truth as a cognitive achievement. This paper presents the salient features of both Husserl’s and Heidegger’s phenomenological reworkings of the correspondence theory of truth, outlines the strengths of Husserl’s account vis-à-vis Aristotle, and shows how Husserl’s account safeguards against Heidegger’s concern with mere utterance, thus opening up a new line of inquiry for Husserlian phenomenologists.

Contemporary virtue epistemologists often evince a great deal of sympathy for the virtue ethics of Aristotle and Aquinas. For the most part, they also deny the distinction between the moral and intellectual virtues that is common to Aristotle and Aquinas. More sustained reflection on Thomas’s account of the intellectual virtues can show that this distinction has been too hastily dismissed. To that end this paper will offer a defense of Thomas’s version of the distinction by responding to four theses that are often taken to provide compelling grounds for rejecting it.

Focusing on the only two texts from the Principles cited on behalf of the libertarian interpretation provides a handle on the otherwise intractable debate over Descartes’s conception of free choice of the will. The main point of this paper is to argue that these texts do not advance a libertarian conception and that therefore at least one attractive version of the libertarian interpretation, according to which Descartes changes his mind there to espouse the libertarian conception, fails. But even a weaker version of this main point shows how broad its implications are. For even if it has been shown only that these texts need not be read in libertarian terms, then at least the burden of proof has been shifted to those who view Descartes as everywhere a libertarian, with no change of mind.

My aim in this paper is to illustrate the significance of hope (elpis, elpizein) in Plato’s Philebus and to indicate topics under this heading that invite further investigation. Even though there is some scholarship treating the issue of hope in the Philebus, there is no study solely devoted to this topic. By providing such a study I intend to fill this lacuna and to show that examining this topic is valuable because it develops our understanding of the good life. In this essay I maintain that the Philebus defines hope as (1) a pleasure of the soul that (2) anticipates pleasure as certain, (3) may be true or false, (4) may be pure or impure, and (5) involves memory. I proceed chronologically through the Philebus’s discussions of hope and make every effort to treat each of the aforementioned components of the definition separately. In so doing I explain why certain topics, such as the relationship between pure intellectual hope and philosophical activity, invite further investigation.

This essay compares Scheler’s view of the person in his last (“pantheistic”) period with the views of Keiji Nishitani, a Buddhist representative of the Kyoto School of phenomenology. Scheler eschewed a “substantialist” concept of the person, as did Nishitani in view of the Buddhist “non-self” (muga) doctrine. Both had experienced spiritual crises in their lives. Why did Nishitani turn to the Buddhist concept of “absolute nothingness”? Why did Scheler turn from theism to pantheism? Both saw traditional Christianity and its understanding of the person as intellectually inadequate, though for different reasons. Nishitani focuses on the inadequacies of secondary influences (like Cartesianism) in the Western concept of person, while Scheler focuses on problems of theodicy stemming from the problem of evil and of volition (divine and human) as the source of evil. Both abandon the Christian meaning of personhood.

Kierkegaard holds that purity of heart is to will one thing. But his treatment of despair, double-mindedness, and self-deception runs into difficulties over whether one can choose beliefs about oneself, which theories of the will (if any) could establish its unity, and whether the individual who fails to become pure of heart is blameworthy. Pace Kierkegaard, willing the good does not make immutable the person who so wills, and purity of heart should not be entirely will-based. This essay articulates a broad understanding of purity of heart whose value and importance in moral and religious life are much clearer. This understanding recasts willing in terms of certain higher-order desires, identifies ambivalence as a different phenomenon from double-mindedness, brings in motives and beliefs, emphasizes trusting radically in God, and explicates purity of heart as a moral and religious ideal.

The debate over Socrates’s claim in the Apology to have practiced philosophy as a divinely ordained mission is almost as old as this claim itself. Yet scholars remain divided over the issue because of the extraordinary difficulty of understanding how Socrates interpreted the negative proclamation of the oracle as providing a positive prescription for a way of life. Finding this difficultly insurmountable, many authors have denied the coherence of Socrates’s account. In this essay, I argue that the debate can be resolved by revisiting the interpretation of human wisdom offered in the Apology. Demonstrating that Socrates understands human wisdom to be structurally incompatible with the claim to possess it, I show that he is thereby prevented from ever simply affirming the truth of the oracle and that this, in turn, establishes his philosophical practice as a lifelong mission.

Husserl’s notion of “sense” has often been interpreted through a Fregean lens. I will show that Husserl saw it as an acquaintance with the background or horizon of perceptual objects. He understands reason (Vernunft) as prescribing rules for performance with regard to perceptual objects. Thus Husserl’s view has a wider scope of experience than Kant’s sense of it as a pre-reflective acquaintance with one’s environment. After Ideas I Husserl develops these notions as part of his theory of the intersubjective world. Heidegger takes over the insights of Husserl and brings out the performative turn inherent in phenomenology by critiquing Husserl’s orientation to theoretical perceptual experience. The reference of performative expressions is not determined by the contents but by performance. What is disclosed in the phenomenological notion of sense is the background against which human existence is to be understood.

This paper takes a nuanced stance against an intellectualist position that is strong in the literature on the Philebus by arguing that pleasure’s goodness is inherent but not independent. Pleasure is worth pursuing together with intellectual activity in the mixed life because pleasure is the sensual manifestation, direct or indirect, of growth in goodness. Pleasure as the expression of this growth is the sensual component of the mixture that Socrates in this dialogue defends as the good for human beings. But if pleasure’s contribution to the overall goodness of a human life is not to be outweighed by some corresponding badness, it must reflect an accurate assessment of the goodness of our experiences and either proceed directly from the right kind of intellectual or psychic activity or else be subordinated to the rational ordering activity of intellect according to the standards of virtue, moderation, and health.

In this paper I explore methodological approaches to Aquinas’s argument for a real distinction between essence and existence in creatures in De ente et essentia. Joseph Owens and John Wippel examine the text through three stages that, they conclude, result in a demonstration for the real distinction. I contrast this approach with R. E. Houser, who argues that Aquinas’s text, which proceeds dialectically, must be understood within the context of its sources, namely, Avicenna’s Metaphysics of the Healing and The Intentions of the Philosophers by al-Ghazali. First, I will offer an evaluative judgment on the disagreement between Owens and Wippel on which stage Aquinas demonstrates a real distinction. Second, I will offer an evaluative judgment on the nature of the treatise as a whole by suggesting that the methodology of source-based contextualism offers another way to read the De ente.

Hegel and Marx both understand the Enlightenment as a failed project at liberation. For Hegel, the failure lies in the form of consciousness that he calls pure insight. For Marx, the failure lies in the commercial practices that perpetuate pure insight. Pure insight may win its battles with superstitious faith, but its view of human activity as purely subjective risks lapsing into skepticism. Pure insight cannot arrive at the truth that it seeks and ultimately reduces all things to utility. Utility is the pseudo-notion that imposes its own emptiness on things, thereby unleashing the violence of terror. Marx, too, regards utility as an imposter, one that offers a phony answer to the question “What gives commodities their value?” while disguising the exploitation inherent in capitalist society. The essay closes with a discussion of how Max Horkheimer’s account of instrumental reason presupposes the purist splits of the Enlightenment that it seeks to overcome.

In this paper I consider the contribution that Hegel’s discussion of ethicality (Sittlichkeit) makes to his account of recognition in the Phenomenology of Spirit. While the famous relation of lord and bondsman might prompt us to think of all failures of recognition as failures of reciprocity, Hegel’s account of ethicality shows that it is possible for forms of social life to be structured so that no one is recognized. This failure of recognition is unique since its source does not lie in a lack of reciprocity between individuals but in the absence of an explicit and shared conception of the “self.” In conclusion I point to the importance of the idea of the self to Hegel’s account of reciprocal intersubjective recognition in the text and contrast it with Pippin’s recent interpretation.

In Sources of the Self Charles Taylor makes clear that both hypergoods and moral sources are essential to the moral life. Although hypergoods and moral sources are not the same thing, Taylor’s descriptions of these concepts are quite similar, and so their distinction requires interpretation. I propose that we interpret the difference on the basis of another distinction that is central to Taylor’s thinking: that between immanence and transcendence. Whereas a moral source transcends us, a hypergood is the value of our immanent way of relating to that moral source. This interpretation requires that we first differentiate between a narrow and a wide sense of “moral source.”

Although the scholars of the Tibetan plateau were not philosophers in a European sense, the Tibetan academies have spent a millennium addressing ways in which formal analytic methods can assist epistemological investigation and best be applied to understanding the nature of existence. Throughout this time sharp debates were sustained over the proper role and function of critical analysis, during which they identified and described the many benefits and limitations of analytic thinking. Contemporary European philosophers studying the nature of formal analytic reason can gain insight by considering these Tibetan inquiries into the hermeneutics of analytic thinking.

This paper explores the connection between Kant’s first antinomy and the set-theoretical paradox of the largest cardinal. The lesson to be drawn is that we should refrain from reifying (i.e., treating as an individual object or thing) the collections that generate the antinomies: the collection of all spatio-temporal objects (the world) in the case of Kant’s first antinomy, the collection of all objects whatsoever (the universe) in the case of the Cantorian paradox. This conclusion is not only one that we are entitled to draw but also one that does not generate new philosophical problems of its own. In this respect it is more attractive than other contemporary reactions to the paradoxes of set theory.

This paper defends the cognitive value of literary fiction by offering an account of fictional truth and wisdom that is based upon Aristotelian-Thomistic principles. It first shows how Aristotle’s notion of understanding (sunesis) as an intellectual virtue provides the foundation for the possibility of fictional truth and wisdom. Second, it considers how Aquinas’s notion of the cogitative faculty or ratio particularis elucidates the faculty that is employed in the act of perception (aísthēsis) that is essential to the virtue of understanding. Third, the author shows how Martha Nussbaum’s contemporary account of deliberative imagination clarifies these classical notions of understanding and the cogitative faculty. Finally, the author argues that these central concepts, when connected to literary fiction, provide philosophical justification for the claim of fictional truth and in turn knowledge or wisdom.

Theistic activism and theistic conceptual realism attempt to relieve the tension between transcendent realism about universals and a strong aseity-sovereignty doctrine. Paradoxically, both theories seem to imply that God is metaphysically prior and metaphysically posterior to his own nature. In this paper I critique one attempt to respond to this worry and offer a neo-Augustinian solution in its place. I demonstrate that Augustine’s argument for forms as ideas in the mind of God strongly suggests that only created beings need universals to ground their character. For them, divine concepts can do all of the work that universals are typically invoked to do in the contemporary literature. An uncreated being’s character needs no such grounding and can be accounted for in terms of his own concepts. If this is correct, theists may be realists about universals while maintaining the traditional read of God’s aseity and sovereignty.

In Religion Within the Bounds of Reason Alone Kant claims that human beings are radically evil and that this evil is to be regarded as both freely chosen and universal. Scholars have long struggled to makes sense of this paradoxical notion. In this paper I propose that the regulative concept of the supersensible as presented in the third Critique can be legitimately extended to cover the mysterious “subjective ground” of radical evil. More specifically, I argue that the symmetry between radical evil (the appearance of law-like universality within the realm of freedom) and purposive nature (the appearance of self-determination within the realm of natural law) warrants the notion of a common supersensible principle underlying both phenomena that is neither nature nor freedom but that motivates their mutual incursions. I call this doctrine of reflective judgment “supersensible monism.”

It is common in bioethical discussion to present thought experiments or cases in order to construct an argument. Some thought experiments are quite illuminating, and ethical theorizing will often appeal at some point to one’s intuitions. But there are cases in which thought experiments are useless or do not contribute to the argument. This article considers cases presented in the context of stem cell research that are destructive of human embryos. I argue that certain popular cases that are meant to motivate the view that such research is permissible either are dialectically useless or do not contribute to the argument. By dialectically useless, I mean that the cases analyzed here yield intuitions in people who are already committed to the permissibility of such research. I end with some reflections that challenge the reliability of our intuitions on applied ethics issues by suggesting that thought experiments in this field are dubious from the start. My argument should not be read to support moral skepticism but to urge that our inquiries on applied issues requires certain intellectual virtues.

This paper compares two philosophical views from vastly different intellectual traditions: the views typical of neo-Aristotelian naturalism and the views that Kitarō Nishida describes in his An Inquiry into the Good. I concentrate on the following points. (1) Nishida and neo-Aristotelian naturalists share the view that the mind tends to construct experience as it characterizes phenomena. It evaluates those that fulfill this tendency positively and those that fail to fulfill it negatively. Moral judgment is one manifestation of this tendency. (2) This allows both approaches to claim that the natural goodness/defect that characterizes human beings results from the capacity of rational choice, and that normalcy in developing and exercising this capacity provides criteria for evaluating the moral status of individuals. (3) Nevertheless, they diverge on whether or not the application of these criteria is agent-neutral or agent-relative. Based on these considerations, I argue that Nishida’s view is free from a major difficulty that the neo-Aristotelian naturalist encounters.

This paper addresses the connections between love of self and love of God in terms of their impact on personal subjectivity according to the thought of Thomas Aquinas. I argue that Aquinas’s understanding of self-love illuminates the experience of oneself as a person. Part of this argument relies on Aquinas’s notion that love of self is more basic than love of others. Aquinas further affirms that one ought to love God more than oneself. I explore the implications of this claim for my interpretation concerning personal self-experience. I maintain that our participation in God causes a pull toward goodness and God within one’s experience of self. Also, friendship with God through charity offers the highest fulfillment of self-experience.

Metropolitan John Zizioulas has recently written a probing assessment of Dietrich von Hildebrand’s The Nature of Love. Zizioulas has thereby opened a dialogue between his own theological personalism and von Hildebrand’s phenomenological personalism. In this paper, I am at continuing this dialogue. I formulate three objections that I see Zizioulas raising to von Hildebrand’s claim that love exists as a value-response. In considering them, I try to eliminate misunderstandings, to identify areas of agreement and disagreement, and to show where each of these thinkers has something to gain from the encounter with the other. Most of all, I aim at working towards an understanding of love that incorporates the insights of both von Hildebrand and Zizioulas.

I offer a critique of Melissa Zinkin’s reading of Kant’s analysis of aesthetic judgment. She argues that in judgments of taste the imagination is freed from its determinate relation with the understanding because the form of intuition in which beauty is apprehended is different from the form of intuition employed in determinate judgment. By distinguishing between an extensive and intensive form of intuition, this interpretation is able to explain why the apprehension of beauty cannot be subsumed under a concept. But I contest Zinkin’s identification of the sensus communis with this intensive form of intuition. I then substantiate two interrelated claims: (1) that we can account for the genesis of the sensus communis by distinguishing between an intensive and an extensive form of time, and (2) that we can avoid making the sensus communis atemporal by showing that it resides within an intensive form of time as a condition for its possibility, thereby structuring Kant’s account of the sensus communis securely within the critical framework.

Martin Buber wrote his 1904 dissertation on Nicholas of Cusa, but the relationship between the two has been little studied. This article focuses on four ways in which Buber appropriated Cusa’s ideas. (1) Cusa’s theory of participation argues for the absolute worth of the individual, foreshadowing Buber’s ethics of actualization. (2) Buber takes Cusa’s model of how one may know God as other through “learned ignorance” and applies it to how one may know and adequately respond to beings as others in his distinction between “I-Thou” and “I-It” relations. (3) Buber employs Cusa’s term “coincidence of opposites” to describe what happens in dialogue. Seeing the coincidence of opposites moves subjects to adopt intersubjective perspectives and give up unhealthy relations of conflict. (4) Buber’s 1938 criticism of Cusa for maintaining that selves evolve in isolation illuminates Buber’s creation of his own dialogic philosophy.

Heidegger’s position regarding the independent existence of entities has been a matter of considerable controversy. On the one hand he appears to defend something resembling transcendental or Kantian idealism without the notion of a thing in itself. On the other he upholds the independent existence of entities in their ontic dimension. The resultant interpretive controversy primarily pertains to how one can make the Dasein-dependence of being cohere with the Dasein-independence of entities. In this paper I argue that this philosophical difficulty arises from a textual ambiguity in the notion of Vorhandensein, which is used to designate two different senses of objectivity: one of the innerworldly existence of objectified entities and another regarding their bare existence independent of their worldliness. After tracing the historical context for this ambiguity, I argue that Heidegger believes that entities unlike Dasein are inherently bare of meaning or nonsensical in themselves.

The theory of infinite modes is not only one of the most controversial points in the philosophy of Spinoza, but also a kind of crossroads concept on whose clarification or interpretation the definition of his philosophy’s overall meaning depends. This article aims to examine Spinoza’s theory of infinite modes, mediate and immediate, in relation to other elements of Spinoza’s theory. Through an analysis of Spinoza’s writings, it proposes an inner reconstruction of the theory in order to ensure the consistency of the difficulties pointed out by several critics and to provide a solution. Spinoza’s identification of immediate infinite in motion, rest, and infinite intellect involves the questions of “what” they really are and what their role is within his system. About mediate infinite modes, Spinoza talks very little and only in terms of facies totius universi. This “silence” is closely linked to the “false” problem of the deduction/mediation of the finite from the infinite, a problem for which Spinoza himself was partly responsible by his statements on motion and the need to analyze the topic in more depth.

Philosophical investigation of human nature has a long, distinguished, and multifaceted history. In the East some of the most heated philosophical disputes pertaining to issues concerning moral self-cultivation centered on disagreements about human nature. Within the Neo-Confucian tradition that developed out of Korea, issues concerning human nature took center stage in a dispute now known as the “Horak Debate” that began in the eighteenth century. In this paper I seek to introduce the Horak Debate to contemporary philosophers by (a) historically situating the debate within the tradition of Korean Neo-Confucianism, (b) providing an outline of the Horak Debate and identifying its central points of contention, and (c) demonstrating the debate’s philosophical significance by revealing how some of its key issues are rooted in disagreements that continue to concern contemporary philosophers.

I suggest two valid and sound arguments refuting physicalism, whether it is reductive or supervenience physicalism. The first argument is a self-referential one that is not involved with any self-referential inconsistency. The second argument demonstrates that physicalism is inescapably involved with self-referential inconsistency. Both arguments show that arguments and propositions (to be distinguished from sentences) are not physical existents. They are rather mental existents that are not reducible to any physical existent and do not supervene on anything physical. From these two arguments it clearly follows that any physicalist argument or proposition, as a mental existent, is self-refuting.

In the Tractatus Russell’s caveat against linguistic reflexivity becomes a caveat against reflective thought. The paper explores the relation between these. There is a connection, perhaps exemplified by 1789, between reflection on one’s assumptions and change (with, perhaps, consequent aporia). The same connection may be exemplified by violation of Russell’s system of levels (levels of generality and detail). Even though Russell never explored this area, they will be violated by interactions of the macroscopic and microscopic. These interactions, like the philosophical questioning of assumptions, are a source of change and instability, of the failure of assumptions or presuppositions, and with it of aporia. Russell’s system of levels precludes these. An aim of avoiding presupposition failure links type theory to “On Denoting.” It is likely that the resistance to reflexivity has its origin in Russell’s rejection of the philosophy of Hegel where reflective thought is the motor of historical development.

Supernaturalism is a philosophical position used in modernity that employs the “supernatural” to explain certain “natural” phenomena. The supernatural is defined by circumscription from the natural. But the line that is supposed to delineate the supernatural from the natural is porous and tenuous, to the point that the distinction between the two becomes a matter of no import. This renders vacuous the concept of the supernatural as well as the concept of the natural. Supernaturalism ends up naturalizing what is supposed to be supernatural. But there is a conception of the supernatural (introduced by John Scotus Eriugena and sent into theological circulation by Thomas Aquinas) that predates the modernist one. Benchmarked against this conception, the God posited by supernaturalism in the modern sense is not supernatural.

Zhu Xi believes that if one attains genuine knowledge of good and evil, one will do good and avoid evil wholeheartedly. As a result, the phenomena of self-deception and akrasia (weakness of will) pose a challenge to his moral psychology. On his deathbed, he revised his commentary on self-deception and sincerity in the book Great Learning. His final explanatory model could be understood as a moderate version of intentionalism: a self-deceiver tacitly allows room for thoughts that run counter to his ethical beliefs, even if this potentially undermines his integrity. This model highlights two major causes for self-deception: uncritical self-trust and the dubious ethical status of first-order desires. Zhu contends that thoughts cannot render themselves sincere on their own. As a remedy, he advocates an open-minded dialogue with the cultural world documented in the classics so as to avoid the myopia of the self.

This paper articulates two seemingly distinct but interrelated conceptions of soul in the Platonic corpus: soul as self-mover (the ontological soul) and soul as self-ruler (the ethical soul). It argues that Plato conceives of soul as a principle of intelligent self-determination. The dialogues in principal focus are the two in which the ontological soul and ethical soul are most manifest: the Phaedrus and the Laws. The article concludes with a brief reflection, by way of the Timaeus, on the relationship between soul thus understood and Plato’s sense of the importance of the care of the soul for the good life.

The privation account of moral evil holds that the badness of morally bad acts consists not in the positive act itself or in any positive feature of the act but rather in the act’s lack of conformity to the moral standard. Traditionally recognized for its theological usefulness, the account has been the target of at least five recent objections. In this paper I offer a positive philosophical argument for the account and then show that the objections fail.

This essay aims to reconstruct and defend Pascal’s account of divine hiddenness. In the first section I explain Pascal’s view that divine hiddenness is primarily a function of human volitional aversion and only secondarily a result of God’s intentional action. In the following section I evaluate the primary sense of hiddenness by considering Pascal’s response to the objection that divine goodness requires and divine power makes possible God’s provision of evidence sufficient to overcome human volitional indisposition. While Pascal does think it possible for God to provide such evidence, he argues that this would unjustly harm human freedom and endanger human intellectual understanding. I conclude by addressing a weaker form of the objection through consideration of the second sense of divine hiddenness and Pascal’s surprising view that God’s intentional “hiding” is in fact a progressively deeper entry into the particulars of human history.

The problems of evil and of divine hiddenness are the two most prominent arguments for atheism in the contemporary literature on the philosophy of religion. But relatively little has been written on the possible relations between these two problems, and especially on whether a solution to one could shed light on a solution to the other. I explore this question here by arguing that a resolution to the hiddenness problem could help address the problem of evil, specifically by supplying a new counter-argument to a common objection raised against the free-will defense.

The essay provides a new interpretation of Fichte’s deduction of the external world that considers the argument to be motivated not by epistemic concerns but by concerns about the possibility of freedom. In defending this view, I critically examine Frederick Beiser’s reconstruction of Fichte’s deduction, which characterizes the argument as refuting external world skepticism, exactly the threat by which (I argue) Fichte is not troubled. I claim that Fichte is troubled by ethical skepticism, the view that the freedom required for self-consciousness is not possible. Establishing the possibility of the freedom involved in self-consciousness requires an external world suitable for such a form of freedom. An implication of this claim is that the world that Fichte deduces is an intersubjective or social world.

The “Treatise on the Relationship of the Real and the Ideal in Nature, or the Development of the First Principles of the Philosophy of Nature and the Principles of Gravity and Light” is one of the last essays on Naturphilosophie that Schelling wrote. It was a topic that had occupied his attention since 1796, and as such it marks the end of an era. It is distinguished by its unusual approach to the problem of matter, which becomes, in his discussion, the problem of force or energy. Without being able to avail himself of the language of the conservation of energy or mass, it can be argued that Schelling makes a valiant attempt to express that insight, using the terminology of the bond and the entities bound by it. The text reaffirms Schelling’s strong affinities with Spinoza, anticipates Schopenhauer, and continues his quarrel with Fichte.

I examine Bernard Williams’s forceful challenge that evolutionary science has done away with the sort of teleological worldview that is needed in order to make sense of an Aristotelian virtue ethic perspective. I also consider Rosalind Hursthouse’s response to Williams and argue that it is not sufficient. My main task is to show what is needed in order to meet Williams’s challenge. First, I argue that we need a deeper exploration of the first-personal evaluative standpoint from within our human form of life than we find in Hursthouse’s ethical naturalist perspective. In particular, we need to recognize the important role of “strong evaluation” for identifying what is noblest and best about us as human beings, for this will enable us to address the “mixed bag” problem of human nature. Second, I argue—contra John McDowell’s quietism—that in order to make sense of such a normative account of human nature we must overcome Williams’s tragic cosmic outlook according to which human life is seen as ultimately without meaning and purpose.

According to the highly controversial “Principle of Alternative Possibilities,” an agent is morally responsible for an action only if he could have done otherwise. In this paper, I will investigate whether Aquinas accepts this principle. I will begin by arguing that if one grants Aquinas’s theory of human action, Frankfurt-style counter-examples do not succeed. For this reason, it is necessary to investigate various texts in order to discover how Aquinas views this principle. Although he does not explicitly discuss it, he does discuss an axiom (taken from Augustine) that is similar to this principle in various ways. I eventually conclude that, even if Aquinas would reject a strict understanding of PAP, he would only demand a relatively common modification of it.

Many personalists have argued that an adequate account of the human person must include an account of subjectivity as irreducible to anything objectively definable. The personalists contend that Aristotle lacks such an account and claim that he fails to meet three criteria that a theory of the human person must fulfill in order to have an account of subjectivity as irreducible. I show first that some later Aristotelians fulfill these criteria, and then that Aristotle himself also does so. He describes four characteristics of human subjectivity that are considered crucial by many personalists. I do this through an interpretation of Aristotle’s accounts of substantial actualities, nous, friendship, and beauty.

Strong motivational internalists claim that the relation between moral judgment and motivation is necessary. It is widely accepted that strong motivational internalism is false because it cannot accommodate various phenomena from common experience. In order to make room for these phenomena, motivational internalists usually propose the weak formulation of their thesis. In the first part of the paper I differentiate between several versions of both strong and weak motivational internalism. In the second part I argue that the reasons for endorsing weak motivational internalism of any form are not compelling.

In pointing out the strange phenomenological structure of anxiety, Kierkegaard re-opens the door to reflection on “nothingness.” This tradition has been fruitful, but it has remained wedded to interpreting this nothingness in light of the distinction between anxiety and fear. Thus, anxiety is understood exclusively as the transcendence of this or that possibility towards an encounter with the freedom of possibility itself. Kierkegaard’s original formulation, however, states that anxiety is “altogether different than fear and similar concepts.” In this article I take up Kierkegaard’s hint and argue that, interpreted in the light of guilt, his distinction is revelatory in ways that he himself did not anticipate. While we may be guilty for this or that sin, in anxiety we stand before our sinfulness itself. Anxiety ought to counsel us to be resolute in the face of possibility, but also to make a genealogical critique of our entanglement in the illusions of our past.