International Philosophical Quarterly

Commentators who find in Confucianism the resources for cross-cultural dialogues about human rights frequently tend to be divided in their emphases on liberal or conservative aspects of this tradition. Those who pursue individuality, even autonomy, in Confucianism, I call liberals. Those who stress collectivity or harmony in Confucianism I call conservatives. Despite these rival paths in appropriating Confucianism for human rights, I show that both liberal and conservative characterizations, properly understood, are present in this tradition. Corresponding to each group’s stress on particular dimensions in Confucianism are the respective negative (civil and political) and positive (social, economic and cultural) human rights that each position defends. If my thesis that both the liberal and conservative accounts of human rights holds, then a Confucian account of human rights would entail that both the negative and positive rights will bear practical and political implications for it.

Defending Kant against the charge that his ethics is formalistic has prompted some prominent interpreters to stress the “humanity” formulation of the categorical imperative. In this paper I argue that this more sophisticated account of Kantian ethics generates a deeper and more philosophically interesting Hegelian criticism (located primarily in the Phenomenology of Spirit). Hegel’s claim that the moral worldview is rife with dialectical conflict serves as a criticism both of Kant’s conception of the moral self and of his more basic assumptions about the proper philosophical reply to the challenges posed by dogmatism and skepticism. As I will argue, the moral worldview unselfconsciously preserves elements of dogmatism and skepticism, even as it claims to be self-critical. Hegel’s strategy, then, is to accuse Kant of falling into a kind of practical antinomy that

The purpose of this essay is to consider the significance that Hegel grants to religious love and, with it, forgiveness in his early The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate. Although Hegel characterizes religious love in this writing as a unity that transcends reason, his association of such love with forgiveness nevertheless sheds light on an important aspect of human finitude. In this, Hegel may be seen to identify forgiveness as a form of freedom elicited by limits that we encounter in practical life. The author suggests that Hegel’s approach to forgiveness, which makes use not only of themes expressed by Jesus in the Gospel but also Greek tragedy, comprises an attractive alternative to some current views.

Through much of his career, Descartes seems confident that he will be able to place medicine on a solid metaphysical foundation and perhaps even succeed in prolonging human life indefinitely. And yet Descartes never develops medicine as a systematic discipline. His failure to do so is inextricably bound up with his increasing focus on the substantial union of mind and body and his increasing awareness of the ultimate irreducibility of the world of sensory phenomena to clear and distinct insight. To the end, Descartes’s thought exhibits an irreducible tension between mind-body dualism, with its denigration of embodied experience, and a vague anticipation of the limits of dualism and the need to develop a unified conception of embodied experience.

In philosophical discussions of emotion, feeling theories identify emotions with bodily events while cognitive theories insist that any coherent conception of emotion begins with acts of mind. The purpose of this paper is to argue the extent to which this debate is motivated by Cartesian considerations that unduly problematize the relationship between mind and body, and to suggest that in Wittgenstein we find resources for a view of emotions that overcomes this Cartesian problematic. My strategy is to show the important intuitions captured by each theory, intuitions the accommodation of which is necessary for any satisfactory theory of emotion, and then to suggest that Wittgenstein enables this accommodation without the stalemate characteristic of the present debate.

Biological naturalism claims that all psychological phenomena can be causally, though not ontologically, reduced to neurological processes, where causal reduction is usually understood in terms of supervenience. After presenting John Searle’s version of biological naturalism in some detail, I argue that the particular supervenience relation on which this account depends is dubious. Specifically, the fact that either realism or nominalism is the case implies that there is one fact about belief that does not supervene on neurophysiological processes. Biological naturalism is thereby defeated because it cannot account for belief. Ialso address three likely objections to this argument.