Even though the concept of right is not empirical, Kant does not deduce right in a transcendental manner. If in conformity with the rational principles of transcendental philosophy, we try to understand why this is so, the answer may be found in an analogy with aesthetic reflection. Indeed, aesthetic reflection might contain the transcendental ground of violence in civil society.

I explore the question of whether scientific changes can induce mutations in our ordinary notion of existence. I conclude that they can’t, partially on the grounds that some of the pro­posed alternative-notions of existence are only terminologically-distinct from our ordinary notion, and so don’t provide genuine metaphysical alternatives, and partially on the grounds that the ordinary notion of existence is criterion-transcendent.

Although D. Dennett is sometimes accused of insensitivity to ‘real’, first-person problems of the mind, his Intentional Systems Theory offers a comprehensive, cognitive science grounded, account of the nature of subjectivity. This account involves views on intentionality (concern­ing the nature of the representation relation, content, psychological explanation), consciousness (comprising a functionalist model, a second order, belief-like, theory of self-awareness, and a deflationary view of qualia), personhood and freedom of action (concerning what must be in place in terms of cognition for the mentalistic concepts of ‘person’ and ‘action’ to apply). Since Dennett defends that the principles for understanding intentionality and consciousness are the same, in order to understand his brand of anti-representationalism we must deal with both intentionality and consciousness. That is what I will do in this article. I will also discuss the metaphysical implications of anti-representationalism, and in general use Dennett’s work as a key to describe how a range of philosophical issues of cognitive science appear from an anti-representationalist point of view.

Constitution is the relation between something and what it is made of. Composition is the relation between something and its parts. I examine three different approaches to the relation between constitution and composition. One approach, associated with neo-Aristotelians like Mark Johnston and Kathrin Koslicki, identifies constitution with composition. A second, popular with those sympathetic to classical mereology such as Judith Thomson, defines constitution in terms of parthood. A third, advocated strongly by Lynne Baker, takes constitution to be somehow inconsistent with relations of parthood. All of these approaches, I argue, face serious problems. I conclude, tentatively, that constitution and composition have nothing to do with each other.

This paper argues that philosophy in the sense of metaphysical speculation is universal and not at all language-specific. At the beginning of traditional Chinese philosophy, the ancient Chinese thinkers were concerned with social morality, raising questions which differed greatly from those of ancient Greeks and the language they used was typologically different from the western languages, but in the end the thinking and debating over their questions gave rise to speculations on language names which were unmistakably metaphysical in na­ture and oriented toward the establishment of conditions of truth in language. This shows that truth-seeking is a universal predisposition.

The theses and arguments with which Jaegwon Kim was most identified all crucially involve properties. Events are said to be exemplification of properties by objects at times. Supervenience, despite its many varieties, is a relation between families of properties, such that there is no difference in supervening properties without a difference in subvening, base properties. The so-called ‘supervenience’ or ‘causal exclusion’ argument is directed against nonreductive physicalism, which denies the identity of physical and mental properties. It concludes that if physicalism is true, then mental properties are only causally efficacious when they are identical to physical properties. But despite all the work properties do for Kim, there is little in his writing regarding traditional ontological views about properties, and he sometimes makes claims about property identity that are puzzling and hard to square with other claims he makes. This paper probes this neglected corner of his work, especially in regard to the supervenience argument and the fate of nonreductive physicalism.

Descartes’s interrelated theories of attributes and conceptual distinction (or rational distinc­tion) are developed. This follows Nolan (1997) in identifying substances and their attributes as they exist apart from the mind’s concepts. This resource is then used to articulate a solution to a famous problem about Descartes’s concept of substance. The key is that the concept of substance is itself to be regarded as an attribute of independently existing things.

It is part of Jaegwon. Kim’s life’s work that he has demonstrated that non-reductive physicalism is not an option in the philosophy of the mental. However, he also recognizes the problems of mentalism that cannot be solved by physicalism. This concerns above all phenomenal consciousness, which resists naturalization. In the philosophy of the mental, this addresses a very fundamental problem of what the place of the mental is in the physical world. It is Kim’s merit in the philosophy of the mental to have shown non-reductive physicalism to be contradictory and qualitative experience to have shown its place as a phenomenon that cannot be explained physically. But Kim wants to be a physicalist and functionalist at the same time. For this he describes his position as “physicalism, or something near enough”. It is to Kim’s credit that he has presented non-reductive physicalism as a variation of British emergentism. But this raises a very fundamental problem, whether this is a valid research program of systematization of mental experience or whether it needs another research program.

As common expressions in natural language, sentences with tense and aspect play a very important role. There are many ways to encode their contributions to meaning, but I believe their function is best understood as exhibiting relations among related eventualities (events and states). Accordingly, contra other efforts to explain tense and aspect by appeal to temporal logics or interval logics, I believe the most basic and correct way to explain tense and aspect is to articulate these relations between eventualities. Building on these ideas, I will characterize a formal semantics – Event-State Semantics (ESS) – which differs from all formal semantics based on temporal logics; in particular, one with which sentences with tense and aspect can be adequately explained, including molecular sentences and those with adverbial clauses.

A common assumption in metaphysics and the philosophy of language is that the general structure of language displays the general metaphysical structure of the things we talk about. But expressions can easily be imperfect representations of what they are about. After clarifying this general point, I make a case study of a recent attempt to semantically analyze the nature of knowledge-how. This attempt fails because there appears to be no plausible bridge from the linguistic structure of knowledge-how reports to knowledge-how itself. I then gesture at some other places where the connection between linguistics and metaphysics is commonly, but illegitimately, assumed.

How is a massive quantity of information and steady stream of images received in the cognitive form of a given reality? In Bergson’s terms, its reception coincides with a “cosmic” perspective, and in that sense it appears outside of and prior to experience and its zones of immediate relevance. At the same time, inasmuch as there is what Schutz calls a “stock” of experiences the elements of which are not immediately relevant to one another, information might be understood to move the unorganized givens in the direction of unified structures of experience, detached from both those givens and experience as such. In that case, there is a coincidence of imposed relevances and what is yielded by communication. An event seems, suddenly, to make sense, offsetting the gap between experience and cultural representation. The erasure of this gap, in other words, leaves experience unguided and its subjects overwhelmed by a certainty for which they can neither account nor frame in such a way that accountability could be seen as a problem. Distortion is then not simply a matter of manipulation or error, but, what is more problematic, a matter of losing the sense of being able to re-imagine what is now imagined as certain. It will be examined below.

Are there eliminativist tendencies in Lewis’s theory of mind? Prima facie one would like to give a negative answer to this question. Lewis (1994) conceives his theory as “Reduction of Mind”. Certainly, both reduction and elimination of mental states are regarded as materialist, yet nevertheless as competive strategies. Relying on folk psychology (FP), as Lewis does, is objected to by eliminativists who denounce FP mainly because they think it is a theory that is essentially wrong. Yet, Lewis sees the importance of FP residing only in its causal schemes that explain behavior and not in its role of specifying internal states by specific mental properties. Should therefore the reduction of mental states not be considered as eliminativist in a certain sense? There is an ambiguity in these concepts that forbids an immediate answer. The problem will be elaborated in section II and III with regard to intentional and qualitative mental states. As a preliminary tho that I discuss in section I central aspects and problems of Lewis’ theory of mind.

Phenomenal consciousness comprises both qualitative character and subjectivity. The former provides the proprietary contents of conscious experiences – determining what they are like – and the latter is that feature that renders those contents “for the subject”, so there is something it is like at all. I have developed a theory of consciousness as “acquaintance” which I dub the “Cartesian Theater” model, on which there is a fundamental psycho-physical law that takes the output of cognitive and perceptual systems as input and yields overall conscious experience as output. This model entails epiphenomenalism regarding phenomenal properties, which, I argue, presents a specific problem regarding our epistemic position with respect to this very theory. I develop a line of thought that seeks to disarm this challenge, relying to a large extent on a certain way of understanding both subjectivity itself and also cognitive phenomenology.

Fifty years ago, Dieter Henrich wrote an influential little text on ‘Fichte’s Origi­nal Insight’. Seldom so much food for thought has been put in a nutshell. The essay, bearing such an unremarkable title, delivers a diagnosis of why two hundred years of penetrating thought about the internal structure of subjectivity have ended up so fruitless. Henrich’s point was: Self-consciousness cannot be explained as the result of a higher-order act, bending back upon a first-order one, given that “what reflection finds, must already have been there before” (Novalis). Whereas Henrich’s discovery had some influence in German speaking countries (and was dubbed the ‘Heidelberg School’), it remained nearly unnoticed in the anglophone (and now dominant) philosophical world. This is starting to change, now that a recent view on (self-) consciousness, called ‘self-representationalism’, is beginning to develop and to discover its Heidelbergian roots.

Jaegwon Kim argued that nonreductive physicalism faces the “exclusion problem” for higher- level causation, mental causation in particular. Roughly, the charge is that given the presumptive ubiquity of physical causation, there cannot be irreducible mental causes for physical effects. Since there are mental causes, Kim concluded that nonreductive physicalism should be rejected in favor of a more reductionist alternative according to which mental causes are just physical causes differently described. But why should mental causes be “excluded” in this way? Unfortunately, Kim had less to say about this than one might expect. After reviewing some of Kim’s proposals, I suggest that the exclusion problem should be premised on nothing more or less than Occamist, simplicity-based considerations. I apply this conception of the exclusion problem to some prominent responses to Kim’s critique of nonreductive physicalism and argue that this conception mandates reconsidering the success of these responses.