Phenomenology can be roughly described as the theory of the pure essences of phenomena. Yet the meaning of essence and of concepts traditionally tied to it (such as the concepts of a priori and of essential necessity) are far from settled. This is especially true given the impact modern science has had on established philosophical views and the need for revisiting certain core notions of philosophy. In this paper I intend to review Husserl’s view on thingness-essence and his conception of the essence of individuals, based mainly in his writings from the time of Logical Investigations, Ideas, and later of Experience and Judgment. Taking account of the work of Lothar Eley in Die Krise des Apriori, among others, I will inquire into the ways in which phenomenology may undermine (one could even say fully “destroy”) the view of essences as non-factual, as well as undermine their ontological priority. Doing so may help to shape a conception of material or formal individual essences and generally of essences as concrete objects of experience in virtue of well-defined epistemic ones.

I consider Kant’s theory of matter, examine his distinction between “formal” and “material” purposiveness, review the related secondary literature, and interpret the role of the stuff of which organs consist in his conception of the special characteristics of organisms. As organisms ingest or absorb compounds, they induce chemical changes among those materials to grow and repair organs. Those organs have their functions with respect to each other in part on account of the materials of which they are composed. A Kantian biological law, I argue, is a coordinated system of lower-order chemical and mechanical regularities that an organism instantiates in the relations that its organs have to each other. I interpret Kant’s contention that organisms resist cognition as claiming that a “discursive understanding” can have no conception of why a particular biological law instantiates whichever lower-order mechanical and chemical regularities it does.

Kant points to two forms of self-consciousness: the inner sense (empirical apperception) grounded in a sensory form of self-awareness and transcendental apperception. The aim of this paper is to show that a sophisticated notion of basic self-consciousness, which contains a pre-reflective self-consciousness as its first level, is provided by the notion of transcendental apperception. The necessity for a pre-reflective self-consciousness has been pointed out in phenomenological literature. According to this account, every self-ascription of any property implies a more fundamental form of self-consciousness, i.e., a kind of immediate familiarity with oneself. This pre-reflective self-consciousness is a non-relational and non-identificational form of self-consciousness and concerns an immediate acquaintance of the subject with itself. In the specific terms of transcendentalism every thought contains an implicit reference to a first-personal “givenness” or a sense of “mineness” that articulates a non-relational and non-identificational form of a pre-reflective model of self-consciousness.

This article considers the positions of Gabriel Marcel and Thomas Aquinas on self-knowledge and argues for a synthesis between them. The basis of this Marcelian-Thomistic synthesis is their common understanding of the self as inherently in relation to that which is other (via embodiment) and in the necessity of activation for self-knowledge to occur. The divergence between these thinkers occurs in regard to the process of activation. While Aquinas presents an Aristotelian account of activation rooted in his understanding of cognition, Marcel offers a broader vision of activation that gives pride of place to intersubjectivity. A Marcelian-Thomistic synthesis preserves the Aristotelian systematization of Aquinas, while adding Marcel’s expanded understanding of activation and his prioritization of intersubjectivity. Such a synthesis allows for a treatment of self-knowledge that is metaphysically systematic and true to lived experience.

Much of Edith Stein’s work on personhood is influenced by Max Scheler’s ethically focused Christian personalism. But Stein’s own treatment of the ethical implications of personalism is not yet well studied. While the ethical theme is visible early on, it is not until the 1930s that the implicitly Christian dimension of her personalism became explicit. Stein mined her Christian personalism for its ethical and pedagogical implications on the topic of self-formation. This paper reviews the lines of development of Stein’s Christian personalism and examines its centrality for a concept of ethical education.

This paper describes an exegetical puzzle that lies at the heart of Frege’s writings—how to reconcile his logicism with his definitions and claims about his definitions. It also reviews two interpretations that try to resolve this puzzle: the “explicative interpretation” and the “analysis interpretation.” This paper defends the explicative interpretation and critiques the careful and sophisticated defenses of the analysis interpretation given by Michael Dummett and Patricia Blanchette. Specifically, I argue that Frege’s texts either are inconsistent with the analysis interpretation or do not support it. I also defend the explicative interpretation from the recent charge that it cannot make sense of Frege’s logicism. While I do not provide the explicative interpretation’s full solution to the puzzle, I show that its main competitor is seriously problematic.

What does it mean to say that a person has dignity, and what explains her dignity? Linda Zagzebski argues that personal dignity entails both infinite and irreplaceable value. Initially she grounds the former claim in the power of rationality and the latter in the uniqueness of one’s subjective lived experience. Later she grounds both in the power of rationality, understood in terms of reflective consciousness. I argue that the latter account is an improvement upon the former but that needless problems arise from both accounts because (1) she conflates properties considered in the abstract with properties instantiated in concrete persons and (2) she fails to recognize an ambiguity in the notion of incommunicability or uniqueness. I also argue that the more fundamental account of rationality should be given not in terms of reflective consciousness but in terms of the ability to understand particulars in light of universals.

Thomas de Vio Cajetan produced a highly influential Thomistic treatise on analogy entitled De nominum analogia. The merits of this work have been contested since the sixteenth century. Notable twentieth-century Thomists who adopted many of the teachings of De nominum analogia include Jacques Maritain and Yves Simon. Joshua Hochschild’s The Semantics of Analogy highlighted the significance of chapter ten, where Cajetan applies his theory to resolve the problem of demonstrations that use analogous terms, with the explicit purpose of addressing a serious challenge from Scotists regarding the use of analogy in metaphysics. This paper examines the criticism of Cajetan’s way of using analogous terms in demonstrations by the seventeenth-century Franciscan Scotist Bartolomeo Mastri. It shows how the Thomist differs from the Scotist and analyzes these rival positions.

This paper places Kant’s Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason within the historical context of the pantheism controversy between Mendelssohn and Jacobi. I argue that reading Religion with this context in mind shines new light upon passages connected with the need for a moral archetype and prototype in the form of Christ, as well as various comments upon the relation between Christianity and Judaism. Within this new viewpoint, we can also see Religion as ultimately concerned with promoting Christianity, broadly understood, as the most appropriate historical vehicle for the promulgation of rational religion, and thus as a cornerstone of the Enlightenment project.

Philosophical skepticism, according to numerous influential accounts of it, is bound up with our failure or inability to adopt an “absolute” standpoint. Similarly, many religions speak of an “absolute” that also is beyond human reach. With this similarity in mind, I will develop what I take to be a religious dimension of skepticism. First, I will discuss the connection that Stanley Cavell draws between his reading of skepticism and the notions of God and original sin. I will then refer to William James’s description of the religious experience of conversion and apply it to the transformative aspect of skepticism. Finally, I will argue with respect to mysticism and negative theology that the transformative experiences one can find in both skepticism and religion can be interpreted as yielding an experiential understanding of the finitude of the human condition.

Pamphilus’s introductory letter opens up contradictory ways of reading Hume’s Dialogues. The first, suggested by his claim to be a “mere auditor” to the dialogues that were “deeply imprinted in [his] memory,” is the empiricist reading. This traditional reading has gone several ways, including to the conclusions that the design of the mosquito and other “curious artifices of nature” that inflict pain and suffering on all bespeaks an utterly careless and insensate (if not malign) creator. Pamphilus’s preface also opens a more philosophical reading by his consideration of the ancient literary form of dialogue. This second interpretive path suggests that there is more design in its writing, and more revealed in it, than simple empiricist readings allow. Dialogically elucidating the Dialogues confronts us with the limits of empiricism in moral and religious philosophy. Hume’s last work, if read philosophically, exhibits the vacancy of empiricism.

In §§62–82 of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment we find several references to the supersensible in the context of the solution of the antinomy of the power of teleological judgment. It is not, however, plainly clear how these references relate to each other or how they contribute to the proposed solution. Specially puzzling is the way in which the idea of an intelligent author of the world is related to the idea of an intuitive understanding. Some interpreters have considered that the intelligent author of the world should possess an understanding capable of intuition. Kant, however, never expressly establishes this relationship. In this paper I intend to show that the idea of an intelligent author of the world cannot be enlarged with the idea of an intuitive understanding. Both of the references to the supersensible perform different functions.

Descartes’s description of his method for discovering truth provides a helpful tool for interpreting his writings. In this article I offer a sample of how to interpret Descartes by understanding his algebraic method. My test case is the Cartesian teaching on divine freedom, which is well known to be inconsistent and often considered unfounded. I reconstruct the equations that led to these doctrines, arguing that Descartes held that the divine act of creation was both necessary and arbitrary because of the equations that resulted when he applied his method to the natural world.

This article analyzes the “Interlude” in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. In particular, it examines Johannes Climacus’s response to Hegel’s view that a past actuality is necessary. I provide an in-depth analysis of Hegel’s view of modality (possibility, actuality, necessity) and of what he means when he says that a past actuality is necessary. In contrast to the standard scholarly interpretation, I argue that Climacus need not reject Hegel’s view because Hegel’s view of the necessity of the past is not so controversial or difficult to accept. Finally, I show that Climacus’s main critique is that we cannot know the past as necessary in any meaningful way. He worries that we might get so preoccupied with the futile task of trying to know the Hegelian necessity of the past that we forget to personally appropriate the past in a way that can help us live in the present.

Kant defined moral evil as reversing the order between self-love and morality. For many critics, however, his egoistically-orientated notion of self-love fails to make sense of the infinitely manifold incentives of evil under the human condition. Against this criticism, my article will re-interpret Kantian self-love and empirical self-conception from both the transcendental and empirical level, thus offering a transcendental grounding for the empirical manifestations of evil. In this way I will argue that we can explain rather sufficiently the infinite manifoldness of evil incentives in real human life with Kant’s prima facie simplistic definition of evil.

This essay offers a critical examination of Neil Ormerod’s treatment of the debate between Lonergan and Gilson on the question of being. Although this debate concerns a highly technical issue of metaphysics and epistemology, it remains germane and relevant, especially within the field of Christian thought. In Ormerod’s careful and for the most part generous examination of this debate, he argues that being for Gilson is perceived through the senses, whereas for Lonergan being is intended in the questions that arise from the relevant sense data. Where Gilson’s philosophy gives priority to the metaphysics of being, Lonergan gives priority to epistemology and cognitional theory. In arguing for the superiority of Lonergan’s approach to the question of being, Ormerod relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of Gilson’s metaphysics. By appeal to the more recent work of Kenneth Schmitz, this essay proposes a proper understanding of Gilson’s metaphysics as a basis for a more conciliatory relationship between these two giants in modern Christian philosophy who too often are pitted against one another.

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

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

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

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