Although Aristotle’s name is regularly mentioned when it comes to the question of where the notion of the will historically derives from and although one of the most influential exponents of philosophical theories of the will, Thomas Aquinas, seems to think that he is just applying the Aristotelian theory, many historians of philosophy explicitly deny that Aristotle had a notion of the will. If we think that the notion of the will is among the notions that have been gradually developed in the history of philosophy, nothing is strange about saying that some philosophers prior to this development lacked this particular notion. However, Aristotle’s case is peculiar, because the same historians, who are reluctant to describe such a notion to Aristotle, admit that he played some role in the formation of the same notion. The line-up of more or less recent philosophers and scholars who are of the opinion that Aristotle had no notion of the will is a very remarkable one. This could almost be called a standard or default position, while the list of exponents of the opposed position, i.e. that Aristotle did have a notion or theory of the will, is much shorter.

The last six lines of Aristotle's Metaphysics A.7 draw some important conclusions about Aristotle's predecessors' (the Presocratics' and Plato's) grasp of the four types of cause. Aristotle argues that his account of his predecessors supports his conception of the four causes and his claim that in first philosophy, too, we should seek to understand our subject-matter on the basis of these four causes. I offer a detailed textual and philosophical interpretation of these lines, connect them with Aristotle's argument in Metaphysics A.1-6, and examine their metaphysical, epistemological, and methodological presuppositions.

I investigate the epistemic status of the hypotheses and other premises used in Socrates’ ‘arguments from a hypothesis’ in the Meno, and of the conclusions drawn from them, and argue that, while they are taken by Socrates to fall short of knowledge, he takes them all to have a positive epistemic status, and is not committed to advancing them only tentatively.

The Principle of common cause (PCC) has its significance in providing explanations of phenomena in terms of causal theories. Though the principle has its own epistemological advantages, there can be certain situations where the principle might fail. In the first part of the paper, I offer a preliminary assessment of the PCC and then I turn to make an attempt to illustrate those scenarios where the PCC might misguide us in providing explanation of phenomena in terms of common cause.

In this article, I try to present some effects of the acceptance of nonconceptual content of perception in the realism problem. After having enhancement as main the problem of discrimination observable - unobservable into the conflict of realism with the constructive empiricism, I criticize a particular aspect, that nonconceptual content of perception strengthens the realistic position. Arguing that, while the starting point of the realist position is the existence of entities of common sense, there is nothing that assures us that the world of our daily life consists of objective, specific, unambiguous entities, that is made up the deep structure of the world - as realists believes - and entities are not just "relevant" objects, which are meant only for our own biological species. These “subjective for species” entities we are obliged, as a particular species, to percept with particular perceptual organs in order to satisfy specific needs, and manage to survive ourselves in a particular environment.

This article investigates the relationship between popular sovereignty, populism, and deliberative democracy. My main thesis is that populisms resurrect the polemical dimension of popular sovereignty by turning “the people” against the “powerbloc” or the “elite”, and that it is crucial thatthis terrain not be ceded to authoritarian distortions of this basic contestatory grammar. Furthermore, I contend that populist forms of politics are compatible with a procedural and deliberative conception of democracy. Ifirst engage with the assumption that populism and a procedural model of democracy are incompatible, demonstrating that this assumption relies on a conservative bias which tiesthe exercising of communicative power to a “duty of civility” (Rawls). I then engage with radical-democratic reconstructions of the procedural notion of popular sovereignty which emphasize the unleashing and diversification of peoplehood in communication circuits and the mutual permeability of constitutional politics, parliamentary legislation, and the public sphere. Thirdly, I conclude that populisms are an essential part of communicative power in modern democracies and part of its dialectical structure.

In this essay, I analyze the cosmopolitan project for a new international order that Habermas has articulated in recent publications. I argue that his presentation of the project oscillates between two models. The first is a very ambitious model for a future international order geared to fulfill the peace and human rights goals of the UN Charter. The second is a minimalist model, in which the obligation to protect human rights by the international community is circumscribed to the negative duty of preventing wars of aggression and massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts such as ethnic cleansing or genocide. According to this model, any more ambitious goals should be left to a global domestic politics, which would have to come about through negotiated compromises among domesticated major powers at the transnational level. I defend the ambitious model by arguing that there is no basis for drawing a normatively significant distinction between massive human rights violations due to armed conflicts and those due to regulations of the global economic order. I conclude that the cosmopolitan goals of the Habermasian project can only be achieved if the principles of transnational justice recognized by the international community are ambitious enough to cover economic justice.

This essay deals with Habermas’ concept of truth in his late theoretical philosophy. Assuming his suggestive yet highly inspiring inauguration of a cognitive turn in Critical Theory, it probes his use of the notion of limit concept against the background of the tradition of thought from which it originally derives with the intention of identifying the notion’s potential for taking this promising departure further. It brings to the fore a number of issues in his late writings that reveal the presence of what may be considered the problem of limit concepts in his thought. For present purposes, these issues are located in two areas: Habermas’ revision of his long-held concept of truth and the related criticism of Peirce; and his account of the role of limit concepts like truth and warranted assertibility or rational acceptability in processes of discursive justification. The analysis finds that there is a structural deficit in his presentation that could be filled by cognitively conceived cultural structures that not only correspond to the major types of limit concepts, but also answer to his undeveloped vision of the ‘cultural embodiment of reason’.