In one of Marge Piercy’s poems, ‘For Strong Women,’ we find the following verse:

A strong woman is a woman in whose head

a voice is repeating, I told you so,

ugly, bad girl, bitch, nag, shrill, witch,

ballbuster, nobody will ever love you back,

why aren’t you feminine, why aren’t

you soft, why aren’t you quiet,

why aren’t you dead?

Similarly, we might say that a moral woman is a woman in whose head a voice is repeating words like ‘immature,’ ‘pathological,’ ‘inadequate,’ ‘immoral,’ ‘evil.’ What I explore in this paper are various ways in which a woman’s moral voice and her sense of moral integrity can be twisted and destroyed by patriarchal ideology and lived experience.

There is no more intriguing or provocative argument in the Marxian corpus; it is the theoretical and rhetorical heart of Capital; not surprisingly, it is the locus of endless controversy: capitalist profit is possible, Marx argues, only because the capitalist is able to find on the market a unique commodity that possesses ‘the specific use-value ... of being a source not only of value, but of more value than it has itself.’ This commodity is labor power, the capacity to work, which, Marx insists, must be sharply distinguished from the activity of laboring, since it is precisely this distinction that lays bare capitalism’s essence, revealing it to be —exploitation.

Democracy and human rights have long been strongly connected in international covenants. In documents such as 1948 United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1966 International Covenant of Civil and Political Rights, democracy is justified both intrinsically in terms of popular sovereignty and instrumentally as the best way to “foster the full realization of all human rights.” Yet, even though they are human and thus universal rights, political rights are often surprisingly specific. In the Covenant, for example, “the right to take part in the conduct of public affairs” is equated with “the right to vote and to be elected.” More often then not, their realization is left to states and their constitutions, as for example in the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights. Political rights have a “peculiar” status among enumerated human rights, and this difficulty has to do with deep assumptions about the nature and scope of democracy and political community that remain unexamined by the drafters of these important declarations.

The modem rationalist tradition initiated by Descartes has as one of its central tenets the independence of the human understanding from the senses. Regardless of the different ways in which independence from experience is understood, there is much common ground among the modem views on the a priori. Yet Kant, culminating this tradition, introduces an entirely new conception of the a priori never before articulated in the history of philosophy. This is the notion of elements in knowledge which are independent of experience but nevertheless closely connected, in a special way, with experience.

Although for Kant the a priori has a privileged position in the structure of knowledge - as it has for other modem rationalist philosophers - one of the most striking, and often neglected, aspect of his conception of the a priori is the great extent to which it is opposed to foundationalism.

Imagination works upon desires and needs in a variety of ways. Different sensibilities will concentrate upon different of its operations and neglect - or even ignore - others. Thus Rousseau (and in some ways Plato, as we shall see) takes a very gloomy view of the uses of imagination. He sees only its dark aspect, under which it is a prime source of wretchedness:

At the one extreme stands Hume, who -at least according to common conceptions - rules out entirely the possibility of material or non-logical necessity, and who therefore rules out also the possibility that we might enjoy that sort of certain knowledge that earlier philosophers had assumed as a matter of course to be correlated therewith. At the other extreme stands Adolf Reinach, the hero of our present story, who defends the existence of a wide class of material necessities falling within the domain of what can be a priori known. More precisely, Reinach holds that there are certain categories of entity whose factual instantiation brings with it as a matter of necessity the instantiation of certain other correlated categories. The instantiation of the category color necessitates in this fashion the instantiation of the category visual extension.

Occasionalism is often taken by historians of philosophy to have been an ad hoc hypothesis to establish the mind-body causal connections which on Cartesian principles are thought otherwise impossible. My aim in this paper is to show that this view is utterly without historical foundation, that, on the contrary, the view that only God can be a real cause of mind-body interaction was but a special case of a claim argued on grounds transcending the mind-body problem, and, what will be part of this, that the logical character of occasionalism anyhow precluded it from the role into which it was later miscast. More specifically, I shall show that occasionalism was but a consequence of the metaphysics adopted by the Cartesians in their general account of change. Though the same case could be made for the views of Clauberg and Geulincx, my concern will be with the occasionalism of Malebranche. My case here will be that his view is the historical and logical dénouement of principles more or less explicit both in Descartes and in two of his lesser known disciples, LaForge and Cordemoy.

Every single day, every newspaper in the world carries some further evidence as to how limited the Earth’s resources are. Every single day, therefore, we should grow more deeply convinced that the notion of abundance has become hopelessly irrelevant and can safely be shelved forever. Or so it seems. In the final section of this paper, I shall defend the opposite view: that growing awareness of the limits of our resources should make the notion of abundance, suitably (though still plausibly) defined, more and not less relevant to our pursuits. Whether or not this defence turns out to be successful, I hope this paper will go some way towards clarifying this notoriously elusive notion, as well as its no less elusive and no less important antonym: scarcity.

New technology in human reproduction has provoked wide ranging arguments about the desirability and moral justifiability of many of these efforts. Authors of biomedical ethics have ventured into the field to offer the insight of moral theory to these complex moral problems of contemporary life. I believe, however, that the moral theories most widely endorsed today are problematic and that a new approach to ethics is necessary if we are to address the concerns and perspectives identified by feminist theorists in our considerations of such topics. Hence, I propose to look at one particular technique in the growing repertoire of new reproductive technologies, in vitro fertilization (IVF), in order to consider the insight which the mainstream approaches to moral theory have offered to this debate, and to see the difference made by a feminist approach to ethics.

Setting out to understand Frege, the scholar confronts a roadblock at the outset: We just have little to go on. Much of the unpublished work and correspondence is lost, probably forever. Even the most basic task of imagining Frege's intellectual life is a challenge. The people he studied with and those he spent daily time with are little known to historians of philosophy and logic. To be sure, this makes it hard to answer broad questions like: ‘Who influenced Frege?’ But the information vacuum also creates local problems of textual interpretation. Say we encounter a sentence that may be read as alluding to a scientific dispute. Should it be read that way? To answer, we'd need to address prior questions. Is it reasonable to think Frege would be familiar with the issue? Deep or superficial familiarity? Would he expect his readers to catch the allusion? Can he be expected to anticipate certain objections? Can people he knows be expected to press those objections? A battery of such questions arise, demanding a richer understanding of Frege's environment.

A sure route to philosophic immortality is to produce a work both too important to ignore and too enigmatic to understand. Whether J.S. Mill consciously elected this strategy or not, his Utilitarianism is destined to enjoy a very long life indeed. Utilitarian theories still define one of our principal options in moral philosophy and Mill remains a major figure in the utilitarian tradition. Although the principle of utility was the centrepiece of Mill's normative system of ethics and politics, he devoted only this slender volume to the nature and implications of that principle. And we are still not sure Just what he said.

Philosophy is not history, not even intellectual history. The history of philosophy is history, a branch of intellectual history. Yet it is widely believed, by philosophers and historians of philosophy alike, that the study of the history of philosophy is an important part of the study of philosophy.

A careful, theoretical clarification of gender roles has only recently begun in social and political philosophy. It is the aim of the following piece to reveal that an analysis of women’s traditional position - her distinctive activities, labor and surrounding sense of ‘mine’ - can not only make valuable contributions towards clarifying traditional property disputes, but may even provide elements for a new conception of ownership. By way of illustration, the article focusses on the influential work of John Rawls and argues that - when Rawls’s own analysis and principles of justice are supplemented by an account of what is here called ‘reproductive labor’ - his theory in fact tends to a form of democratic socialism. Stated somewhat differently, my aim is to shift the terms of the property debate as posed by Rawls from within his own position. I hope to show that the real ownership question which now emerges is no longer whether ‘justice as fairness’ countenances a private property or socialist form of democracy, but what precise form such a socialism should take.

Naturalized epistemology, as I understand it, is the practice of treating knowledge – human or otherwise – as a natural phenomenon, susceptible of investigation by the methods of empirical science. A naturalized approach to the study of knowledge differs saliently from more traditional forms of epistemology in taking the existence of knowledge for granted. Naturalized epistemologists do not concern themselves with skeptical challenges. Nor are naturalized epistemologists much concerned with questions about what counts as “knowledge,” properly speaking. They do not worry if a bird’s natively specified program for star-based navigation is “justified” for the bird, nor if the sub-personal data structures and algorithms posited by cognitive psychologists can be properly counted as “beliefs.” The naturalized epistemologist is interested in the explanation of anything that even appears to be a cognitive achievement, whether or not it passes muster as “knowledge” in some preferred sense.

The relationship of philosophy to science is a matter of long historical dispute. Philosophy has been described variously as the mother, the queen or the handmaiden of science, depending on whether the philosopher’s role was perceived as that of giving birth to science, of regulating and legitimating scientific discourse or of clearing the conceptual underbrush in the way of scientific advance. This essay, by contrast, is grounded on a conception of philosophy and science as partners or sisters, perhaps even as Siamese twin sisters, both proceeding from the same impulse to understand ourselves and the world and to change both for the better. Occasionally relations between philosophy and science have been marred by sibling rivalry, with each sister claiming the right to control and limit the pretensions of the other. In fact, however, philosophy and science are interdependent and ultimately inseparable. To borrow a famous slogan from another context: science without philosophy is blind; philosophy without science is empty.

Over the past twenty years, Husserlian phenomenology has increasingly drawn the attention of the cognitive community, thereby leading to the emergence of what might be called a phenomenological trend within contemporary cognitive studies. What this phenomenological trend really amounts to is however a matter of debate. The reason is that it embodies, in fact, a multifaceted reflection about the relevance of Husserlian phenomenology to the current efforts towards a scientific theory of cognition, and, to a lesser degree, about the reciprocal relevance of these efforts to the fate of the Husserlian tradition. Indeed, it covers a wide array of perspectives on these questions, ranging from tentative demonstrations of the cognitively misleading character of Husserl's ideas, inasmuch as they would incarnate the same foundational errors as cognitivism (Hall and Dreyfus 1982), to diametrically opposed views arguing that the naturalist bent of contemporary cognitive science is ill-conceived, and that only the brand of transcendentalism defended by Husserl can provide it with adequate foundations (cf., for instance, Villela-Petit 1999).

Principles of rationality are invoked for several purposes: they are often deployed in explanation and prediction; they are also used to set standards for rational health for deliberating agents or to furnish blueprints for rational automata; and they are intended as guides to perplexed decision makers seeking to regulate their own attitudes and conduct. These purposes are quite different. It is far from obvious that what serves well in one capacity will do so in another. Indeed, I shall argue later on in this essay that when principles of rationality are intended for use as norms for self-criticism, they cannot also serve as laws in explanation and prediction or as blueprints for rational automata.

Plato represents Socrates as believing in the unity of the virtues, quarreling with those who, like Protagoras or Meno, wish to treat the virtues as distinct objects of inquiry (Protagoras 329c2ff., Meno 71e1ff.). On the other hand, there is good reason to deny that Plato's Socrates believed in the numerical identity of the virtues (cf. Meno 79a3-5). What Socrates did believe, I shall argue, is that the various virtues are one in essence. I shall show what this means and how it clears up prima facie inconsistencies among Plato's early dialogues.

If I am right, Socrates’ theory has startling consequences. Since essence is exactly what Socrates wants a definition to state, it follows that all virtues will have one and the same definition. And if this is so, no wonder the quest for separate definitions of virtues fails in every case! For example in the Laches the generals are baffled by Courage because Courage has no private essence and cannot be marked off from the other virtues by stating its essence. Its essence is Virtue entire. That is a radical view, but there are good reasons for attributing it to Socrates.

All modern democratic societies claim to be egalitarian. They do not agree, of course, about what egalitarianism demands; the ideal of equality is hardly transparent and can be plausibly understood to encompass any number of social arrangements and values. That some form of equality is to be prized, though, is uncontroversial. Indeed, it may be true that all political theories that have stood the test of time can be understood as specifying and interpreting the ideal of equality (Dworkin 1973, 500; 513). Whether or not this is true, I think it is hard to deny that democratic political philosophy can generally be understood as egalitarian in character; to know how to treat people as moral equals, on this account, is to know what justice demands of us. We are all, if this is correct, egalitarians now, however much we argue about what such a label truly demands.

How many emotions are there? Should we accept as overwhelming the evidence in favour of regarding emotions as emanating from a relatively small number of modules evolved efficiently to serve us in common life situations? Or can emotions, like colour, be organized in a space of two, three, or more dimensions defining a vast number of discriminable emotions, arranged on a continuum, on the model of the colour cone?

There is some evidence that certain emotions are specialized to facilitate certain response sequences, relatively encapsulated in their neurophysiological organization. These are natural facts. But nature, as Katherine Hepburn remarked to Humphrey Bogart, is what we were put in the world to rise above. I shall suggest that we can consider the question not merely from a scientific point of view, but from a political point of view. And so I will try to explain how to reconcile the evidence of emotional modularity - which, as some of the contributions to the present volume illustrate, is not devoid of a certain ambiguity - with a reasonable plea for an attitude of disapproval towards the rigidities of our taxonomy.