In his important recent book, Aaron James has defended a principle – Collective Due Care – for determining when a form of economic integration is morally objectionable because it causes unjustified harm (including unemployment, wage suppression and diminished working conditions). This essay argues that Collective Due Care would yield implausible judgements about trade practices and would be too indeterminate to play the practical role for which it is intended.

This paper gives a contextualized reading of Kant’s theory of real definitions in geometry. Though Leibniz, Wolff, Lambert and Kant all believe that definitions in geometry must be ‘real’, they disagree about what a real definition is. These disagreements are made vivid by looking at two of Euclid’s definitions. I argue that Kant accepted Euclid’s definition of circle and rejected his definition of parallel lines because his conception of mathematics placed uniquely stringent requirements on real definitions in geometry. Leibniz, Wolff and Lambert thus accept definitions that Kant rejects because they assign weaker roles to real definitions.

Is it possible to characterize the sortal essence of Fs for a sortal concept F solely in terms of a criterion of identity C for F? That is, can the question ‘What sort of thing are Fs?’ be answered by saying that Fs are essentially those things whose identity can be assessed in terms of C? This paper presents a case study supporting a negative answer to these questions by critically examining the neo-Fregean suggestion that cardinal numbers can be fully characterized as those things whose identity can be assessed in terms of one-one correspondence between concepts.

For any essential property God has, there is an ability He does not have. He is unable to bring about any state of affairs in which He does not have that property. Such inabilities seem to preclude omnipotence. After making trouble for the standard responses to this problem, I offer my own solution: God is not omnipotent. This may seem like a significant loss for the theist. But I show that it is not. The theist may abandon the doctrine that God is omnipotent without scaling back the extent of His power and without denying that He has all perfections.

In his account of fairness in international trade, Aaron James distinguishes autarkic gains from the gains of trade. Since the autarkic gains are external to the practice of trade, James's account allows each country to keep these gains. The gains of trade, in contrast, must be distributed equally. This distinction suffers from three problems. First, James's autarkic adjustment not only allows inequalities to persist, but exacerbates and creates new ones. Second, there is no non-morally arbitrary way to determine the autarkic gains. Finally, by favouring his account over more egalitarian options, James does not merely set autarkic gains aside as external to the practice of trade but rather implicitly endorses a moral entitlement to autarkic gains without argumentation.

The consensus view in the literature is that, according to Kant, definitions in philosophy are impossible. While this is true prior to the advent of transcendental philosophy, I argue that with Kant’s Copernican Turn definitions of some philosophical concepts, the categories become possible. Along the way I discuss issues like why Kant introduces the ‘Analytic of Concepts’ as an analysis of the understanding, how this faculty, as the faculty for judging, provides the principle for the complete exhibition of the categories, how the pure categories relate to the schematized categories, and how the latter can be used on empirical objects.

In this review of Hutto and Myin’s Radicalizing Enactivism, I question the adequacy of a non-representational theory of mind. I argue first that such a theory cannot differentiate cognition from other bodily engagements such as wrestling with an opponent. Second, I question whether the simple robots constructed by Rodney Brooks are adequate as models of multimodal organisms. Last, I argue that Hutto and Myin pay very little attention to how semantically interacting representations are needed to give an account of choice and action.

According to rationalist conceptions of moral agency, the constitutive capacities of moral agency are rational capacities. So understood, rationalists are often thought to have a problem with feeling. For example, many believe that rationalists must reject the attractive Aristotelian thought that moral activity is by nature pleasant. I disagree. It is easy to go wrong here because it is easy to assume that pleasure is empirical rather than rational and so extrinsic rather than intrinsic to moral agency, rationalistically conceived. Drawing on underappreciated elements of Kant’s moral psychology, I sketch an alternative form of rationalism, according to which moral activity is by nature pleasant because at least some pleasures are by nature rational.

In his 1763 Prize Essay, Kant is thought to endorse a version of formalism on which mathematical concepts need not apply to extramental objects. Against this reading, I argue that the Prize Essay has sufficient resources to explain how the objective reference of mathematical concepts is secured. This account of mathematical concepts’ objective reference employs material from Wolffian philosophy. On my reading, Kant’s 1763 view still falls short of his Critical view in that it does not explain the universal, unconditional applicability of mathematical concepts.

G.A. Cohen and David Estlund claim that, because of their fact-dependent nature, constructivist theories of justice do not qualify as moral theories about fundamental values such as justice. In this paper, I defend fact-dependent, constructivist theories of justice against this fact-independency critique. I argue that constructivists can invoke facts among the grounds for accepting fundamental principles of justice while maintaining that the foundation of morality has to be non-empirical. My claim is that constructivists ultimately account for the normativity of fact-dependent principles by referring to a fact-independent, moral conception of the person, which is not a principle of justice.1

This discussion responds to important questions raised about my theory of fairness in the global economy by Christian Barry, Charles Beitz, A.J. Julius and Kristi Olson. I further elaborate how moral argument can be ‘internal’ to a social practice, how my proposed principles of fairness depend on international practice, how I can admit several relevant conceptions of ‘harm’ and why my account does not depend on a problematic conception of societal ‘endowments’.

I critically evaluate the notion of structure Ted Sider presents in Writing the Book of the World. A prerequisite to understanding Sider’s notion of structure is understanding Sider’s take on ideology and ontology. In Section II, I discuss this. In Section III, I consider arguments in favor of structure. In Section IV, I examine one debate that is considered by Sider to be nonsubstantive: the debate over modality. I conclude, in Section V, by examining the reception Writing the Book of the World has received in the philosophical community.

Gibbard argues that ‘meaning is normative’. He explains the claim with an account of the normative which bases it on the process of planning, taken in part as issuing instructions to oneself. It seems to entail that the right kind of plans make norms. One ought to continue adding with plus rather than quus in a Kripkenstein horror story. I focus on Gibbard’s characterization of normativity: it is not what one might expect. The main purpose of this review article is to present the way of understanding normativity that makes most sense of what he says, and which makes some otherwise implausible assertions defensible and perhaps even true. I give reasons for thinking that Gibbard’s understanding of normativity-through-plans cannot do the work he wants it to. I also argue that he is onto something right, and it opens interesting new questions.

This paper shows that Kant’s investigation into mathematical purposiveness was central to the development of his understanding of synthetic a priori knowledge. Specifically, it provides a clear historical explanation as to why Kant points to mathematics as an exemplary case of the synthetic a priori, argues that his early analysis of mathematical purposiveness provides a clue to the metaphysical context and motives from which his understanding of synthetic a-priori knowledge emerged, and provides an analysis of the underlying structure of mathematical purposiveness itself, which can be described as unintentional, but also as objective and unlimited.

I examine the claim, made by some authors, that we sometimes acquire knowledge from falsehood. I focus on two representative cases in which a subject S infers a proposition q from a false proposition p. If S knows that q, I argue, S’s false belief that p is not essential to S’s cognition. S’s knowledge is instead due to S’s belief that p′, a proposition in the neighbourhood of p that S (dispositionally) believes (and knows). S thus knows despite her false belief. The widely accepted and plausible principle that inferential knowledge requires known premises is unscathed.

This paper tries to make sense of Kant’s scattered remarks about conic sections to see what light they shed on his philosophy of mathematics. It proceeds by confronting his remarks with the source that seems to have informed his thinking about conic sections: the Conica of Apollonius. The paper raises questions about Kant’s attitude towards mathematics and the way he understood the cognitive resources available to us to do mathematics.

Existentialist accounts maintain that visual phenomenal content takes the logical form of an existentially quantified sentence. These accounts do not make phenomenal content specific enough. Singularist accounts posit a singular content in which the seen object is a constituent. These accounts make phenomenal content too specific. My account gets the specificity of visual phenomenal content just right. My account begins with John Searle’s suggestion that visual experience represents an object as seen, moves this relation outside the scope of the existential quantifier and then replaces it with the relation of objects being ‘present as accessible’, as described by Alva Noë.