It is commonly assumed, at least by continental philosophers, that epistemological hermeneutics and foundationalism are incompatible. I argue that this assumption is mistaken. If I am correct, the analytic and continental traditions may be closer than is commonly supposed. Hermeneutics, as I will argue, is a descriptive claim about human cognition, and foundationalism is a normative claim about how beliefs ought to be related to one another. Once the positions are stated in this way, their putative incompatibility vanishes. Also, to inspire further research I include an appendix which contains an unfinished prototype of a hermeneutic foundationalism.

This commentary on a poem of Crates of Thebes, which was transmitted in Julian's Oration VII, To the Cynic Herakleios, and Oration IX [VI], To the Uneducated Cynics, intends to rediscuss the notions of happiness, pleasure, wealth, and justice in the context of the kata phusin life as viewed by the Cynics. The “minimal ethics” proposed by the cynic philosophers, which many would consider as a kind of voluntary experience of suffering, appears as a possible way to secure both individual happiness and political justice.

I shall consider the phenomenon of believing ourselves to have at least one false belief: a phenomenon I call believed fallibility. I shall first present a paradoxical argument which appears to show that believed fallibility is incoherent; second, note that this argument assumes that we are committed to the conjunction of all our beliefs; third, sketch a more intuitive notion of commitment in which we are not committed to the conjunction of all our beliefs and argue that the original paradoxical argument is now defused; fourth, construct a new paradoxical argument showing that if we believe that we have at least one false belief we are committed to a contradiction, employing the preferable notion of commitment; and, fifth, suggest that perhaps we might avoid the new paradox by denying that closing our beliefs under conjunction is required by rationality.

This article argues that the normative foundations and political implications of David Held's cosmopolitan social democracy are insufficient as solutions to the moral and social problems he criticizes. The article develops a life-grounded alternative critique of globalization that roots our ethical duties towards each other in consciousness of our shared needs and capabilities. These ethical duties are best realized in political projects aimed at fundamental long-term transformations in the principles that govern major socio-economic institutions.

Recent discussions of the nature of mind, emotion, and self have often intersected with renewed interest in the sources of morals and morality. In this article I examine proposals on these matters by Charles Taylor and two of his interlocutors, Thomas Wren and Justin Oakley. I describe and compare the “holistic” epistemological approaches of these three in their searches for the “moral self,” and then evaluate the adequacy of their correlative ontological proposals. Finally, I discuss the meta-ethical implications of these emotive views of selfhood in terms of the objective or subjective status of moral values to determine whether these views meet the philosophers' own criteria for moral plausibility.