L'une des fonctions des institutions publiques des démocraties libérales est de formuler des recommandations à l'attention des décideurs. Or, les institutions publiques savent que leurs recommandations seront souvent ignorées en partie par le décideur. Cette situation de « conformité partielle » aux recommandations soulève plusieurs problèmes de nature philosophique pour les institutions. En nous appuyant sur une analyse de 570 recommandations tirées de 40 documents et rapports du secteur public québécois, nous identifions deux enjeux entourant la structure des recommandations issues du secteur public.

One of the key responsibilities of public institutions in liberal democracies is to formulate recommendations for decision makers. However, public institutions realize that decision makers will often partly ignore their recommendations. This situation of “partial compliance” with recommendations raises a number of philosophical issues for institutions. Based on an analysis of 570 recommendations drawn from 40 Quebec public-sector documents and reports, we identify two issues surrounding the structure of public-policy recommendations.

There are strong moral reasons to acknowledge that third parties can have the standing to forgive. Third-party refusals to forgive can reinforce the moral agency and value of women and disrupt the gendering of forgiveness. Third-party forgiveness can also be crucial for restorative justice aims, like recognizing the value of wrongdoers. Lastly, many victim-only accounts of forgiveness are problematic and utilize an individualistic conception of the self that reinforces the logic of misogyny. Victim-only accounts of forgiveness can also restrict focus to the victim's suffering, thereby neglecting the importance of healing and the relevance of third-party forgiveness for facilitating healing.

In response to the claim that democracies are inherently short-termist, this article argues for a new way to understand them as being committed to future generations. If taking turns among rulers and ruled is a normative idea inherent to the concept of democracy, then such turn-taking commits democrats to a fair turn with future generations.

In the Summa Theologiae, Thomas Aquinas states that the “aspect of pastness” involved in memory is a certain kind of cognitive object — i.e., an intention — apprehended by the “estimative power.” All told, however, Aquinas mentions this idea precisely once. In this article, I construct an account of the idea that pastness is an estimative intention by drawing upon texts in which I argue that Aquinas develops this idea, albeit without invoking the terminology of the estimative intention. I conclude that, by identifying the aspect of pastness as an estimative intention, Aquinas neatly synthesizes the Aristotelian and Arabic traditions on memory.

In this article, I argue that some irremediably depressed patients have the decision-making capacity to consent to medical treatment even when they want to die. These patients are said to have deficits in appreciative capacity because they lack insight into their condition. I argue that some patients have insight if they can cognize and articulate a range of future possibilities regarding their health. The argument requires a phenomenological lens. Phenomenology captures something fundamental about depression, such as temporal experience, which is needed for a more thorough assessment of capacity for medical assistance in dying (MAiD).

Indigenous philosophy from the 17th century and earlier is often thought to be irretrievable because of a lack of extant works. There are at least two reasons that this view is mistaken. First, it overlooks the role oral traditions play in preserving the thought of Indigenous peoples. Second, some Indigenous thinkers had their philosophical views recorded by European interlocutors shortly after contact. With these sources, the same techniques used to recover the views of philosophers like Prodicus, whose works are lost, can be applied to Indigenous thinkers. By reconstructing the philosophy of Kondiaronk, I show how this can be done.

Les pays ayant une structure politique fédérale sont souvent confrontés aux revendications de leurs États membres pour obtenir plus d'autonomie politique. Pour répondre à ces revendications, les théoriciens du fédéralisme multinational ont proposé de reconnaître un droit à l'autodétermination interne qu'ils ont pris soin d'encadrer de diverses manières. Bien qu'intéressante, cette proposition pourrait toutefois s'avérer insuffisante pour répondre aux inégalités entre les peuples au sein d'une même fédération. C'est la thèse que nous défendrons dans le présent article. Nous montrerons que le concept d'autodétermination interne défendu par Kymlicka reste indéterminé et ouvre la porte à des interprétations plus exigeantes.

In Harry Frankfurt’s seminal “Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility,” he advances an argument against the Principle of Alternate Possibilities: if an agent is responsible for performing some action, then she is able to do otherwise. However, almost all of the Frankfurt cases in this literature involve impermissible actions. In this article, I argue that the failure to consider other deontic categories exposes a deep problem, one that threatens either to upend much current moral theorizing or to upend the relevance of Frankfurt cases.

I argue, through Heidegger, that the notion of τὸ ἐξαίφνης in the Parmenides does not signify eternity, or a trace of eternity in time, but rather implies a primordial conception of time. In deduction two, the relationship between stasis and kinesis becomes problematic due to the notion of τὸ νῦν. This leads Parmenides, in deduction three, to posit the notion of τὸ ἐξαίφνης to solve this problematic relationship, implying a primordial conception of time.

Mullā Ṣadrā explains self-knowledge through the notion of knowledge-by-presence, which refers to the immediate presence of the known before the knower. A puzzling component of this view is his idea that knower and known have a relationship of unity with one another. Reflection on Sydney Shoemaker's account of self-knowledge can help us uncover Ṣadrā's motivation for this puzzling idea. We show that Ṣadrā was motivated by his awareness of the concept of self-blindness, a notion introduced into contemporary philosophy by Shoemaker.