In a recent article (2011), Steglich-Petersen claims to be able to provide a teleological account of the nature of epistemic reasons which (i) avoids the standard objections to this kind of approach and (ii) is compatible with the evidentialist claim that epistemic reasons always trump non-epistemic reasons (assuming there are such reasons). I argue that his proposal is unable to do justice to the idea that epistemic reasons are constituted by the evidence, and more generally, that it is incoherent to hold at once that epistemic reasons are instrumental, that believing the true and not believing the false is what has epistemic value and that epistemic reasons are evidential in nature.

Hume sought to analyse our propositionally-structured thought in terms of our ultimate awareness of nothing but objects, sensory impressions or their imagistic copies, “ideas.” The ideas of space and time are often regarded as exceptions to his Copy Theory of impressions and ideas. On grounds strictly internal to Hume’s Treatise, I argue that they are instead typical of Hume’s account of the generality of thought. This ultimately reveals the limits of the Copy Theory and of Concept Empiricism. The key is to recognise how very capacious is our (Humean) imaginative capacity to associate particular perceptions by various fine-grained determinable resemblances.

This paper is part of a series of interdisciplinary investigations in literary fiction and aims to identify the illocutionary force of the so-called “non-serious utterance” (Frege, Austin, Searle) of fiction makers on the theoretical assumption that the primary unit of an utterance’s meaning are complete speech acts (Austin), composed of an illocutionary force (Frege) and a propositional content (Searle). Based on philosophical analysis of non-serious and performative utterances of descriptive sentences, I formulate the fundamental hypothesis that the primary unit of non-serious utterances’ meaning is a complete declaration of the form F(in the language game x, P), whose illocutionary point is to create the extra-linguistic event represented in the propositional content of this speech act, in virtue of the linguistic meaning determined by the social conventions of fiction.

BonJour claims that he has found a way out of the Sellarsian dilemma. In this paper, I argue for three claims to show that his alleged solution fails. First, there are two requirements for being a good reason, and BonJour’s notion of non-conceptual awareness of sensory experience faces a serious dilemma with regard to these requirements. Second, he derives his idea of the so-called “constitutive awareness of content” from his conception of conscious occurrent belief. But this conception also faces an analogous dilemma with regard to these requirements. Third, his explanatory account faces the problem of representation.

Although Hermann Cohen’s criticist system is opposed to metaphysics or ontology of any kind, and therefore differs radically from Ernst Bloch’s realistic philosophy, it was nonetheless instrumental in the forming of Bloch’s philosophy. The young Bloch took up Cohen’s thought through the ontologizing reading made of it by Oswald Weidenbach. Bloch owes to Cohen the themes of the origin as question and problem, the future as primary dimension of time, and the Idea as hypothesis and practical aim of knowledge.

Metaphysical theories heavily rely on the use of primitives to which they typically appeal. I will start by examining and evaluating some traditional well-known theories and I will discuss the role of primitives in metaphysical theories in general. I will then turn to a discussion of claims of ‘equivalence’ between theories that, I think, depend on equivalences of primitives, and I will explore the nature of primitives. I will then claim that almost all explanatory power of metaphysical theories comes from their primitives, and so I will turn to scrutinize the notion of ‘power’ and ‘explanatory’.

Loving another person requires that we set that person apart from others, but morality is often thought to require that we view everyone as equally important. I argue that two approaches to the nature of love, robust concern and special perception, both miss crucial aspects of loving relationships: sensitivity to the beloved’s response, and history of the relationship. Love depends on the beloved’s attitude as well as the lover’s. Shared history as a necessary condition of loving relationships addresses these problems, and points the way to more productive analysis of conflicts between loving relationships and impartiality.

The objective of this paper is to demonstrate the difficulties involved in interdisciplinary work on the question of the risks associated with the ethical and social acceptability of human enhancement through the development of nanotechnologies. These difficulties emerge in the context of the debate between transhumanism, whose principal defenders have backgrounds in the natural sciences, and humanism, whose principal defenders have backgrounds in the social sciences and the humanities. The aim of the paper is to demonstrate that essentially transhumanists and humanists differ on these questions: the identification of risks and impacts; the assessment that serves as the foundation for the acceptability or unacceptability of these risks and impacts; and faith in the capacity of science to overcome the identified risks to human beings. This paper’s presentation of the divergences that exist in the debate between transhumanism and humanism constitutes a necessary first step towards intervening in that debate in an interdisciplinary manner.