In the third Critique, Kant claims that beauty is the symbol of morality and that the consideration of this relation is a duty. This paper declares Kant’s argument to be twofold: firstly, experience of beauty strengthens our moral feeling. Secondly, in judging the beautiful, we assume some indeterminate purpose underlying nature, based on which we can conceive of nature as cooperative with our practical pursuit. Hence, for the sake of moral cultivation and moral motivation, it is our duty to regard beauty as the special symbol of morality.

Duns Scotus's famous proposition was first attacked in a short polemical treatise attributed to Thomas of Sutton. By the time of Ockham, the proposition was known as the propositio famosa, so called by Walter Chatton, Ockham's colleague at Oxford and London, who defended it against Ockham's lengthy critique. At Paris, during the same period, it was called the propositio vulgata and was used approvingly by Francis of Meyronnes, Peter of Navarre and Durandus St. Pourçain. This “famous proposition” was so controverted because on it depended the acceptance, with Duns Scotus, or the rejection, with Ockham, of theology as a strict, propter quid science. As its detractors and defenders must have realized, it also struck at the heart of the divergent philosophical outlooks of Duns Scotus and Ockham. For all of this, Duns Scotus's famous proposition and its history have all but escaped notice.

This article deals with Leibniz's dynamic conception of political order. Leibniz reduces the sovereignty of States to the monopoly of coercion by setting apart jurisdictional monopoly and sovereignty. With this new definition of sovereignty however, war becomes the core of international relations. The sovereigns' ability to make war is the condition to take part in law of nations, whose precise aim is to prevent wars. Peace can only exist if there is a balance between opposite forces of similar magnitude that cancel each other.

In this paper I will combat the claim that concrete matter can exist independently of objecthood. This view is a denial of the Aristotelian principles that only particular objects (primary substances) exist apart (independently), and that as a condition of concreteness, matter must have acquired form. For, it propounds that matter can be concrete and general.

ABSTRACT: Cheryl Misak has offered a pragmatic argument against a position she calls “scientific transcendentalism.” Scientific transcendentalists hold that truth is something different from what would be believed at the end of inquiry; more specifically, they adhere to a correspondence theory of truth. Misak thinks scientific transcendentalists thereby undermine the connection between truth and inquiry, for (a) pragmatically speaking, it adds nothing to truth and inquiry to ask whether what would be the results of sufficiently rigorous inquiry are really true and (b) they can only accept it as an article of faith that inquiry leads us to truth. I defend “scientific transcendentalism” against Misak’s objections.

Otto Neurath est intéressant à plus d'un titre. En premier lieu, il a joué un rôle central dans le développement institutionnel du mouvement dénommé « empirisme logique » dont certains interprètes ont considerablement réduit l'étendue et tronqué les thèses. En second lieu, intellectuellement, il occupe une place importante dans les réflexions épistémologiques et politiques d'avant la seconde guerre mondiale, comme en temoigne le fait que Karl Popper le prenne pour cible dans La logique de la découverte scientifique ou Friedrich Hayek dans La route de la servitude. En troisième lieu, il est, comme le note Popper, l'incarnation d'une approche épistémologique originale (Popper, 1944–45, 165–166).

In this paper, I defend a metaethical position described as ‘actual agreement contractualism’: the view that norms arise from actual attempts to arrive at legitimate terms for social cooperation among all those affected. I distinguish the actual agreement approach from hypothetical approaches to contractualism, and defend the former against objections from Thomas Scanlon, in particular. The attractiveness of a focus on actual agreements, I argue, is seen in the way it resolves problems internal to the hypothetical approach as well as in its implications for the purpose of moral theory and for the obligation to justify our actions to others.

It is commonly held that nature is knowable in itself and that death has no explanatory priority in knowing nature. I reject both claims as they undermine an account of the unity of human life, failing, respectively, to thematize the limitations of finite understanding and to acknowledge what’s most certain about finite existence. I use Kant’s idea of the thing in itself and Heidegger’s idea of death to solve two structurally analogous antinomies these failures leave intact. I conclude that to think these ideas is to represent the telos that unifies our living as, respectively, finite knowers and finite beings.

In a well-known paper, John Doris argues that situationist psychology impugns Aristotelian virtue ethics, which presupposes the existence of stable, situation-independent virtues. Maria Merritt responds that a Humean conception of virtue, which is situation-dependent, is immune to this criticism. However, she does not directly address two of Doris’ more trenchant objections, which he presents in the form of a dilemma. In this paper, I respond to Doris’ dilemma, using recent research in psychology and cognitive science to show that virtue ethics, as a dispositionalist, non-codifiable theory, represents a more empirically adequate moral psychology than the leading alternatives.

Les recherches poursuivies par les membres de l'école de Francfort depuis la seconde moitié des années quatre-vingt se signalent primordialement par l'intérêt porté au problème général des conditions d'application de l'éthique de la discussion (Diskursethik) au domaine du droit et de la politique. En témoignent les recueils publiés récemment par Karl-Otto Apel, en particulier Diskurs und Verantwortung (1988) et Zur Anwendung der Diskursethik in Politik, Recht und Wissenschaft (1992), ainsi que l'ouvrage volumineux de J. Habermas consacré à la théorie du droit, Faktizität und Geltung (1992). Bien que non définitive, cette orientation de recherche n'en est pas moins suffisamment élaborée à l'heure actuelle pour permettre une évaluation. Le but du présent article sera plus spécialement de soumettre à un examen critique la voie de solution propre apportée par Apel à ce problème. Une thèse centrale sera défendue: celle suivant laquelle les difficultés que présente l'application de l'éthique communicationnelle au monde du droit et de la politique ne peuvent être entièrement solutionnées dans le cadre restreint de la théorie morale, mais exigent la transition à une théorie du droit et de la démocratie.

This paper argues that philosophical practice in the Western world, in particular analytic philosophy, suffers from problems that contribute to its lack of diversity in two senses: the exclusion of women and minorities, and a narrow choice of subjects and methods. This is not fruitful for philosophical exchange and the flourishing of philosophical thought. Three contributing factors are covered: a flawed execution when instilling intellectual humility; the gaslighting of women in philosophy; and an overemphasis on a narrow conception of intelligence. The conclusion calls for a more humane and socially aware practice of philosophy.

This article defends two theses: that a mental state is conscious if and only if it has phenomenal character, i.e., if and only if there is something it is like for the subject to be in that state, and that all state consciousness involves selfconsciousness, in the sense that a mental state is conscious if and only if its possessor is, in some suitable way, conscious of being in it. Though neither of these theses is novel, there is a dearth of direct arguments for them in the scholarly literature and the relationship between them has so far gone underrecognized. This article attempts to remedy this lack, advancing the claim that if all conscious states have phenomenal character, then all state consciousness involves self-consciousness.

Wendy Donner's The Liberal Self: John Stuart Mill's Moral and Political Philosophy is an important and thought-provoking addition to the growing body of literature seeking to rescue Mill's practical philosophy from the rather lowly place it occupied in the estimation of many philosophers earlier this century, and to present him as a philosopher whose views form a coherent, systematic whole that can still contribute significantly to numerous moral and political debates. The book proposes an interpretation of the whole of Mill's practical philosophy, and attempts to reveal how aspects of Mill's thought, hitherto considered incompatible, actually mutually support one another. At the same time, Donner sets many of Mill's positions in the context of contemporary moral and political philosophical debates, and finds that on a number of important issues, his thought stands up rather well against more recent work.

We propose a compatibilist theory of free will in the tradition of naturalized philosophy that attempts to: 1) provide a synthesis of a variety of well-known theories, capable of addressing problems of the latter; 2) account for the fact that free will comes in degrees; and 3) interface with neurobiology. We argue that free will comes in degrees, and that these degrees vary with the agent's capacity to make assumptions and use theories. Our model, then, highlights that free-willed actions are consciously monitored by the agent, through beliefs, assumptions, and ultimately theories — hence, the CMT model (for Conscious-through-Monitoring-through-Theories).

What is realism in film? Focusing on a test case of High Frame Rate (HFR) high-definition movies, I discuss in this article various types of realism as well as their inter-relations. Precision, recessiveness of the medium, transparency, and ‘Collapse’ are discussed and compared. At the end of the day, I defend the claim that ‘less is more’ in the sense that more image precision can actually have a negative impact on storytelling.