A legal fiction is a knowingly false assumption that is given effect in a legal proceeding and that participants are not permitted to disprove. I offer a semantic pretence theory that shows how fiction-involving legal reasoning works.

The literature on the metaphysics of gender is partially marked by a tension between conceptions that understand gender categories as importantly at least partly self-determined identities and those that understand them as social or cultural categories imposed upon others as a tool of oppression. I argue that this tension can be mediated by understanding gender categories as essentially contested. I then draw on “radical functionalism” to argue that, while, divorced of context, competing conceptions can simultaneously explicate an essentially contested concept, within context, some conceptions better meet background purposes underlying the use of the concept than others.

According to A. John Simmons's anarchist scepticism, there is no duty to obey the law as things stand, as legal obligations have legitimacy only when voluntarily incurred by most or many citizens. However, an alternative, pluralist position is suggested by Simmons's sensitivity to the diversity of reasons and to the possibility of unresolved conflict. It shows that the grounds of legitimate authority are plural, and include distributive justice. Also, even voluntarily incurred obligations can be defeated by conflicting reasons, as when we are duty bound to an unjust regime.

In Fellow Creatures, Christine Korsgaard claims that human beings ought to treat all sentient animals as ends in themselves. However, in this article, I argue that Korgaard's method goes beyond what a coherent constructivist conception allows, and I claim that we should therefore adopt a Humean rather than a Kantian version of constructivism. I believe that such a conception permits us to hold substantial ethical positions about non-human animals without having to compromise our ontological commitments.

L'hédonisme axiologique a une longue histoire en philosophie. Pourtant, il garde une mauvaise réputation qui lui vaut d’être parfois écarté sans ménagement de la discussion philosophique. Cet article se propose de défendre l'hédonisme axiologique en exposant les principaux arguments en sa faveur et en répondant aux principales critiques et confusions dont il fait l'objet. Une attention particulière sera portée aux arguments établissant la spécificité du plaisir et du déplaisir par rapport à toutes les autres choses — amitié, savoir, justice, etc. — dont on pourrait argumenter la valeur finale.

Kant's critique of rational psychology is a thought experiment that targets no individual or school, but rather the natural tendency of human reason to “hypostatize” the highest intellectual condition of all cognition (the pure ‘I think’) as though it were itself a cognition of the ‘I.’ To do so is to violate the very anti-circularity stricture also at work in Kant's better-known transcendental critiques of Locke and Hume. Along with a new type of circularity (level circularity), this article proposes a conception of transcendental arguments different from that of most contemporary debates regarding empiricism, naturalism, and Cartesian foundationalism.

Le processus d'autonomisation des patient.es qui s'opéra en France au cours du XXe siècle peut, artificiellement, être divisé en trois grandes périodes marquées par les principes de solidarité, d'agentivité et d'autorité. Cette tripartition permet de mieux saisir les enjeux de ce mouvement et de comprendre en quoi l'avènement de la démocratie sanitaire, auquel il a abouti au début du XXIe siècle, consiste, par sa dépolitisation des enjeux d'autonomie, au renvoi des patient.es vers une forme de subalternité qu'incarnent, paradoxalement, les nouvelles figures de patient expert ou partenaire.

This article examines Wilhelm Dilthey's project of a critique of historical reason and the reproach of historicism addressed by Heinrich Rickert. Through a comparative analysis of their respective attempts to establish a philosophical grounding for the human sciences, this article demonstrates that Dilthey and Rickert, despite their disagreement, converge toward a productive reinterpretation of the crisis of historicism and pave the way for a reconfiguration of the relationship between philosophy and history. The article focuses on three aspects of the historicist view: the importance of the particular, the historically situated character of the knowing subject, and the primacy of historical consciousness.

In this article, I discuss two approaches to the phenomenon of gesture, constituted by the existential dimension of embodiment, intersubjectivity, affectivity, and language: while Martin Heidegger states that human bodily movement as a whole should be understood as gesture in contrast to the spatial movement of things, Vilém Flusser integrates under this notion a multitude of human practices and activities that common sense hesitates to call gestures. The dilemma of the phenomenology of gesture consists in this tension between the plural concreteness of gestural appearances and the irrepressible temptation to identify a unitary layer that would allow them to hold together.

Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that consciousness not only historically constrains experience but also allows strangeness to intelligibly speak to it. This historically effected and effective consciousness features in Gadamer's idea that a common language is unearthed for the interpretive horizons of those involved in dialogue with each other through a logic of question and answer. I argue, however, that this reveals a conceptual uncertainty about evaluating progress in interpretive understanding. Gadamer's failure to escape from this uncertainty risks the possibility of a problematic relativism. Effectively, even if sufficient interpretation occurs when horizons are infinitely structured, this does not preclude incoherence between a horizon's elements.

Philosophers and scientists generally assume that consciousness is characterized by a ‘first-person perspective.’ On one interpretation of this claim, experiences are defined, at least in part, by representations that encode a subject-centred ‘point of view.’ But claims about the defining features of consciousness must be sensitive to the possibility of dissociation: if a neurobiological structure or psychological function is neither necessary nor sufficient for consciousness, it cannot be a defining feature in any robust sense. I appeal to research on unconscious emotion, visually guided action, perceptual constancy, and psychiatric disorder to argue that first-personal representations dissociate from conscious experience.

Comment concevoir la généalogie de l’État sans réduire les sociétés tribales au statut d'ancêtres des sociétés étatiques ? À travers cette question, c'est la généalogie du pouvoir politique qui est en jeu. Chez Ibn Khaldûn, le pouvoir fait partie intégrante d'une ontologie qui ancre le politique dans le biologique. Lorsque Gilles Deleuze et Félix Guattari butent sur la séparation radicale entre les sociétés à État et sans État chez Pierre Clastres, ils empruntent à Ibn Khaldûn le concept d'esprit de corps qui leur permet de poser la relation entre les États et leur dehors. Il s'agira pour nous de dégager une anthropologie du pouvoir chez Ibn Khaldûn afin de mieux comprendre le rôle qu'il joue dans Mille Plateaux de Deleuze et Guattari.

Dans ce court article, je propose en m'appuyant sur l’œuvre de Paul Ricœur que la réalisation de la liberté dépend en partie de l'anonymat des institutions politiques. D'abord, j'explique que les institutions constituent la nécessaire médiation de la liberté. Ensuite, je distingue deux formes d'anonymat des institutions. Alors que la première exprime la perversion de certaines institutions, la seconde appartient à leur essence. Je conclus en suggérant que toute critique de l'anonymat des institutions devrait prendre en compte cette distinction.

An appealing interpretation of Aristotle's moral psychology argues that character virtue sets the goal of the good life. On that view, practical wisdom or phronēsis supplies only the means toward the end that is grasped by the character virtues. Yet, this view has trouble accounting for the supremacy of the contemplative life, which is clearly the best life in the paradigmatic or strict sense for Aristotle. In this paper, I argue that the intellect plays a role for Aristotle in realizing the priority of the contemplative life and integrating it into our practical lives as a whole.

This article highlights three epistemic practices, which, taken together, create conditions that worsen the problem of ‘bisexual erasure.’ Though bisexual people constitute a significant portion of the larger LGBTQ+ community, their identities and experiences and routinely erased — in queer communities and broader society alike. This article argues that we have both an epistemic and a moral obligation to attend to the epistemic conditions created for bisexual people, and to work to make those conditions more just. Specifically, I highlight the detrimental influence of testimonial injustice, testimonial smothering, and epistemic microaggressions on bisexual people's ability to challenge and resist their own erasure.

Dans cet article, nous étudions l'axiologie des techniques des discours écologistes de la décroissance à l'aune de celle du philosophe français Gilbert Simondon. Cette articulation fertile permet de montrer, premièrement, que les discours de la décroissance n’évaluent les techniques qu’à partir de leurs usages ; deuxièmement, elle explique pourquoi une telle axiologie, praxéologique plutôt que technologique, est incapable d'influer sur le progrès technique. À partir de Simondon, nous montrons notamment que la pensée de la décroissance ignore la distinction entre information et énergie au sein des réalités techniques, distinction pourtant nécessaire si l'on souhaite relier l’étude des techniques et l’écologie de façon adéquate et constructive.

In this paper, the key tenets of Anjan Chakravartty's book Scientific Ontology are critically discussed. After a brief presentation of the project of stance-based ontology (Section 2), I move on to criticize Chakravartty's account of metaphysical inference (Sections 2 and 3). Then, in Section 4, I take issue with Chakravartty's view that fundamental debates in metaphysics inevitably lead to irresolvable disagreement, while in Section 5, the concept of epistemic stance is scrutinized, noting that there are problems in Chakravartty's account of the rationality of stance-choice. Finally, Section 6 is about the implications of stance-based ontology for the scientific realism debate.

Scientific Ontology: Integrating Naturalized Metaphysics and Voluntarist Epistemology contends that ontological commitments associated with scientific inquiry are infused with philosophical commitments. Interpretations of scientific ontology involve (what I call) metaphysical inferences, and furthermore, there are different ways of making these inferences, on the basis of different but nonetheless rational epistemic stances. If correct, this problematizes any neat distinction between naturalized and other metaphysics, and dissolves any presumption of there being a uniquely correct answer to ontological questions connected to the sciences. In this paper, I consider some weighty challenges to these contentions by Amanda Bryant, Stathis Psillos, and Matthew Slater.

Taste, as a faculty of aesthetic appreciation, involves an individual, and yet assumes a community. In this article, a distinctly singular mode of being attuned to objects of taste is shown to be conditioned by the consent of others and by being-with others, thereby constituting what is named here an ‘aesthetic community.’ This idea of an aesthetic community is traced back to Kant's sensus communis and to Heidegger's notion of preservation: for both, it is the presence of a community that conditions aesthetic experience.

In this article, I explore how we can expand the project of Buddhist feminism by drawing on Chinese Yogācāra philosophy. With a focus on the writings of Xuanzang (c. 602–664) and his disciple Kuiji (632–682), I investigate how the Yogācāra theory of consciousness can be read as a gendered account of non-duality. The term ‘Yogācāra dialectics’ is thus coined to describe this theory of non-duality that highlights fluidity and transformability. As I will argue, Chinese Yogācārins developed the dialectics of gender by means of which they were able to subtly erode sexism in premodern times.