In Ecological Thinking, Lorraine Code argues that advocacy “often makes knowledge possible” and without it “certain kinds of knowing are impossible.” By acknowledging the value of subjectivity and testimony in knowledge creation, I argue that ecological thinking serves as an appropriate framework for engagement with individuals who are living with mental illnesses. Contrasted with the dominant Anglo-American epistemologies that involve excessive degrees of mastery and control (with the tendency to silence the voices of Others), I argue that ecological thinking facilitates healthy advocacy practices precisely because of its inclusivity and receptivity towards different perspectives in knowledge creation.

Some authors have proposed that Avicenna considers mathematical objects, i.e., geometric shapes and numbers, to be mental existents completely separated from matter. In this paper, I will show that this description, though not completely wrong, is misleading. Avicenna endorses, I will argue, some sort of literalism, potentialism, and finitism.

Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology reveals two attitudes regarding the classification of phenomena. On the one hand, they are classified by type. On the other, the “banality of saturation” reduces these types to possible interpretations, in which case saturation isn’t a qualitative rupture anymore, but a possible hermeneutic attitude to any phenomenon. Hence, there is, in Marion’s phenomenology, a tension between a metaphysical attitude that maintains categorial discontinuities, and a hermeneutic temptation driven by the recovery of quantitative continuities between all phenomena. Yet, Marion does not push this quantitative temptation to its limits; he steps back in front of a specifically saturated phenomenon: the icon.

David Gauthier develops morality in the social contract tradition as an emergent property rationally necessitated by the presence of inefficiency. To demarcate situations in which morality arises from those in which it does not, two principles, Strategic Emergence and Market Emergence, are motivated and assumed by Gauthier to be equivalent. Following the work of Bob Bright, this paper formalizes and expands upon a demonstration of the inconsistency of the two principles. Eliminating each of the emergence conditions is considered to resolve the inconsistency. Additionally, the Kantian equilibrium is examined in place of the Nash equilibrium; however, Gauthier’s approach resists such amendments.

Luck egalitarians argue that distributive justice should be understood in terms of our capacity to be responsible for our choices. Both proponents and critics assume that the theory must rely on a comprehensive conception of responsibility. I respond to luck egalitarianism’s critics by developing a political conception of responsibility that remains agnostic on the metaphysics of free choice. I construct this political conception by developing a novel reading of John Rawls’ distinction between the political and the comprehensive. A surprising consequence is that many responsibility-based objections to luck egalitarianism turn out to be objections to Rawls’ political liberalism as well.

The possibility of knowledge attributions across contexts (where attributor and subject find themselves in different epistemic contexts) can create serious problems for certain views of knowledge. Amongst such views is subject-sensitive invariantism—the view that knowledge is determined not only by epistemic factors (belief, truth, evidence, etc.), but also by non-epistemic factors (practical interests, etc.). I argue that subject-sensitive invariantism either runs into a contradiction or has to make very implausible assumptions. The problem has been very much neglected but is so serious that one should look for alternative accounts of knowledge.

David Gauthier once said that the social contract offers ‘the only game in town’ if we hope for a rational morality. I argue that he’s correct. Morality consists of rules notionally directed at everyone everywhere. Only individual people are rational, and they have varying interests. The social contract proposes principles that everyone would, in view of their social and environmental circumstances, agree to as constraining their separate pursuits of their ends. There is no other rational way to understand morals, and so it is indeed the only game in town.

In 1975, Gauthier discussed Schelling’s pure coordination games and Hodgson’s Hi-Lo game. While developing an original analysis of how rational players coordinate on ‘focal points,’ Gauthier argued, contrary to Schelling and Hodgson, that successful coordination in these games does not depend on deviations from conventional principles of individually rational choice. I argue that Gauthier’s analysis of constrained maximization in Morals by Agreement, which famously deviates from conventional game theory, has significant similarities with Schelling’s and Hodgson’s analyses of coordination. Constrained maximization can be thought of as a pragmatic and contractarian variant of the team-reasoning approach pioneered by Hodgson.

Aristotelian virtue theorists are currently engaged in a discussion with philosophers who use psychological findings to question some of their main assumptions. In this article, I present and argue against one of these psychological challenges—Jesse Prinz’s Normativity Challenge—which rests on the claim that findings in cultural psychology contradict the Aristotelian thesis that the normativity of virtues derives from nature. First, I demonstrate that the Normativity Challenge is based on three problematic assumptions about contemporary Aristotelianism. Second, I argue that it presupposes the truth of a metaethical framework that Aristotelians reject: moral relativism.

My fellow contractarians and I are of a mind that it would be irrational to comply with a distribution of the cooperative dividend that worsens one’s condition. But worse than what? According to David Gauthier et al., it’s non-interaction, i.e., what would be the case were the negotiators never to have met. I argue that it’s what would be the case in the absence of their coming to an agreement. As it turns out, this distinction can be, and often is, a matter of life and death.

Christine Overall has argued that miracles, if they exist, would be an evil committed by God and therefore disprove the existence of God. However, her notion of a miracle as an intervention presupposes a view about the relation between God and creation that posits God as an ‘outsider.’ Such a view has not been held by all theists. It was not held by Thomas Aquinas. I show that Aquinas’s conception is not susceptible to Overall’s criticisms. The upshot is that theists should avoid any view of God as an ‘outsider,’ if they wish to avoid Overall’s criticisms.

In this article, I examine two aspects of the transition from Kant to Fichte: systematicity and the primacy of practical reason. It is commonly agreed that Kant saw the critical exercise as an occasion to renew, rather than supress, the possibility of a positive metaphysics; however, most scholars now consider the “system” he sketched to be the sole heritage of Schulmetaphysik. However, I take literally Kant’s demand for a system that expects from the “practical” a new and absolute “foundation,” rather than a system that must be completed. Here, Fichte’s perspective gives us the common thread.

Moral realists face an epistemological challenge: they must explain why many judgments that are likely to be (mind-independent) moral truths are those it would be evolutionarily adaptive to hold. Is it a coincidence? Do evolutionary forces track these truths? Third-factor explanation is the strategy most commonly adopted by moral realists to explain this striking correlation. In this article, I argue that it does not allow them to meet the challenge.