This article examines the three works of Jeremy Bentham on capital punishment dating from 1775, 1809, and 1831. Besides Hugo Bedau's analysis of Bentham's 1775 and 1831 works and James Crimmins's assessment of Bentham's 1809 work, little attention has been paid to his abolitionist arguments on this contentious issue. I review some of the developments in Bentham's position, noting where the later work corrects some deficiencies in the earlier work, and I assess the cogency of the position as it evolves. I concentrate on deterrence and irremissibility, though I also comment on his discussion of popularity in his 1831 address and his 1775 essay.

John Searle upholds the idea of a “background” of intentionality. In his view there is an ensemble of non-representational (or non-intentional) mental capacities that make every form of intentionality possible (that is to say, without these mental capacities there would not be any beliefs, desires, intentions, etc.). I examine both his reasons to believe that there are non-representational mental capacities and the arguments he gives in support of the most important claim (according to him) that an intentional state cannot be this particular state unless the said “background” existe.

This article analyzes the notion of background capacities as developed by John Searle during the last twenty years in philosophy of mind. Broadly construed, this notion designates non-representational mental capacities as the means by which mental representations are given a precise semantic content and thus are able to be expressed. Though novel and relevant, I intend to show that, according to Searle's description, this notion proves inadequate to attain its descriptive and explicative goals. I go on to regard background capacities in a perspective both externalist and (minimally) representationalist.

It is commonly assumed, at least by continental philosophers, that epistemological hermeneutics and foundationalism are incompatible. I argue that this assumption is mistaken. If I am correct, the analytic and continental traditions may be closer than is commonly supposed. Hermeneutics, as I will argue, is a descriptive claim about human cognition, and foundationalism is a normative claim about how beliefs ought to be related to one another. Once the positions are stated in this way, their putative incompatibility vanishes. Also, to inspire further research I include an appendix which contains an unfinished prototype of a hermeneutic foundationalism.

Within Hegel's system of science, judgement (Urteil) is thought's original dividing from identity into difference. In the same context, judgement is also an act of predication where “subject” must be understood in both a grammatical and psychical sense. Thus, judgement expresses a language act that is a self-positing into the difference of being. This article looks at two examples where Hegel's ontological notion of judgement obtains, then finds, the roots of this notion in Hölderlin and Fichte.

In the De doctrina christiana Augustine lays the foundations of a type of hermeneutics more community oriented than epistemological. Likewise, the rules he formulates have jurisdiction beyond the sole domain of semiotics; as I shall argue, they are applicable, in like (even congruent) manner, to the world of social relations. More fundamentally, these rules are intended to moderate an economy of desire, in which semiotics and social relations find a common origin and, above all, the principles of their harmonious organization. I shall demonstrate these ideas through an analysis of the image of “the voyage towards the homeland” (peregrinatio ad patriam).

My aim in this article is to argue that Philippa Foot fails to provide a convincing basis for moral evaluation in her book Natural Goodness. Foot's proposal fails because her conception of natural goodness and defect in human beings either sanctions prescriptive claims that are clearly objectionable or else it inadvertently begs the question of what constitutes a good human life by tacitly appealing to an independent ethical standpoint to sanitize the theory's normative implications. Foot's appeal to natural facts about human goodness is in this way singled out as an Achilles' heel that undermines her attempt to establish an independent framework for virtue ethics. This problem might seem to be one that is uniquely applicable to the bold naturalism of Foot's methodology; however, I claim that the problem is indicative of a more general problem for all contemporary articulations of virtue ethics.

This commentary on a poem of Crates of Thebes, which was transmitted in Julian's Oration VII, To the Cynic Herakleios, and Oration IX [VI], To the Uneducated Cynics, intends to rediscuss the notions of happiness, pleasure, wealth, and justice in the context of the kata phusin life as viewed by the Cynics. The “minimal ethics” proposed by the cynic philosophers, which many would consider as a kind of voluntary experience of suffering, appears as a possible way to secure both individual happiness and political justice.

Emmanuel Lévinas is unquestionably the philosopher of ethics par excellence. One of the major themes of his thought, or rather the key to understanding his work—work that spans over many fields—is one's responsibility toward the Other. This article attempts to reconsider this determining aspect of his writings from the perspective of contemporary individualism. We argue that Lévinas's ethics of responsibility in no way obliterates “the share of the Ego in the eminence of the Other.” On the contrary, in his approach to otherness, he takes the Self entirely into account. In other words, our interpretation is that the commonly held view that Lévinas's philosophy consists of normative interpretation of the human condition leading to the sacrifice of the self is imputable to a misunderstanding caused by the polysemous and ambivalent character of the concept of individualism.

Contrary to much Kant interpretation, this article argues that Kant's moral philosophy, including his account of charity, is irrelevant to justifying the state's right to redistribute material resources to secure the rights of dependents (the poor, children, and the impaired). The article also rejects the popular view that Kant either does not or cannot justify anything remotely similar to the liberal welfare state. A closer look at Kant's account of dependency relations in “The Doctrine of Right” reveals an argumentative structure sufficient for a public institutional protection of dependents and evidence that Kant identifies concerns of economic justice as lying at the heart of the state's legitimacy.

I shall consider the phenomenon of believing ourselves to have at least one false belief: a phenomenon I call believed fallibility. I shall first present a paradoxical argument which appears to show that believed fallibility is incoherent; second, note that this argument assumes that we are committed to the conjunction of all our beliefs; third, sketch a more intuitive notion of commitment in which we are not committed to the conjunction of all our beliefs and argue that the original paradoxical argument is now defused; fourth, construct a new paradoxical argument showing that if we believe that we have at least one false belief we are committed to a contradiction, employing the preferable notion of commitment; and, fifth, suggest that perhaps we might avoid the new paradox by denying that closing our beliefs under conjunction is required by rationality.

Hans Reichenbach argued in Experience and Prediction (1938) that the theory of meaning defended by Logical Positivism, i.e., “strict verificationism,” failed to give a relevant criterion for cognitive meaningfulness. He replaces it with a wholly probabilistic criterion that allows us to establish a pragmatic connection between language and action. But serious difficulties arise in the justification of his theory. The aim of this article is to assess some of these difficulties and to indicate a way to solve them in a “reichenbachian” way.

This article argues that the normative foundations and political implications of David Held's cosmopolitan social democracy are insufficient as solutions to the moral and social problems he criticizes. The article develops a life-grounded alternative critique of globalization that roots our ethical duties towards each other in consciousness of our shared needs and capabilities. These ethical duties are best realized in political projects aimed at fundamental long-term transformations in the principles that govern major socio-economic institutions.

This article argues that Quine's holistic and naturalized semantics provides an inadequate account of the foundations of logical expressions and misrepresents the internal structure of theories. By considering a Quinean model of theoretical revision, I identify the status and foundation holism provides to the propositions of logic. I contend that a central tenet of Quinean holism—the Revisability Doctrine—cannot be held consistently, and that the inconsistencies surrounding it mark a series of pervasive errors within naturalized holism. In response, I propose that semantic theories must reflect the different linguistic functions of different types of expressions and the specific relationships that individual concepts within a theory or language have to one another.

McDowell argues that the shortcomings of recent theories of experience are the product of the modern scientistic conception of nature. Reconceive nature, he suggests, and we can explain how perceptual experience can be an external constraint on thought that, moreover, has conceptual import. In this article I argue that McDowell's project is unsuccessful. Those wishing to construct normative theories, including theories of perceptual experience, face the normative trilemma—they must choose one of three styles of theory, each of which exhibits a distinctive weakness. If we view McDowell's approach in light of this choice, we see that he cannot adequately explain the link between experience and the world itself. I conclude that the real problem with theories of experience flows not from scientistic naturalism, but rather from the inconsistent demands we place on normative theories in general.

This article investigates Martin Heidegger's intellectual relation to Ernst Jünger. In order to show that Heidegger's appraisal of Jünger is directly related to his understanding of Nietzsche's pre-eminent standing in the history of Western philosophy, I situate Jünger in the Heideggerian reconstruction of the history of metaphysics. It is because Jünger belongs to the Nietzschean paradigm that Heidegger believes he is worth reading—but also worth criticizing. Indeed, Jünger did not overtake the philosophical project that Nietzsche made possible by accomplishing the end of metaphysics. This is the very project adopted by Heidegger, first by thinking beyond metaphysics, and second by hoping Germany would turn towards a spiritual renewal of its civilization. Thus, since Nietzsche is the central figure who stands between Heidegger and Jünger, this article wishes to show that through his critical reading of Jünger, Heidegger in fact fosters a fundamental and uninterrupted dialogue with Nietzsche.

Recent discussions of the nature of mind, emotion, and self have often intersected with renewed interest in the sources of morals and morality. In this article I examine proposals on these matters by Charles Taylor and two of his interlocutors, Thomas Wren and Justin Oakley. I describe and compare the “holistic” epistemological approaches of these three in their searches for the “moral self,” and then evaluate the adequacy of their correlative ontological proposals. Finally, I discuss the meta-ethical implications of these emotive views of selfhood in terms of the objective or subjective status of moral values to determine whether these views meet the philosophers' own criteria for moral plausibility.

My aim in this article is to demonstrate that the reality of ideas of pure reason (liberty, God, and the immortality of the soul) in the practical use of reason is less objective than the reality of pure concepts of understanding in their function of determining the object. To this end I explain how the objective reality of ideas of God and the immortality of the soul can be qualified as “subjective,” and in what sense the objective reality of the idea of liberty as a res facti can be considered as incomplete in terms of theoretical objectivity. Finally, I propose that the acquisition of practical objective reality does not entail expanding our theoretical knowledge of the objects of these three ideas.