I offer a novel conception of the nature of wanting. According to it, wanting is lacking something one needs. Lacking is not a normative notion but needing is, and that is how goodness figures in to wanting. What a thing needs derives from what it is to be a good thing of its kind. In people, wanting is connected to both knowledge and the will. A person can know that she wants something and can act on that knowledge. When she (...) does, she is acting in light of that want and her want is a reason why she acted. There is a close connection between wanting and our wills, not just because we can sometimes choose how to get what we need, but because our choices can determine what we want. We can't simply choose to want something, but in deciding how to live our lives, who to be, and what to pursue, we are free to settle what we want, at least within limits. These connections to knowledge and the will make human wanting rich and morally relevant, but they don't transform human wanting into something special. Wanting is everywhere just a matter of lacking something one needs. (shrink)

Philosophical accounts of the nature of belief, at least in the western tradition, are framed in large part by two ideas. One is that believing is a form of representing. The other is that a belief plays a causal role when a person acts on it. The standard picture of belief as a mental entity with representational properties and causal powers merges these two ideas. We are to think of beliefs as things that are true or false and that interact (...) with desires, intentions, and emotions to bring about rational action. Both ideas, I think, are ill-founded. One effect of abandoning them is a further blurring of the distinction between what is inside and what is outside our minds. Another is a shift towards a less mentalistic picture of the roots of rational action. (shrink)

Patient RB has a peculiar memory impairment wherein he experiences his memories in rich contextual detail, but claims to not own them. His memories do not feel as if they happened to him. In this paper, I provide an explanatory model of RB’s phenomenology, the self-attentional model. I draw upon recent work in neuroscience on self-attentional processing and global workspace models of conscious recollection to show that RB has a self-attentional deficit that inhibits self-bias processes in broadcasting the contents of (...) episodic memories to the global workspace. Typically, self-related contents enjoy a higher salience level than other-related contents. Elimination of bias toward self-related contents diminishes the salience of those contents to the level of other-related contents. Because the typical high salience of self-related content is necessary for the feeling of ownership, RB lacks the feeling of ownership. I also discuss potential applications of the self-attentional model to other psychopathological cases. (shrink)

I will argue that a person is causally responsible for believing what she does. Through inference, she can sustain and change her perspective on the world. When she draws an inference, she causes herself to keep or to change her take on things. In a literal sense, she makes up her own mind as to how things are. And, I will suggest, she can do this voluntarily. It is in part because she is causally responsible for believing what she does (...) that there are things that she ought to believe, and that what she believes can be to her credit or discredit. I won’t pursue these ethical matters here, but will focus instead on the metaphysics that underpin them. (shrink)

The following abstracts were selected by AJOB-Neuroscience judges as the best submitted to the International Neuroethics Society 2024 Annual Meeting based on merit, novelty, relevance, and contribution to the field of neuroethics. The scores were tallied and the top abstracts appear in alphabetical order by first author surname.

Though largely neglected by philosophers, the concept of ineffability is integral to the Christian mystical tradition, and has been part of almost every philosophical discussion of religious experience since the early twentieth century. After a brief introduction, this article surveys the most important discussions of divine ineffability, observing that the literature presents two mutually reinforcing obstacles to a coherent account of the concept, creating the impression that philosophical reflection on the subject had reached an impasse. The article goes on to (...) survey some more recent work, which draws on the conceptual resources of existential phenomenology, pragmatism, and the later Wittgenstein. It shows that this work has made possible a new philosophical account of divine ineffability that surmounts the obstacles, overcomes the impasse and makes divine ineffability, once again, a live option in philosophy of religion. The article concludes with some brief remarks on how this alternative approach reflects recent trends in the discipline as a whole and has the potential to make a valuable contribution to live research questions in epistemology of religion. (shrink)

The principle of sufficient reason threatens modal collapse. Some have suggested that by appealing to the indefinite extensibility of contingent truth, the threat is neutralized. This paper argues that this is not so. If the indefinite extensibility of contingent truth is developed in an analogous fashion to the most promising models of the indefinite extensibility of the concept set, plausible principles permit the derivation of modal collapse.

In the first two sections of this reply article, I provide a brief introduction to the topic of ineffability and a summary of Ineffability and Religious Experience. This is followed, in section 3, by some reflections in reply to the response articles by Professors Metz and Cooper. Section 4 presents some concluding remarks on the future of philosophy of religion in the light of the most recent philosophical work on ineffability.

I am extremely grateful for the very thoughtful and stimulating comments by Daniel Drucker, Miriam Schleifer McCormick,1 and Mark Richard, and for the close attention they gave my book (Hunter 2022...

This article provides an historical account of Kant's political, legal, and religious thought in the context of the Prussian Enlightenment.

I offer some responses to Prosser’s ‘Experiencing Time’, one of whose goals is to debunk a view of temporal experience somewhat prevalent in the metaphysics literature, which I call ‘Perceptualism’. According to Perceptualism: it is part of the content of perceptual experience that time passes in a metaphysically strong sense: the present has a metaphysically privileged status, and time passes in virtue of changes in which events this ‘objective present’ highlights, and moreover this gives us evidence in favor of strong (...) passage. Prosser argues that perception cannot be sensitive to whether the strong passage obtains, and therefore cannot represent strong passage in a way that gives us evidence of its truth. Although I accept this conclusion, I argue that Prosser’s argument for it is problematic. It threatens to over-generalize to rule out uncontroversial cases of perceptual knowledge, such as our knowledge that we live in a spatial world. Furthermore, a successful argument ruling out perceptual evidence for strong passage would have to give constraints on the theory/observation distinction of a kind not provided by Prosser’s discussion. I also comment on several other parts of the book. (shrink)

In this article, we explore various arguments against the traditional distinction between episodic and semantic memory based on the metaphysical phenomenon of transitional gradation. Transitional gradation occurs when two candidate kinds A and B grade into one another along a continuum according to their characteristic properties. We review two kinds of arguments—from the gradual semanticization of episodic memories as they are consolidated, and from the composition of episodic memories during storage and recall from semantic memories—that predict the proliferation of such (...) transitional forms. We further explain why the distinction cannot be saved from the challenges of transitional gradation by appealing to distinct underlying memory structures and applying our perspective to the impasse over research into ‘episodic-like’ memory in non-human animals. On the whole, we recommend replacing the distinction with a dynamic life cycle of memory in which a variety of transitional forms will proliferate, and illustrate the utility of this perspective by tying together recent trends in animal episodic memory research and recommending productive future directions. (shrink)

Some embodied theories of concepts state that concepts are represented in a sensorimotor manner, typically via simulation in sensorimotor cortices. Fred Adams (2010) has advanced an empirical argument against embodied concepts reasoning as follows. If concepts are embodied, then patients with certain sensorimotor impairments should perform worse on categorization tasks involving those concepts. Adams cites a study with Moebius Syndrome patients that shows typical categorization performance in face-based emotion recognition. Adams concludes that their typical performance shows that embodiment is false. (...) Moebius patients must draw on amodal (non-embodied) emotion concepts. In this paper, I review face-based emotion recognition studies with Moebius patients yielding conflicting results and diagnose these conflicts as a difference in experimental design. When emotion labels are provided, patients have typical performance, but when labels are not provided patients are severely deficient. I then show how an embodied, psychological constructionist view of emotions predicts and explains these performance differences. The upshot is that embodied theories of concepts are vindicated. (shrink)

I assess a number of connected ideas about temporal experience that are introspectively plausible, but which I believe can be argued to be incorrect. These include the idea that temporal experiences are extended experiential processes, that they have an internal structure that in some way mirrors the structure of the apparent events they present, and the idea that time in experience is in some way represented by time itself. I explain how these ideas can be developed into more sharply defined (...) views, and then argue that these views are inconsistent with certain empirical facts about how time is represented in the brain. These facts instead support a kind of atomic view, on which temporal experiences are temporally unstructured atoms. (shrink)

This is a précis of my book for an author-meets-critics session forthcoming in Inquiry. The commenters are Daniel Drucker, Miriam Schleifer McCormick, and Mark Richard.

A report on Cornel West's Edinburgh Gifford Lectures 2024: "A Jazz-soaked Philosophy for our Catastrophic Times: From Socrates to Coltrane".

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) recently issued its first approval of an oral contraceptive medication for access without a clinician’s prescription. One might expect this will lead to fewer people seeking to terminate unplanned pregnancies, including in states that imposed severe restrictions on abortion care following the Supreme Court’s reversal on abortion rights in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. Despite the clear potential health benefits, increased accessibility of oral contraceptives offers no real solution to ongoing threats to patients’ (...) reproductive health and moral rights created by post-Dobbs abortion restrictions. To secure their patients’ reproductive health and well-being, clinicians must work to maximize the benefits of OTC oral contraceptives without relenting in their advocacy for safe and accessible abortion care. (shrink)

The articles that comprise this special issue of Intellectual History Review are briefly described.

During the Standing Rock protests in North Dakota, USA/Turtle Island, a group of military veterans knelt in front of Oceti Sakowin Elders asking forgiveness for centuries of settler colonial military ventures in Oceti Sakowin Territory. Leonard Crow Dog forgave them and immediately demanded respect for Native Nations throughout the U.S. Lacking such respect, he said, Native people will cease paying taxes. Crow Dog’s post-forgiveness remarks speak to the political context of the military veterans’ request: They seek collective forgiveness amidst ongoing (...) occupation and harms committed by the collective they represent. In this chapter, I examine this case study and argue that ongoing harm undermines requests for forgiveness on behalf of collectives. I look to the work of Glen Coultard, Waziyatawin, and Leanne Simpson to consider what a responsible request for collective forgiveness would entail. (shrink)

Propositions represent the entities from which they are formed. This fact has puzzled philosophers and some have put forward radical proposals in order to explain it. This paper develops a primitivist account of the representational properties of propositions that centers on the operation of application. As we will see, this theory wins out over its competitors on grounds of strength, systematicity and unifying power.

Philosophers and cognitive scientists alike have recently been interested in whether cognition extends beyond the boundaries of skin and skull and into the environment. However, the extended cognition hypothesis has suffered many objections over the past few decades. In this paper, I explore the option of control extending beyond the human boundary. My aim is to convince the reader of three things: (i) that control can be implemented in artifacts, (ii) that humans and artifacts can form extended control systems, and (...) (iii) that perhaps extended control ought to be preferred over extended cognition. Using the objections to extended cognition as constraints on my own extended theorizing and the example of autofocus systems in cameras, I decompose and localize the components of an autofocus system that realize the central properties of control from a plausible theory of control in the literature. I then provide criteria according to which control can be extended in a system. Finally, I consider how this theory of extended control ought to be preferred to theories of extended cognition. (shrink)

I give an account of the difference between "Holistic" and "Atomistic" views of conscious experience. On the Holistic view, we enjoy a unified "field" of awareness, whose parts are mere modifications of the whole, and therefore owe their existence to the whole. There is some tendency to saddle those who reject the Holistic field model with a (perhaps) implausible "building block" view. I distinguish a number of different theses about the parts of an experience that are suggested by the "building (...) block" metaphor, but which can be rejected by those who also reject the holistic field view. (shrink)

We defend and explore the view that bringing philosophy, political science, and economics together in the study of social and political institutions sheds light and banishes shadows in ways that no subset of these three disciplines could possibly accomplish.

This essay draws on the work of Jacques Derrida and Angela Y. Davis towards a philosophical resistance to the death penalty in the U.S. I find promise in Derrida’s claim that resistance to the death penalty ought to contest a political structure that founds itself on having the power to decide life and death, but I move beyond Derrida’s desire to consider the abolition of the death penalty without engaging with the particular histories and geographies of European colonialism. I offer (...) a critique of Derrida’s recently published work on the death penalty by engaging with the work of Davis and argue that discussions of state violence in nations that inherit European forms of sovereignty must take seriously the racist violence on which those sovereign powers rely. (shrink)

Recently some philosophers have defended the thesis that naturalness, or joint-carvingness, is an aim of belief. This paper argues that there is an important class of counterexamples to this thesis. In particular, it is argued that naturalness is not an aim of our beliefs concerning what is joint carving and what is not.

At least since Anaximander’s apeiron, there have been philosophical questions about what, if anything, preceded the gods. But, as far as I know, the precise question that I address in this essay was first explicitly asked by Ronald W. Hepburn, in his essay ‘Restoring the Sacred: Sacred as a Concept of Aesthetics’. In his essay, Hepburn is interested in the actual and potential relationships between religious and aesthetic uses of the concept of the sacred. Which leads him to the question: (...) Does the concept have a valid meaning – an aesthetic meaning, say – that is logically independent of (and therefore might have preceded) the religious one, which seems most strongly associated with the metaphysical belief that God or the gods exist? In other words, is the sacred older than the gods? While he does not provide a definitive answer, Hepburn adumbrates his view on whether this claim is correct. In this essay, I set out my own answer within the guidelines that Hepburn’s sketch has laid out. (shrink)

Did Donald Davidson agree with G.E.M. Anscombe that action requires a distinctive form of agential awareness? The answer is No, at least according to the standard interpretation of Davidson’s account of action. A careful study of Davidson’s early writings, however, reveals a much more subtle conception of the role of agential belief in action. While the role of the general belief in Davidson’s theory is familiar and has been much discussed, virtually no attention has been paid to the singular belief. (...) This essay makes a start on remedying this neglect. I begin, in section 1, by examining Davidson’s claim that for a desire or belief to rationalize and cause an action it must have a suitable generality. It must, he says, be ‘logically independent’ of the action itself. While he was clear about this requirement in the case of the desire that forms part of a person’s primary reason, I show in section 2 that his early treatment of belief confuses general and singular beliefs. This confusion reflects his failure clearly to distinguish the two roles belief can play in his account of action: as rationalizing cause and as agential awareness. Somewhat surprisingly, though, after he carefully drew the distinction and announced that intentional action requires practical knowledge, he pretty much ignored it. This may explain why some have assumed that Davidson parted ways with Anscombe on this. But a careful study of their writings shows that in fact they held remarkably similar views on the nature and need for practical knowledge. (shrink)

In the last century, philosophers turned their attention to language. One place they have looked for clues about its nature is Plato’s Cratylus, which considers whether names are naturally or conventionally correct. The dialogue is a source of annoyance to many commentators because it does not take a clear position on the central question. At times, it argues that language is conventional, and, at other times, defends the view that language is natural. This lack of commitment has led to a (...) longstanding dispute over the outcome of the dialogue. I argue that the Cratylus provides no clear resolution to this problem because it presupposes certain unexamined metaphysical commitments about the nature of reality, which are in need of thorough investigation. (shrink)

In this paper, I argue for the usefulness of pragmatism as a framework within which to develop the theological application of emergentist theory. I consider some philosophical issues relevant to the recent revival of interest, across various disciplines, in the concept of emergence and clarify some of the conceptual issues at stake in the attempts to formulate the philosophical position of emergentism and to apply it theologically. After highlighting some major problems arising from the main existing ways of formulating emergentism, (...) I build on the work of Sami Pihlström, outlining a less problematic, alternative proposal. I attempt to show that the philosophical problems can be circumvented by an appeal to the pragmatist tradition, which is a useful philosophical framework within which to develop an emergentist theory fit for theological application. (shrink)

An Editorial for issue 128.1 of the Expository Times.

In two rarely discussed passages – from unpublished notes on the Principles of Philosophy and a 1647 letter to Chanut – Descartes argues that the question of the infinite extension of space is importantly different from the infinity of time. In both passages, he is anxious to block the application of his well-known argument for the indefinite extension of space to time, in order to avoid the theologically problematic implication that the world has no beginning. Descartes concedes that we always (...) imagine an earlier time in which God might have created the world if he had wanted, but insists that this imaginary earlier existence of the world is not connected to its actual duration in the way that the indefinite extension of space is connected to the actual extension of the world. This paper considers whether Descartes’s metaphysics can sustain this asymmetrical attitude towards infinite space vs. time. I first consider Descartes’s relation to the ‘imaginary’ space/time tradition that extended from the late scholastics through Gassendi and More. I next examine carefully Descartes’s main argument for the indefinite extension of space and explain why it does not apply to time. Most crucially, since duration is merely conceptually distinct from enduring substance, the end or beginning of the world entails the end or beginning of real time. In contrast, extension does not depend on any enduring substance besides itself. (shrink)

What is the connection between having a phenomenal property and knowing that one has that property? A traditional view on the matter takes the connection to be quite intimate. Whenever one has a phenomenal property, one knows that one does. Recently most authors have denied this traditional view. The goal of this paper is to defend the traditional view. In fact, I will defend something much stronger: I will argue that what it is for a property to be phenomenal is (...) for it to be a property one must know oneself to have when on has it. As we will see, this theory has a number of surprising and welcome upshots, suggesting that the traditional view has been unjustly maligned. (shrink)

In their thoughtful article, Malm and Navin (2020) raise concerns about a potentially unjust generational welfare tradeoff between children and adults when it comes to chicken pox. We share their c...

(DRAFT: I'll update when the book is published.) This started as a book about desire. I was hoping to complement what I had said about belief in my (2022). To believe something, I argued, is to be positioned to do, think and feel things in light of a possibility whose obtaining would make one right. I argued that believing is not representational, that belief states are not causes or causal powers, and that the objects of belief are ways the world (...) might be and not representations of things. Believing is not so much a response to the world as a way of being positioned in it, a way of having an environment, as Frege put it. (Frege 1956, 306) I was trying to put the believer as a rational agent positioned in a world at the heart of my account. I hoped an account of desire could round out this picture of a rational agent’s psychology. But as I thought about desire, I came to see that two ideas about the nature of goodness, one negative and one positive, were really at the heart of my thinking. The negative idea is that there is no such thing as what philosophers have variously called intrinsic goodness or simple goodness or absolute value. I guess I am a nihilist about that. The positive idea is that our world is rich in what I will call sortal quality, what others have called goodness-of-a-kind or attributive goodness. I came to think that sortal quality is at the heart not just of desire but also of pleasure and moral worth. A picture of moral psychology had come into view. And so I re-organised the book. I still say a lot about the nature of desire, or ‘wanting’ as I prefer to call it, and I think my view does complement my externalist view of belief. Wanting, I will argue, is a matter of falling short relative to a standard one falls under, failing to be as good as one could be. If believing is about having an environment to respond to, then desire is about fitting into it well. And so my book offers a comprehensive picture of a moral agent in a world where nothing is simply or absolutely good but where many kinds of things, including people, can be very good and even splendid. (shrink)

What are we to make of works of art whose apparent point is to convince us of the meaninglessness and absurdity of human existence? I examine, in this paper, the attempt of Albert Camus to provide philosophical justification of art in the face of the supposed fact of absurdity and note its failure as such with specific reference to Sartre’s criticism. Despite other superficial similarities, I contrast Camus’s concept of the absurd with that of his ‘existentialist’ colleagues, including Sartre, and (...) suggest that the latter concept is more philosophically viable. I conclude that existential phenomenology consequently provides a more promising philosophical justification for artistic creation in the light of the more viable conception of absurdity. (shrink)

This paper attempts to explain why Heidegger's thought has evoked both positive and negative reactions of such an extreme nature by focussing on his answer to the central methodological question “What is Philosophy?” After briefly setting forth Heidegger‟s answer in terms of attunement to Being, the centrality to it of his view of language and by focussing on his relationship with the word "philosophy‟ and with the history of philosophy, the author shows how it has led Heidegger to construct his (...) own work, itself linguistic, as a self-referential union of form and meaning. It is suggested that, from a Heideggerian perspective, this gives his work added argumentative force but, conversely, allows the critic no point of entry into his hermeneutical circle – hence the extreme reactions. This observation is then applied to address a related critical question; it is used to make sense of the apparent distinction, in Heidegger's work, between talking about attunement to Being and actually effecting such an attunement. The author argues that, for Heidegger, there is actually no distinction and that his apparent descriptions of attunement to Being at once describe and effect such an attunement. This union can therefore be conceived as one dimension of the intimacy, previously observed, between form and content and which is recognised to be a feature of Heidegger‟s work by both the acolyte and the critic. (shrink)

The case for secrecy in voting depends on the assumption that voters reliably vote for the political outcomes they want to prevail. No such assumption is valid. Accordingly, voting procedures should be designed to provide maximal incentive for voters to vote responsibly. Secret voting fails this test because citizens are protected from public scrutiny. Under open voting, citizens are publicly answerable for their electoral choices and will be encouraged thereby to vote in a discursively defensible manner. The possibility of bribery, (...) intimidation or blackmail moderates this argument but such dangers will be avoidable in many contemporary societies without recourse to secrecy. (shrink)

The ways in which Wittgenstein was directly influenced by William James (by his early psychological work as well his later philosophy) have been thoroughly explored and charted by Russell B. Goodman. In particular, Goodman has drawn attention to the pragmatist resonances of the Wittgensteinian notion of hinge propositions as developedand articulated in the posthumously edited and published work, On Certainty. This paper attempts to extend Goodman’s observation, moving beyond his focus on James (specifically, James’s Pragmatism) as his pragmatist reference point. (...) It aims to articulate the affinity between Wittgenstein’s thought on the topic of certainty and that of the neglected pragmatist thinker, George Santayana. -/- The paper draws on Duncan Pritchard’s recent reading of Wittgenstein’s On Certainty in order to articulate the concept of certainty involved in the notion of hinge propositions. It identifies two important and related points of affinity between this Wittgensteinian line of thought on certainty and the line of thought on the same topic articulated in Santayana’s Scepticism and Animal Faith. The paper argues, firstly, that, both lines of thought reflect a pragmatist concept of certainty, according to which our most fundamental certainties are not conceived as purely theoretical objects of belief or knowledge but rather as thearational presuppositions of beliefs and practical action. Secondly, it examines the way inwhich the pragmatist concept of certainty functions, for the two thinkers as a response to scepticism. It argues that although the two thinkers’ responses are very different, they are mutually compatible and, together, point towards the possibility of a distinctively pragmatist response to scepticism, which involves an anti-epistemological model of the intimate relation of the human self to the world. (shrink)

Ecological communities are seldom, if ever, biological individuals. They lack causal boundaries as the populations that constitute communities are not congruent and rarely have persistent functional roles regulating the communities’ higher-level properties. Instead we should represent ecological communities indexically, by identifying ecological communities via the network of weak causal interactions between populations that unfurl from a starting set of populations. This precisification of ecological communities helps identify how community properties remain invariant, and why they have robust characteristics. This respects the (...) diversity and aggregational nature of these complex systems while still vindicating them as units worthy of investigation. (shrink)

The question of whether there are laws of nature in ecology has developed substantially in the last 20 years. Many have attempted to rehabilitate ecology’s lawlike status through establishing that ecology possesses laws that robustly appear across many different ecological systems. I argue that there is still something missing, which explains why so many have been skeptical of ecology’s lawlike status. Community ecology has struggled to establish what I call a General Unificatory Theory. The lack of a GUT causes problems (...) for explanation as there are no guidelines for how to integrate the lower-level mathematical and causal models into a larger theory of how ecological assemblages are formed. I turn to a promising modern attempt to provide a unified higher-level explanation in ecology, presented by ecologist Mark Vellend, and advocate for philosophical engagement with its prospects for aiding ecological explanation. (shrink)

The present religious constitution of the Federal Republic of Germany is the product of protracted historical conflicts and political settlements that began in the sixteenth century. The mediation of these conflicts and settlements and the piecemeal establishment of the constitution was the achievement of imperial public law and diplomacy. Germany’s religious constitution—a secular and relativistic juridical framework protecting a plurality of confessional religions—pre-dated liberalism and democracy, and owes nothing to normative philosophical constructions of individual freedoms and rights, or social justice (...) and moral community. Rather, it was the product of a political compromise between warring confessional blocs, and of the institutions of public law that were the instruments and effects of this compromise. (shrink)

It is often said in physics that if two models of a theory are related by a symmetry, then the two models provide (or could provide) two different representations of the very same situation, alike the case of two maps of different color for the very same city. It is also said that the situations represented by two models of a theory are indiscernible in some ways when the models in question are related by a symmetry of the theory, just (...) like the situation in the interior of the cabin of a train when the train is at rest in the station is empirically indiscernible from the situation in the interior when the train is moving uniformly (in classical mechanics, these two situations are represented by two models related by a boost). In recent years, philosophers of physics have focused a lot of attention in developing various principles that aim to elucidate these and similar remarks on symmetries, models, physical equivalence, and representation that are widespread in physics practice. The goal of the current article is to provide a critical review of these principles, and suggest a new framework for thinking about these kinds of questions. One important upshot of the paper is that questions of indiscernibility, and questions of the representational capacity of models, must be distinguished from one another. (shrink)

This Essay analyzes an essay by H. L. A. Hart about discretion that has never before been published, and has often been considered lost. Hart, one of the most significant legal philosophers of the twentieth century, wrote the essay at Harvard Law School in November 1956, shortly after he arrived as a visiting professor. In the essay, Hart argued that discretion is a special mode of reasoned, constrained decisionmaking that occupies a middle ground between arbitrary choice and determinate rule application. (...) Hart believed that discretion, soundly exercised, provides a principled way of coping with legal indeterminacy that is fully consistent with the rule of law. This Essay situates Hart’s paper – Discretion – in historical and intellectual context, interprets its main arguments, and assesses its significance in jurisprudential history. In the context of Hart’s work, Discretion is notable because it sketches a theory of legal reasoning in depth, with vivid examples. In the context of jurisprudential history, Discretion is significant because it sheds new light on long-overlooked historical and theoretical connections between Hart’s work and the Legal Process School, the American jurisprudential movement dominant at Harvard during Hart’s year as a visiting professor. Hart’s Discretion is part of our jurisprudential heritage, advancing our understanding of legal philosophy and its history. (shrink)