In this paper, I defend a version of the medical model of disability, which defines disability as an enduring biological dysfunction that causes its bearer a significant degree of impairment. We should accept the medical model, I argue, because it succeeds in capturing our judgments about what conditions do and do not qualify as disabilities, because it offers a compelling explanation for what makes a condition count as a disability, and because it justifies why the federal government should spend hundreds (...) of billions of dollars, annually, on aid and accommodations for disabled people. After responding to a pair of objections Elizabeth Barnes has raised against the medical model, I contrast it with Guy Kahane and Julian Savulescu's welfarist account of disability, and with Barnes's own mere-difference view. Both of these accounts face serious challenges, although elements of Barnes's view can—and, in my opinion, should—be adopted by proponents of the medical model. (shrink)

Fifteen years ago, Sharon Street and Richard Joyce advanced evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism, which purported to show that the evolutionary history of our moral beliefs makes moral realism untenable. These arguments have since given rise to a flurry of objections; the epistemic principles Street and Joyce relied upon, in particular, have come in for a number of serious challenges. My goal in this paper is to develop a new account of evolutionary debunking which avoids the pitfalls Street and (...) Joyce encountered and responds to the most pressing objections they faced. I begin by presenting a striking thought experiment to serve as an analogy for the evolution of morality; I then show why calibrationist views of higher-order evidence are crucial to the evolutionary debunking project; I outline a new rationale for why finding out that morality was selected to promote cooperation suggests that our moral judgments are unreliable; and I explain why evolutionary debunking arguments do not depend on our having a dedicated faculty for moral cognition. All things considered, I argue, evolutionary debunking arguments against moral realism are on relatively secure footing – provided, at least, that we accept a calibrationist account of higher-order evidence. (shrink)

Evolutionary debunking arguments purport to show that, if moral realism is true, all of our moral beliefs are unjustified. In this paper, I respond to two of the most enduring objections that have been raised against these arguments. The first objection claims that evolutionary debunking arguments are self-undermining, because they cannot be formulated without invoking epistemic principles, and epistemic principles are just as vulnerable to debunking as our moral beliefs. I argue that this objection suffers from several defects, the most (...) serious of which is that it has the unpalatable consequence that we should never revise our moral beliefs in response to evidence that our capacity for normative cognition is globally impaired. The second objection, which comes to us from Katia Vavova, claims that evolutionary debunking arguments are doomed to fail, because they attempt to show that our moral beliefs are unreliable without making any assumptions about the nature of morality, and this is impossible. I argue, to the contrary, that the etiological higher-order evidence cited by debunking arguments can give us good reason to think that our moral beliefs are unreliable, even if we make no assumptions about what morality is like. (shrink)

Brian Hedden has proposed that any successful account of options for the subjective “ought” must satisfy two constraints: first, it must ensure that we are able to carry out each of the options available to us, and second, it should guarantee that the set of options available to us supervenes on our mental states. In this paper I show that, due to the ever-present possibility of Frankfurt-style cases, these two constraints jointly entail that no agent has any options at any (...) time. This consequence, however, is clearly unacceptable, so one of Hedden’s constraints must go. Because the ability constraint is indispensable, I argue, we have no choice but to reject the supervenience constraint. Hedden’s underlying motivation for imposing the supervenience constraint is the conviction that our options should be transparent to us, but transparency also proves to be incompatible with the ability constraint, so it must be rejected as well. I conclude by sketching an unabashedly externalist account of options, which conceives of options as exhaustive combinations of atomic movements. (shrink)

A key question in the philosophy of logic is how we have epistemic justification for claims about logical entailment (assuming we have such justification at all). Justification holism asserts that claims of logical entailment can only be justified in the context of an entire logical theory, e.g., classical, intuitionistic, paraconsistent, paracomplete etc. According to holism, claims of logical entailment cannot be atomistically justified as isolated statements, independently of theory choice. At present there is a developing interest in—and endorsement of—justification holism (...) due to the revival of an abductivist approach to the epistemology of logic. This paper presents an argument against holism by establishing a foundational entailment-sentence of deduction which is justified independently of theory choice and outside the context of a whole logical theory. (shrink)

In “Proof-Theoretic Justification of Logic”, building on work by Dummett and Prawitz, I show how to construct use-based meaning-theories for the logical constants. The assertability-conditional meaning-theory takes the meaning of the logical constants to be given by their introduction rules; the consequence-conditional meaning-theory takes the meaning of the logical constants to be given by their elimination rules. I then consider the question: given a set of introduction rules \, what are the strongest elimination rules that are validated by an assertability (...) conditional meaning-theory based on \? I prove that the intuitionistic introduction rules are the strongest rules that are validated by the intuitionistic elimination rules. I then prove that intuitionistic logic is the strongest logic that can be given either an assertability-conditional or consequence-conditional meaning-theory. In “Grounding Grounding” I discuss the notion of grounding. My discussion revolves around the problem of iterated grounding-claims. Suppose that \ grounds \; what grounds that \ grounds that \? I argue that unless we can get a satisfactory answer to this question the notion of grounding will be useless. I discuss and reject some proposed accounts of iterated grounding claims. I then develop a new way of expressing grounding, propose an account of iterated grounding-claims and show how we can develop logics for grounding. In “Is the Vagueness Argument Valid?” I argue that the Vagueness Argument in favor of unrestricted composition isn’t valid. However, if the premisses of the argument are true and the conclusion false, mereological facts fail to supervene on non-mereological facts. I argue that this failure of supervenience is an artifact of the interplay between the necessity and determinacy operators and that it does not mean that mereological facts fail to depend on non-mereological facts. I sketch a deflationary view of ontology to establish this. (shrink)

How do people decide which claims should be considered mere beliefs and which count as knowledge? Although little is known about how people attribute knowledge to others, philosophical debate about the nature of knowledge may provide a starting point. Traditionally, a belief that is both true and justified was thought to constitute knowledge. However, philosophers now agree that this account is inadequate, due largely to a class of counterexamples (termed ‘‘Gettier cases’’) in which a person’s justified belief is true, but (...) only due to luck. We report four experiments examining the effect of truth, justification, and ‘‘Gettiering’’ on people’s knowledge attributions. These experiments show that: (1) people attribute knowledge to others only when their beliefs are both true and justified; (2) in contrast to contemporary philosophers, people also attribute knowledge to others in Gettier situations; and (3) knowledge is not attributed in one class of Gettier cases, but only because the agent’s belief is based on ‘‘apparent’’ evidence. These findings suggest that the lay concept of knowledge is roughly consistent with the traditional account of knowledge as justified true belief, and also point to a major difference between the epistemic intuitions of laypeople and those of philosophers. (shrink)

Condorcet's famous jury theorem reaches an optimistic conclusion on the correctness of majority decisions, based on two controversial premises about voters: they are competent and vote independently, in a technical sense. I carefully analyse these premises and show that: whether a premise is justi…ed depends on the notion of probability considered; none of the notions renders both premises simultaneously justi…ed. Under the perhaps most interesting notions, the independence assumption should be weakened.

The aim of this article is to investigate specific aspects connected with visualization in the practice of a mathematical subfield: low-dimensional topology. Through a case study, it will be established that visualization can play an epistemic role. The background assumption is that the consideration of the actual practice of mathematics is relevant to address epistemological issues. It will be shown that in low-dimensional topology, justifications can be based on sequences of pictures. Three theses will be defended. First, the representations used (...) in the practice are an integral part of the mathematical reasoning. As a matter of fact, they convey in a material form the relevant transitions and thus allow experts to draw inferential connections. Second, in low-dimensional topology experts exploit a particular type of manipulative imagination which is connected to intuition of two- and three-dimensional space and motor agency. This imagination allows recognizing the transformations which connect different pictures in an argument. Third, the epistemic—and inferential—actions performed are permissible only within a specific practice: this form of reasoning is subject-matter dependent. Local criteria of validity are established to assure the soundness of representationally heterogeneous arguments in low-dimensional topology. (shrink)

Some commentators have condemned Kant’s moral project from a feminist perspective based on Kant’s apparently dim view of women as being innately morally deficient. Here I will argue that although his remarks concerning women are unsettling at first glance, a more detailed and closer examination shows that Kant’s view of women is actually far more complex and less unsettling than that attributed to him by various feminist critics. My argument, then, undercuts the justification for the severe feminist critique of Kant’s (...) moral project. (shrink)

It is clear that beliefs can be assessed both as to their justification and their rationality. What is not as clear, however, is how the rationality and justification of belief relate to one another. Stewart Cohen has stumped for the popular proposal that rationality and justification come to the same thing, that rational beliefs just are justified beliefs, supporting his view by arguing that ‘justified belief’ and ‘rational belief’ are synonymous. In this paper, I will give reason to think that (...) Cohen’s argument is spurious. I will show that ‘rational’ and ‘justified’ occupy two distinct semantic categories – ‘rational’ is an absolute gradable adjective and ‘justified’ is a relative gradable adjective – telling against the thought that ‘rational belief’ and ‘justified belief’ are synonymous. I will then argue that the burden of proof is on those who would equate rationality and justification, making the case that those who hold this prominent position face the difficulty of explaining how rationality and justification come to the same thing even though ‘rational’ and ‘justified’ are not synonymous. (shrink)

This paper assesses branching spacetime theories in light of metaphysical considerations concerning time. I present the A, B, and C series in terms of the temporal structure they impose on sets of events, and raise problems for two elements of extant branching spacetime theories—McCall’s ‘branch attrition’, and the ‘no backward branching’ feature of Belnap’s ‘branching space-time’—in terms of their respective A- and B-theoretic nature. I argue that McCall’s presentation of branch attrition can only be coherently formulated on a model with (...) at least two temporal dimensions, and that this results in severing the link between branch attrition and the flow of time. I argue that ‘no backward branching’ prohibits Belnap’s theory from capturing the modal content of indeterministic physical theories, and results in it ascribing to the world a time-asymmetric modal structure that lacks physical justification. (shrink)

While the epistemic significance of disagreement has been a popular topic in epistemology for at least a decade, little attention has been paid to logical disagreement. This monograph is meant as a remedy. The text starts with an extensive literature review of the epistemology of (peer) disagreement and sets the stage for an epistemological study of logical disagreement. The guiding thread for the rest of the work is then three distinct readings of the ambiguous term ‘logical disagreement’. Chapters 1 and (...) 2 focus on the Ad Hoc Reading according to which logical disagreements occur when two subjects take incompatible doxastic attitudes toward a specific proposition in or about logic. Chapter 2 presents a new counterexample to the widely discussed Uniqueness Thesis. Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the Theory Choice Reading of ‘logical disagreement’. According to this interpretation, logical disagreements occur at the level of entire logical theories rather than individual entailment-claims. Chapter 4 concerns a key question from the philosophy of logic, viz., how we have epistemic justification for claims about logical consequence. In Chapters 5 and 6 we turn to the Akrasia Reading. On this reading, logical disagreements occur when there is a mismatch between the deductive strength of one’s background logic and the logical theory one prefers (officially). Chapter 6 introduces logical akrasia by analogy to epistemic akrasia and presents a novel dilemma. Chapter 7 revisits the epistemology of peer disagreement and argues that the epistemic significance of central principles from the literature are at best deflated in the context of logical disagreement. The chapter also develops a simple formal model of deep disagreement in Default Logic, relating this to our general discussion of logical disagreement. The monograph ends in an epilogue with some reflections on the potential epistemic significance of convergence in logical theorizing. (shrink)

We reconsider the pragmatic interpretation of intuitionistic logic [21] regarded as a logic of assertions and their justi cations and its relations with classical logic. We recall an extension of this approach to a logic dealing with assertions and obligations, related by a notion of causal implication [14, 45]. We focus on the extension to co-intuitionistic logic, seen as a logic of hypotheses [8, 9, 13] and on polarized bi-intuitionistic logic as a logic of assertions and conjectures: looking at (...) the S4 modal translation, we give a de nition of a system AHL of bi-intuitionistic logic that correctly represents the duality between intuitionistic and co-intuitionistic logic, correcting a mistake in previous work [7, 10]. A computational interpretation of cointuitionism as a distributed calculus of coroutines is then used to give an operational interpretation of subtraction.Work on linear co-intuitionism is then recalled, a linear calculus of co-intuitionistic coroutines is de ned and a probabilistic interpretation of linear co-intuitionism is given as in [9]. Also we remark that by extending the language of intuitionistic logic we can express the notion of expectation, an assertion that in all situations the truth of p is possible and that in a logic of expectations the law of double negation holds. Similarly, extending co-intuitionistic logic, we can express the notion of conjecture that p, de ned as a hypothesis that in some situation the truth of p is epistemically necessary. (shrink)

L'article s'intéresse aux obstacles épistémologiques qui empêchèrent Wittgenstein d'admettre l'idée moderne de logique modale et, en particulier, les logiques d'attitudes propositionnelles. Tout en proposant un aperçu rétrospectif de la logique des modalités épistémiques, nous verrons que ces obstacles reposent avant tout sur la nature de l'espace logique présenté dans le Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus et le statut métaphysique du sujet. Des passages éclairants seront rappelés pour justi.

In addition to providing a rebuttal of the “paper-doubts” of the would-be skeptic, pragmatists have also been quite responsive to the social dimensions of doubt. This is true concerning the causes of doubt. This is true also regarding its consequences: doubt has consequences on epistemic trust; on the way we discuss truths, either about the sciences or about the “construction of good”. Readers of Dewey’s The Quest for Certainty and of some of his most important political writings can easily see (...) how practical uncertainty can degenerate into practical and political skepticism, preventing the emergence of the public. This social aspect of the question has received less attention, perhaps, than the general pragmatist stance towards skepticism, and the present symposium offers a rst round of insights into this aspect of the question: the papers retrieved below all cast light on important aspects of the debate on justi cation, on scienti c dogmatism, on irony and skepticism, on doubt and legal theory, on skepticism and political anarchism. (shrink)

In this paper, I address a range of arguments put forward by Katrin Flikschuh (2016) casting doubts on a theoretical account ofancestral persons in the work of Ifeanyi Menkiti. She argues both that their ontological status is uncertain and that they areontologically redundant. I argue that she does not succeed in convincing us to settle for a practical justification of ancestors. Ithen supplement Menkiti’s life-history account of post-mortem persistence with Searle’s account of social ontology with a viewto theoretically justify belief (...) in the existence of ancestral persons. (shrink)

“Dalla filosofia dell’azione alla filosofia della mente” è stato il percorso di alcuni filosofi di nazionalità varia degli anni 1980 – come Paul Churchland negli Stati Uniti o Ansgar Beckermann in Germania – che prima si sono interessati agli aspetti più teorici nella filosofia dell’azione, come il modo di funzionamento delle azioni e la loro spiegazione scientifica, e che poi, con l’arrivo e la diffusione dei personal computers e delle scienze cognitive, hanno ampliato e approfondito questo interesse di ricerca e (...) si sono dedicati alla filosofia della mente più in generale e in particolare alla spiegazione scientifica e filosofica del mentale. Sandro Nannini faceva parte di questo movimento ed è stato uno tra gli inizialmente pochi filosofi italiani che si sono occupati di questi argomenti; successivamente ne è diventato uno dei maggiori specialisti in Italia, proponendo una sua particolare versione di naturalizzazione del mentale. Subordinata agli interessi teorici è stata la sua iniziativa accademica di fondare e promuovere il primo dottorato italiano di ricerca in Scienze Cognitive. Il presente volume tratta dell’opera di Sandro Nannini in contributi che sono riflessioni più o meno specifiche sulle differenti tappe del suo percorso, affrontando temi come l’analisi dell'azione, il libero arbitrio, la discussione di Nannini di vari classici della filosofia, la tendenza del naturalismo a dissolvere la filosofia in un enciclopedismo empirico e la sfida dei qualia e della fenomenologia all’approccio naturalistico alla mente. Il volume contiene inoltre un saggio dello stesso Sandro Nannini, nel quale espone l’ultimo sviluppo della sua filosofia della mente nonché le risposte agli interventi degli altri autori: Mario De Caro, Sara Dellantonio, Rosaria Egidi, Roberta Lanfredini, Christoph Lumer, Paolo Parrini, Pietro Perconti, Claudio Pizzi, Emanuela Scribano e Giuseppe Varnier. (shrink)

Many epistemologists treat rationality and justification as the same thing. Those who don’t lack detailed accounts of the difference, leading their opponents to suspect that the distinction is an ad hoc attempt to safeguard their theories of justification. In this paper, I offer a new and detailed account of the distinction. The account is inspired by no particular views in epistemology, but rather by insights from the literature on reasons and rationality outside of epistemology. Specifically, it turns on a version (...) of the familiar distinction in meta-ethics between possessing apparent normative reasons (which may be merely apparent) and possessing objective normative reasons. The paper proceeds as follows. In §1, I discuss the history of indifference to the distinction between rationality and justification in epistemology and the striking contrast with meta-ethics. I introduced the distinction between apparent reasons and possessed objective reasons in §2 and provide a deeper basis for it in §3. I explain how the ideas extend to epistemology in §4 and explore the upshots for some central issues in §5. (shrink)

The present paper wants to promote epistemic pluralism as an alternative view of non-classical logics. For this purpose, a bilateralist logic of acceptance and rejection is developed in order to make an important di erence between several concepts of epistemology, including information and justi cation. Moreover, the notion of disagreement corresponds to a set of epistemic oppositions between agents. The result is a non-standard theory of opposition for many-valued logics, rendering total and partial disagreement in terms of epistemic negation (...) and semi-negations. (shrink)

Paying attention to the inner workings of mathematicians has led to a proliferation of new themes in the philosophy of mathematics. Several of these have to do with epistemology. Philosophers of mathematical practice, however, have not (yet) systematically engaged with general (analytic) epistemology. To be sure, there are some exceptions, but they are few and far between. In this chapter, I offer an explanation of why this might be the case and show how the situation could be remedied. I contend (...) that it is only by conceiving the knowing subject(s) as embodied, fallible, and embedded in a specific context (along the lines of what has been done within social and feminist epistemology) that we can pursue an epistemology of mathematics sensitive to actual mathematical practice. I further suggest that this reconception of the knowing subject(s) does not force us to abandon the traditional framework of epistemology in which knowledge requires justified true belief. It does, however, lead to a fallible conception of mathematical justification that, among other things, makes Gettier cases possible. This shows that topics considered to be far removed from the interests of philosophers of mathematical practice might reveal to be relevant to them. (shrink)

The aim of this discussion is twofold.* First, I shall scrutinize certain prevailing rationales for enlisting for military service and show that these justifications are inadequate to meet the military’s recruiting needs. Larger numbers of enlistees who are fully equipped, both in technical skills and morale, for combat readiness are in great demand, but the arguments used to recruit potential enlistees are self-defeating. I shall show how and why they attract volunteers who are rendered singularly unfit to meet these demands (...) by those very arguments themselves. (shrink)

It has been claimed that justification, conceived traditionally in an internalist fashion, is not an epistemologically important property. I argue for the importance of a conception of justification that is completely dependent on the subject’s experience, using an analogy to advice. The epistemological importance of a property depends on two desiderata: the extent to which it guarantees the epistemic goal of attaining truth and avoiding falsehood, and the extent to which it depends only on the information available to the believer. (...) The traditional intermalist notion of justification completely satisfies the second desideratum and largely satisfies the first. (shrink)

I argue that one in particular of CrispinWright’s attempts to capture our common or intuitive concepts of objectivity, warrant, and other associated notions, relies on an ambiguity between a given constructivist reading of the concepts and at least one other, arguablymore ‘ordinary’, version of the notions he tries to accommodate. I do this by focusing on one case in point, and concluding with a brief argument showing how this case generalises. I demonstrate why this ambiguity is unacceptable and also that (...) its resolution undermines the aim it serves: to account for and accommodate our ordinary conception of (at least) objectivity, warrant (or justication) and truth. (shrink)

It is true of many truths that I do not believe them. It is equally true, however, that I cannot rationally assert of any such truth both that it is true and that I do not believe it. To explain why this is so, I will distinguish absence of belief from disbelief and argue that an assertion of “p, but I do not believe that p” is paradoxical because it is indefensible, i.e. for reasons internal to it unable to convince. (...) A closer examination of the irrationality involved will show that such is the skeptic’s predicament, trying to convince us to bracket knowledge claims we have good grounds to take ourselves to be entitled to. Even if the sceptic cannot be proven wrong, his challenge still demands an answer, if not a treatment. In this paper, I argue that the cure lies in epidemiology rather than epistemology: instead of attacking the sceptic head-long, I commend guerilla tactics, vaccinating our fellow non-sceptics against the sceptical virus. I will not argue that the sceptic is wrong, necessarily wrong or that he cannot be believed, but that he cannot convince. Scepticism requires a leap of faith: something we may justifiably refrain from even on the sceptic’s own standards. (shrink)

Metacognition is the monitoring and controlling of cognitive processes. I examine the role of metacognition in ‘ordinary retrieval cases’, cases in which it is intuitive that via recollection the subject has a justified belief. Drawing on psychological research on metacognition, I argue that evidentialism has a unique, accurate prediction in each ordinary retrieval case: the subject has evidence for the proposition she justifiedly believes. But, I argue, process reliabilism has no unique, accurate predictions in these cases. I conclude that ordinary (...) retrieval cases better support evidentialism than process reliabilism. This conclusion challenges several common assumptions. One is that non-evidentialism alone allows for a naturalized epistemology, i.e., an epistemology that is fully in accordance with scientific research and methodology. Another is that process reliabilism fares much better than evidentialism in the epistemology of memory. (shrink)

In the light of a study of the di erence between political actors and ordinary citizens as language users, and based on three moral arguments (consequence-based, recognition-based, and complicity-based), we propose that democratic representatives have an imperfect duty to use gender-fair-language in their public communication. In the case of members of the executive, such as ministries, prime ministries, and presidents, such an imperfect duty could also be justi ed on democratic grounds. Their choice of using a gender-unfair language, we (...) argue, can cast doubts on the fundamental democratic commitment to respect the agency of all present and future citizens as potential participants in the law-making process. (shrink)

Under which conditions are we epistemically justied to believe that what other people tell us is true? Traditionally, the answer has either been reductionist or anti-reductionist: Either our justication reduces to non-testimonial reasons, or we have a presumptive, though defeasible, right to believe what we are told. However, different cases pull in different directions. Intuitively, someone asking for the time is subject to different epistemic standards than a surgeon consulting a colleague before a dangerous operation. Following this line (...) of thought, this paper develops an account of testimonial justication that captures our reductionist as well as our anti-reductionist intuitions. It is argued that the speaker’s commitment to an epistemic norm, as well as the hearer’s understanding of that norm, gives the hearer a presumptive right to believe what she is told. However, this justication doesn’t apply to situations with high practical risks. Here, the hearer needs reductive reasons to believe that her interlocutor is especially qualied to give her the desired information. (shrink)

The present article studies the epictetean philosophical use of some passages of the Greek and Roman history. The concepts of love-friendship (philía) and personal con- venience (sumphéron) second the philosopher to explain why happiness (eudaimonía) has not been reached by the human being in all history. All historical war or strife (pólemos), such as the Trojan, the Medics and the Peloponnesian wars, is provoked by epistemological-moral mistakes derived from the ignorance of which is the correct place to put the sumphéron; (...) such correct place is only the personal “rational capacity” ( proháiresis). This causal explanation of the incorrect and vicious human actions, of which history is full and which destroy the existent philía between nations and provoke pólemos, constitutes an authentic epictetean philosophy of history. Nevertheless, those vicious actions have a justification in a superior Cosmological level because they are pre-determined and ordered by the God-Providence. This leads us to the possibility of observing that the stoic philosophy of history, particularly the epictetean, is analogous to some modern speculative systems of history like the ones developed by Vico or Hegel. (shrink)

Uma pesquisa revisando o pensamento gestáltico se justifica pelo intenso debate em torno da tese emergentista da mente. Sem a pretensão de uma exposição extensiva dos usos de noções emergentistas na análise do conceito de mente, realiza-se uma exposição do conceito com foco nas perspectivas de John R. Searle e de Evan Thompson. Ambos realizam uma defesa da emergência como conceito central na compreensão e explicação da relação mente corpo, mas o primeiro centrado no conceito de propriedades emergentes e o (...) segundo centrado no conceito de processos emergentes. Neste debate entendemos que contribuições da teoria da Gestalt podem se fazer interessantes. Apresenta-se neste contexto o pensamento gestáltico enfatizando o texto “Über ‘Gestaltqualitäten’ ” de 1932, ditado à sua esposa por Chistian von Ehrenfels (1859-1932) no ano de sua morte como um comentário a partir da repercussão de seu artigo “Über ‘Gestaltqualitäten’ ”, publicado em 1890 e comentado pelos três autores de maior repercussão da psicologia da Gestalt; Max Wertheimer (1880-1943), Kurt Koffka (1886-1941) e Wolfgang Köhler (1887-1967). (shrink)

Criticism of contract theory has always played an important role in Hartmut Kliemt’s writings on political philosophy. Notwithstanding his objections to a consent-based justi- fication of the state he has never subscribed to an anarchist position. In Hartmut Kliemt’s view, a minimal state which protects the basic liberties of its citizens has to be considered legitimate. The article begins with a brief restatement of the most influential objections that have been raised against the various forms of contract theory. Thereafter (...) interest- based accounts of political legitimacy are critically examined; it is argued that individual interests fail to provide a justification for any kind of political authority. Finally, philo- sophical anarchism is suggested as a possible alternative to contract theory and interest theory. Although philosophical anarchism holds that no state has a moral right to ru- le, it can be reconciled with the view that it is in the individual’s interest to create and maintain a minimal state. (shrink)