1000 time-travelers travel back in time, each with the intention of killing their own infant-self. If there is no branching time, then on pain of bringing about a logical contradiction, all must fail. But this seems inexplicable: what is to ensure that the time-travelers are stopped? For a time, this inexplicability objection was thought to provide evidence that there is something incoherent about the possibility of backwards time travel in a universe without branching time. There is now near-consensus, however, that (...) the objection has no bite: there is nothing inexplicable about the mass failure. Lewis, Sider and Ismael independently argue that since it is built into the description of the class of cases considered that the time-travelers must fail – and so we consider only unsuccessful attempts – there is no mystery. Smith argues that the absence of possible worlds at which auto-infanticide is committed suffices as a complete explanation for the failures. And Baron and Colyvan maintain that available causal and logical explanations jointly account for everything that needs accounting for. I argue that these are wrong. There is remaining, problematic inexplicability. For backwards time travel not to lead to logical contradiction, something would need to do logic’s bidding, after all. (shrink)

Robert Brandom’s notion of historical rationality seeks to supplement his inferentialism thesis by providing an account for the validity of conceptual contents. This account, in the shape of a historical process, involves the same self-integration of Brandom’s earlier inferentialism and is similarly restricted by reciprocal recognition of others. This article argues that in applying the synchronic social model of normative discourse to the diachronic axis of engaging the past, Brandom premises a false analogy between present community and past tradition, which (...) obscures the important differences between the two axes. This is explored by looking closely at how Brandom’s own engagements with the past exemplify his historical rationality. Taking its cue from Brandom’s critics, the article shows that Brandom’s own discourse with tradition is not, and cannot be, dialogical and, in accordance, that historical rationality is not, and cannot be, governed by the same social structure of inferentialism. The article concludes with the implications of such a claim on Brandom’s thesis as a whole and on the role of tradition in the process of normative change, in light of it. (shrink)

ABSTRACT The apparent consistency of Sobel sequences famously motivated David Lewis to defend a variably strict conditional semantics for counterfactuals. If Sophie had gone to the parade, she would have seen Pedro. If Sophie had gone to the parade and had been stuck behind someone tall, she would not have seen Pedro. But if the order of the counterfactuals in a Sobel sequence is reversed—in the example, if is asserted prior to —the second counterfactual asserted no longer rings true. This (...) is the Heim sequence problem. That the order of assertion makes this difference is surprising on the variably strict account. Some argue that this is reason to reject the Lewis-Stalnaker semantics outright. Others argue that the problem motivates a contextualist rendering of counterfactuals. Still others maintain that the explanation for the phenomenon is merely pragmatic. I argue that none of these is right, and I defend a novel way to understand the phenomenon. My proposal avoids the problems faced by the alternative analyses and enjoys independent support. There is, however, a difficulty for my view: it entails that many ordinarily accepted counterfactuals are not true. I argue that this cost is acceptable. (shrink)

This article suggests a change of perspective on philosophy’s engagement with its past. It argues that rather than the putative purport of giving life to the past philosopher’s work, philosophical engagement with the past gives life to one’s own. Drawing on the neo-pragmatist thesis of Robert Brandom, it suggests looking to what philosophers do when they attribute meaning to concepts and considering their engagement with the past as appropriation in consequence. By scrutinizing Robert Pippin’s opposing thesis of philosophical engagement with (...) the past as dialogue, and carefully examining Brandom’s, the article suggests an account for appropriation that shows it to be non-dialogical, and hence unable to yield the fruits associated with this conception, but also insightful and rich with other philosophical values. Brandom and John McDowell’s dispute over the interpretation of Wilfrid Sellars provides an illustration of the proposed perspective and of those values. (shrink)

Just as knowledge contextualism offers a way out of knowledge skepticism in the face of powerful skeptical arguments, counterfactual contextualism purports to answer the many compelling arguments for the skeptical thesis that most ordinary counterfactuals of the form ‘if A had happened, C would have happened’, are false. In this article I review a few of the arguments for counterfactual skepticism, before surveying the various types of contextualist responses. I then discuss some of the recent objections to counterfactual contextualism, with (...) an eye toward weighing contextualism's costs with the costs of accepting skepticism. I conclude by remarking on some of the implications that skepticism and contextualism each has for many disputes in metaphysics. (shrink)

This article intends to shed new light on the impressive series of “war writings,” in which Hermann Cohen developed the idea of a possible messianic collaboration of German imperial ambitions and a modern Jewish Diaspora regenerated by German Spirit (from Russia to America). My paper pays special attention to two lecture tours planed by Cohen in the year 1914, one to Petersburg, Moscow, Riga, Vilna and Warsaw in May 1914, a few weeks before the outbreak of WWI; the (...) other a propaganda trip to America imagined at the beginning of WWI (Autumn 1914) by Cohen and a group of Jews linked to the Centralverein deutscher Staatsbürger jüdischen Glaubens – a plan which failed and turned only into the publication of an article in several American newspapers in German, English and Yiddish in early 1915. The article brings into consideration new archival material concerning the political background of these two initiatives. The article demonstrates how Cohen’s writings and activities during WWI were deploying a new Jewish and Imperial politics – which sought to pave the way for a messianic integration of Jewish Diaspora in the Imperial project of Germany, understood as the political realization of German Idealism. (shrink)

Before a fair, indeterministic coin is tossed, Lucky, who is causally isolated from the coin-tossing mechanism, declines to bet on heads. The coin lands heads. The consensus is that the following counterfactual is true: (M:) If Lucky had bet heads, he would have won the bet. It is also widely believed that to rule (M) true, any plausible semantics for counterfactuals must invoke causal independence. But if that’s so, the hope of giving a reductive analysis of causation in terms of (...) counterfactuals is undermined. Here I argue that there is compelling reason to question the assumption that (M) is true. (shrink)

Plotinus resolved the paradox of the immanent transcendence, characterizing the relation between the One and the universe, through his theory of the two energeiai. According to this doctrine, all existents have an internal activity and an external activity: the internal activity comprises the true essence and substance of each being; the external activity is emitted outwards as its image. The source of the emission is thus present in the lower layer of being by virtue of its manifold images. The prominence (...) given to light in elucidating this solution led to a distinction between two types of lights: an original light, corresponding to the internal energeia of every existent, and a secondary light, which is the outflow and image of the first light, existing outside of the luminous body.This paper demonstrates the striking similarity between these two Plotinian lights and the concepts of lux and lumen developed by two thirteenth-century philosophers: Robert Grosseteste and Albertus Magnus. Moreover, the paper contends that the purpose of these two medieval concepts of light was identical to what Plotinus had in mind when he first made the distinction: to account for the relation between the one and the many.Keywords: Plotinus; Albertus Magnus; Robert Grosseteste; Light; Lux; Lumen. (shrink)

Timothy Williamson has fruitfully exploited formal resources to shed considerable light on the nature of knowledge. In the paper under examination, Williamson turns his attention to Gettier cases, showing how they can be motivated formally. At the same time, he disparages the kind of justification he thinks gives rise to these cases. He favors instead his own notion of justification for which Gettier cases cannot arise. We take issue both with his disparagement of the kind of justification that figures in (...) Gettier cases and the specifics of the formal motivation. (shrink)

Attempting to settle various debates from recent literature regarding its precise nature, I offer a detailed conceptual analysis of toleration. I begin by isolating toleration from other notions; this provides us some guidance by introducing the eight definitional conditions of toleration that I then explicate and defend. Together, these eight conditions indicate that toleration is an agent’s intentional and principled refraining from interfering with an opposed other (or their behavior, etc.) in situations of diversity, where the agent believes she has (...) the power to interfere. This non-normative definition can serve as a preliminary to normative discussions of toleration. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the possibility of developing a Kantian account of the ethics of belief by deploying the tools provided by Kant's ethics. To do so, I reconstruct epistemic concepts and arguments on the model of their ethical counterparts, focusing on the notions of epistemic principle, epistemic maxim and epistemic universalizability test. On this basis, I suggest that there is an analogy between our position as moral agents and as cognizers: our actions and our thoughts are subject to (...) the same rational norm. (shrink)

In this paper I discuss the nature of halakhic facts and I frame the discussion in a broader meta-ethical context. Most of the existing literature on the philosophy of halakha has focused on the contrast between ‘Halakhic Realism’ and ‘Halakhic Nominalism’. This theoretical contrast is vague and includes a wide range of theories. Inspired by the meta-ethical literature, I propose to focus the discussion on views that can be called ‘Halakhic Naturalism’ and ‘Halakhic Non-naturalism’. I present, develop and distinguish between (...) different meanings of 'naturalism' and consider arguments for and against 'Halakhic Naturalism'. The purpose of this paper is twofold: First, to present and demonstrate the fruitful encounter between meta-ethics and the philosophy of halakha. Second, to present, evaluate and promote the substantive discussion of naturalistic and non-naturalistic views. (shrink)

Kant’s notorious remark about the impossibility of there ever being a Newton of a blade of grass has often been interpreted as a misguided pre-emptive strike against Darwin and evolutionary theories in general: 'It would be absurd for humans even to make such an attempt or to hope that there may yet arise a Newton who could make comprehensible even the generation of a blade of grass according to natural laws that no intention has ordered; rather, we must absolutely deny (...) this insight to human beings. (CPJ 5:400) My aim in this chapter is to re-evaluate this claim in the context of Kant’s account of organic generation and argue that, contrary to what is usually thought, it does leave room for the possibility of evolution. After spelling out the constraints Kant identifies for any scientific study of the history of living beings, I examine his theory of generation and draw its implications for biological heredity, species diversity, and the role played by environmental factors in organic development. On this basis, I conclude that first, evolution is a possible albeit far-fetched hypothesis for Kant; second, Darwin’s theory of natural selection would have turned a far-fetched possibility into a plausible candidate; and third, it would not have disposed of the need for teleology. This is why, I argue, Darwin could never have been a Newton of a blade of grass. (shrink)

In the recent literature on the issue, a number of commentators have argued that Kant’s aesthetic theory commits him to the position that nothing is ugly. For instance, in ‘Why Kant finds nothing ugly’, Shier argues that ‘within Kant’s aesthetics, there cannot be any negative judgments of taste’ (Shier (1998): 413). And in ‘Kant’s problems with ugliness’, Thomson claims that ‘Kant’s aesthetic theory precludes […] ugliness’ (Thomson (1992): 107). In other words, as it is presented in some of the literature, (...) Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment seems to preclude him from accounting for the possibility of ugliness. A number of reasons have been put forward to explain why there can be no ugliness for Kant. Some have to do with his account of experience in general. Others have to do with the very nature of the free play between imagination and understanding. Of course, the real source of the problem is that the Critique of Judgment does not actually discuss ugliness, so commentators are left with the task of filling in the gaps. This paper aims to argue that Kant’s account of aesthetic judgment commits him not only to the existence of the ugly, but to the distinction between two kinds of ugliness. To support this claim, I will start from the premise that if there is to be room for ugliness, it should be defined as the contrary of beauty. However, I will suggest that Kant’s account of beauty can be negated in two ways, one that gives rise to impure ugliness and the other to pure ugliness. I will examine them in turn, first by showing that impure ugliness is the contrary of beauty insofar as it contravenes our interests and produces a desire to dispose of it, whereas beauty is necessarily disinterested for Kant. In the second section, I will use Kant’s definition of judgments of pure beauty to carve a space for an account of pure ugliness. For, it should present all the characteristics that make it “pure” whilst replacing the characteristics that make it beautiful with the ones that make it ugly. On this basis, I will define pure ugliness as the disinterested displeasure caused by the experience of what I will call “foul play” between the imagination and the understanding. (shrink)

This paper sets out to show that Kant’s account of cognition can be used to defend epistemic responsibility against the double threat of either being committed to implausible versions of doxastic voluntarism, or failing to account for a sufficiently robust connection between the will and belief. To support this claim, I argue that whilst we have no direct control over our beliefs, we have two forms of indirect doxastic control that are sufficient to ground epistemic responsibility: first, the capacity to (...) judge and doubt; and second, the ability to choose our epistemic maxims. It is because we have direct control over our capacity to judge as well as the epistemic principles that govern belief-acquisition that we have indirect control over the beliefs we thereby acquire. The interpretation of Kant I defend here thus allows us to account for the possibility of epistemic responsibility by providing a robust account of indirect doxastic voluntarism and thereby rendering direct doxastic voluntarism unnecessary. (shrink)

Many researchers experiment with participatory settings to increase public engagement in research and innovation (R&I). Because of their temporary nature, it often remains unclear how such participatory experiments can contribute to structural change. This paper empirically explores options for bridging this gap. It analyzes how participants can be supported to act as institutional entrepreneurs to actively promote public engagement in R&I. To draw lessons, we analyze empirical material gathered on nineteen Social Labs which were set up to promote the uptake (...) of Responsible Research and Innovation in a European R&I funding program (Horizon 2020). Involvement of motivated participants, insight in their institutional context, and specific methods and management choices that enhance a sense of agency are identified as essential for organizing change. These findings and the resulting framework of interventions may prove valuable for further (action) research into the institutionalization of public engagement in R&I. (shrink)

Perszyk has argued that Molinists cannot consistently endorse the consequence argument because of a structurally similar argument for the incompatibility of true Molinist counterfactuals of freedom and the ability to do otherwise. Wierenga has argued that on the proper understanding of CCFs, there is a relevant difference between the consequence argument and the anti-Molinist argument. I argue that, even on Wierenga’s understanding of CCFs, there is in fact no relevant difference between the two arguments. Moreover, I strengthen Perszyk’s challenge by (...) highlighting further relevant similarities between CCFs and facts about the laws. (shrink)

It is well-known that in the fifth of his Cartesian Meditations, Husserl puts forth a theory of intersubjectivity. Most commentators of Husserl have read his Cartesian Meditations as presenting a theory of intersubjectivity whose basis is empathy, in the form of a process of constituting the sense of “other” in one’s own experience, as the primary origin of the intersubjective layer of experience. In this paper, I claim that the structure of intersubjectivity as Husserl presents it in the Cartesian Meditations (...) is articulated as being governed by a logic of parts and wholes rather than that of a phenomenology of empathy, and that the articulation of this logic demonstrates that the transcendental ego is intrinsically intersubjective. My main philosophical claim in this regard is that the way Husserl’s account of transcendental empathy unfolds in the Cartesian Meditations implies a prior fundamental mereological structure of which the individual transcendental ego is only a part. That is, the transcendental ego has an eidetic a-priori intersubjective structure, in the sense of being a moment of an intersubjectively structured transcendental whole. In this sense, rather than being a singulare tantum, it is more fitting to say that transcendental subjectivity is actually a plurale tantum. (shrink)

Suppose you can save only one of two groups of people from harm, with one person in one group, and five persons in the other group. Are you obligated to save the greater number? While common sense seems to say ‘yes’, the numbers skeptic says ‘no’. Numbers Skepticism has been partly motivated by the anti-consequentialist thought that the goods, harms and well-being of individual people do not aggregate in any morally significant way. However, even many non-consequentialists think that Numbers Skepticism (...) goes too far in rejecting the claim that you ought to save the greater number. Besides the prima facie implausibility of Numbers Skepticism, Michael Otsuka has developed an intriguing argument against this position. Otsuka argues that Numbers Skepticism, in conjunction with an independently plausible moral principle, leads to inconsistent choices regarding what ought to be done in certain circumstances. This inconsistency in turn provides us with a good reason to reject Numbers Skepticism. Kirsten Meyer offers a notable challenge to Otsuka’s argument. I argue that Meyer’s challenge can be met, and then offer my own reasons for rejecting Otsuka’s argument. In light of these criticisms, I then develop an improved, yet structurally similar argument to Otsuka’s argument. I argue for the slightly different conclusion that the view proposed by John Taurek that ‘the numbers don’t count’ leads to inconsistent choices, which in turn provides us with a good reason to reject Taurek’s position. (shrink)

Two normative principles of toleration are offered, one individual-regarding, the other group-regarding. The first is John Stuart Mill’s harm principle; the other is “Principle T,” meant to be the harm principle writ large. It is argued that the state should tolerate autonomous sacrifices of autonomy, including instances where an individual rationally chooses to be enslaved, lobotomized, or killed. Consistent with that, it is argued that the state should tolerate internal restrictions within minority groups even where these prevent autonomy promotion of (...) members of the group. Finally, it is argued that toleration excludes external protections of minority groups. (shrink)

The Introduction discusses determinables and similarity spaces and ties together the contributions to Color Ontology and Color Science.

Halakha consists of a variety of laws that determine the halakhic status of various actions. Halakhic laws, by their very nature, have a general aspect in that they apply to all similar actions under similar conditions. In this paper, I examine, from a philosophical-analytical point of view, the relationship between the general aspect of the halakhic laws and the fact that these laws apply to particular actions. After the introduction, this paper is divided into three parts. First, I distinguish between (...) two competing theses regarding the "metaphysical order" between the general aspect of halakhic law and its individual cases. The first one, I call 'Halakhic Generalism', according to which the general aspect of Halakhic law has essential precedence. The second one I refer to as 'Halakhic Particularism', according to which the general aspect of the halakhic law is nothing more than a generalization of all its individual cases. In the second part of the paper, I argue that the particularist position has the power to justify a unique and puzzling halakhic principle. According to this principle, in cases of normative over-determination where the same action is forbidden due to two different halakhic laws, then "a prohibition does not apply to a prohibition". Finally, I compare the reasoning I offer for this principle to alternative justifications of said principle. I argue that, compared to the alternatives, the particularist position provides the best explanation for the principle. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to show that there is a genuine difficulty in Kant’s argument regarding the connection between mechanism and teleology. But this difficulty is not the one that is usually underlined. Far from consisting in a contradiction between the first and the third Critique, I argue that the genuine difficulty is intrinsic to the antinomy of reflective judgement: rather than having any hope of resolving anything, it consists in an inescapable conflict. In order to support this (...) claim, I show firstly why converting the thesis of the antinomy about mechanism into reflective judgement does not require renunciation of the universality of causality demonstrated in the first Critique. Then, I suggest that the actual difficulty with Kant’s argument is that there is a genuine conflict inherent in the reflective form of the antinomy. Finally, I examine in detail the antinomy of reflective judgement and compare it to the other Kantian antinomies in order to show that its uniqueness makes it uniquely troubling. This leads me to conclude that the Kantian resolution of the conflict between mechanism and teleology is unsatisfactory. (shrink)

A commonly deployed signifier to render the political event of a riot intelligible, ‘chaos’ describes an affective condition of disorder and disarray. For some theorists of affect, such a condition of chaotic unpredictability suggests emancipatory potential. Recounting the 2018 May Day / May 1st protests in Paris, that both politicians and media declared to be a riot, this paper argues that to consider the riot as chaotic is to think and feel like a state. Critically interrogating the analytical purchase of (...) ‘chaos’ to describe a riotous assembly of bodies, this paper contends that ‘chaos’ is not only a theoretically impoverished concept to understand such political events, but also that sovereignty mobilizes ‘chaos’ as an affective infrastructure of governance to shore up attachment to the security state. Repudiating the sovereign logic of chaos, this paper presents a first-person encounter with a protest-declared-riot in order to explore the various affects that materialize around such events. Through ethnographic reflection, this paper outlines a series of affects that accompanied the day’s events, such as speculative optimism, fragility, suspicion, fear, boldness, and joy. In so doing, the paper develops an affective approach to theorize relations of political antagonism in the street, arguing that whereas the state weaponizes terror as a form of governance, the rioters weaponize joy as an affective means of resistance. (shrink)

I defend a neo-Kantian view wherein we are capable of being completely autonomous and impartial and argue that this ability can ground normativity. As this view includes an existentialist conception of the self, I defend radical choice, a primary component of that conception, against arguments many take to be definitive. I call the ability to use radical choice “existentialist voluntarism” and bring it into a current debate in normative philosophy, arguing that it allows that we can be distanced from all (...) ends at once so as to be completely impartial. Finally, I indicate how this can be the source of normativity as it provides a purely impartial reason for being rational. (shrink)

Communitarians like Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel, defend what we may call the ‘social constitution thesis.’ This is the view that participation in society makes us what we are. This claim, however, is ambiguous. In an attempt to shed some light on it and to better understand the impact its truth would have on our beliefs regarding autonomy, I offer four possible ways it could be understood and four corresponding senses of individual independence and autonomy. I also indicate (...) what senses liberals can accept that we are socially constituted and in what sense I take communitarians to argue we are socially constituted. (shrink)

This paper aims to shed new light on major features of the early Zionist construction of a Jewish political space. Revisiting two early debates of Martin Buber (1878-1965) with Max Nordau (1849-1923) and Hermann Cohen (1842-1918), the article points at the limitation of the Zionist political construction for a later articulation of the Jewish and Palestinian complexity in a shared or divided land. Herzl’s understanding of Zionism as a strictly political and economic apparatus brought to an historical and ideological (...) debate at the fifth Zionist Congress in 1901 between the young Buber and the faithful associate of Herzl, Nordau. Against Nordau’s prioritization of the productivization of Jews, Buber developed in his famous speech on “Jewish Art” the necessity of a cultural and spiritual elevation of Jews. In 1916, in the middle of WWI, Buber’s cultural notion of Jewish national regeneration in Eretz Israel sets the backdrop for another debate and clash, this time with the German Jewish philosopher Hermann Cohen. (shrink)

According to Kant, the opacity of human motivation takes two distinct forms – a psychological form: man ‘can never, even by the most strenuous self-examination, get entirely behind [his] covert incentives’ – and a social form: ‘everyone in our race finds it advisable to be on his guard, and not to reveal himself completely’. In other words, first, men's ‘interior’ cannot be entirely revealed to themselves and, second, they tend not to reveal their ‘interior’ to others. A number of Kant (...) scholars have acknowledged the importance of the first form of opacity in Kant's thought and have attempted to draw out from it implications for moral deliberation and ethics in general. The aim of this paper is to examine the second, social form of opacity and draw out its anthropological implications, an issue that has been overlooked in the literature. To do so, I focus on Kant's contrast between men and beings that I would like to call ‘sincere aliens’. These sincere aliens are beings who have the opposite features of man's opacity, namely beings who cannot but reveal their ‘interior’ both to others and to themselves. (shrink)

Jean-François Lyotard's intellectual evolution in the late 1970s and 1980s is well known in continental philosophy. In 1979, with the publication of The Postmodern Condition, Lyotard became famous for his report on "the obsolescence of the metanarrative apparatus of legitimation". Later, in his magnum opus Le diférend he expanded on this, claiming that "a universal rule of judgment between heterogeneous genres is lacking in general". Yet, this creative moment in Lyotard's career, responsible for shaping the philosophical concept of the postmodern (...) condition, is rarely connected to his book La guerre des Algériens (1989). This work was supposed to implement his new postmodern concepts in relation to the war in Algeria. The present article looks at La guerre des Algériens, within its broader historical and philosophical context, as a unique opportunity to evaluate the validity of Lyotard's philosophical shift, especially his new concept of radical heterogeneity at work in history. (shrink)

In my dissertation, "The Nature of Halakha: Philosophical Investigations," I explore the metaphysics of Halakha using contemporary analytical philosophy. The central question guiding my research is: How are the natural world and the world of Halakha related, according to the underlying assumptions of Halakha? My work consists of three papers addressing the relationship between natural facts and halakhic facts. In the first paper, I propose a shift from the traditional debate between halakhic realism and nominalism to a discussion of halakhic (...) naturalism and non-naturalism. I evaluate arguments for and against various interpretations of these views, favoring a non-naturalistic perspective. In the second paper, I argue for a strong version of non-naturalism, which I term "Halakhic Occasionalism." This view suggests that God's primary involvement in the world is His responsiveness to halakhic practices. I analyze the Talmudic principle that "the mitzvot were not given to produce benefit" and its implications, using this analysis to support the occasionalist interpretation. The third paper examines the metaphysical nature of halakhic laws, focusing on the relationship between their general aspect and specific applications. I present two competing theses: Halakhic Generalism and Halakhic Particularism. I argue that the particularist position better justifies the halakhic principle that "no prohibition applies to prohibition" in cases of normative overdetermination. Throughout my dissertation, I argue that the halakhic concepts do not carve nature at its joints, indicating that the halakhic framework does not align with the natural divisions of the physical world. I explore this insight across the three papers, contributing to an understanding of the relationship between God, the natural world, and halakhic practice. My work aims to contribute to the field of philosophy of Halakha by applying analytical methods to traditional Jewish legal concepts. I also seek to bridge discussions in metaethics, philosophy of religion, and philosophy of law with halakhic thought, offering perspectives on longstanding questions in Jewish legal philosophy. I draw on sources including Talmudic literature, Jewish commentaries, and contemporary philosophical works. By engaging with traditional Jewish texts and modern analytical philosophy, I create an interdisciplinary approach to understanding the nature of Halakha. (shrink)

The sentence "The boss fired the employee who is always late" invites the defeasible inference that the speaker is attempting to convey that the lateness caused the firing. We argue that such inferences cannot be understood in terms of familiar approaches to extrasemantic enrichment such as implicature, impliciture, explicature, or species of local enrichment already in the literature. Rather, we propose that they arise from more basic cognitive strategies, grounded in processes of coherence establishment, that thinkers use to make sense (...) of the world. Attention to such cases provides a richer and more varied landscape of extrasemantic enrichment than has been appreciated to date. (shrink)

Some claim that liberalism’s neutrality toward the Good encourages anomie, thereby disallowing social confirmation of beliefs, leaving the individual with an uncertainty about judgments that is opposed to confidence and self-respect. This is the “anomie challenge.” I begin by discussing toleration and neutrality and motivating the problem. I then look at responses to the challenge by liberal pluralists and liberalism’s critics. After dismissing both, I argue that the right to choose is the good to be advocated and that it allows (...) for supportive, but voluntary, social structures. I conclude that liberalism better supports self-respect than the alternatives. (shrink)

According to recent literature in philosophy and psychology, there is a set of basic emotions that were preserved over the course of evolution because they serve adaptive functions. However, the empirical evidence fails to support the claim that there are basic emotions because it fails to show that emotions can be identified with specific functions. Moreover, work on basic emotions lacks the conceptual space to take emotional experience into account and so fails to amount to an adequate theory of emotion: (...) in the literature basic emotions are identified with emotional responses, but these responses — even if they did exist as characterized — are not emotions or emotional. That said, recent empirical discoveries about the brain structures responsible for emotional responses, discoveries that are often cited in the basic emotions literature, nevertheless form the foundation for a comprehensive theory of emotion — a theory that is broadly Jamesian in that an emotion is the experience and interpretation of a prior, physiological response. (shrink)

In this paper, I first argue that waste is best understood as (a) any process wherein something useful becomes less useful and that produces less benefit than is lost—where benefit and usefulness are understood with reference to the same metric—or (b) the result of such a process. I next argue for the immorality of waste. My concluding suggestions are that (W1) if one person needs something for her preservation and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it, and refuses (...) to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second may be morally wrong and that (W2) if one person needs something for her preservation understood according to her metric and a second person has it, is avoidably wasting it according to his own metric, and refuses to allow the first to make some greater use of it, the second is morally wrong. (shrink)

Critics of liberalism have argued that liberal individualismmisdescribes persons in ignoring the degree to which they aredependent on their communities. Indeed, they argue that personsare essentially socially constituted. In this paper, however, Iprovide two arguments – the first concerning communitariandescriptive claims about persons, our society, and the communitarian ideal society, and the second regarding thecommunitarian view of individual autonomy – that the communitariantheory of Alasdair MacIntyre, Charles Taylor, and Michael Sandel,relies on individuals either being independent from theircommunities or having a (...) community-independent desire. Thisis indicative of a deep contradiction in communitarian thought. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to extract from Kant's writings an account of the nature of the emotions and their function – and to do so despite the fact that Kant neither uses the term ‘emotion’ nor offers a systematic treatment of it. Kant's position, as I interpret it, challenges the contemporary trends that define emotions in terms of other mental states and defines them instead first and foremost as ‘feelings’. Although Kant's views on the nature of feelings have (...) drawn surprisingly little attention, I argue that the faculty of feeling has the distinct role of making us aware of the way our faculties relate to each other and to the world. As I show, feelings are affective appraisals of our activity, and as such they play an indispensable orientational function in the Kantian mind. After spelling out Kant's distinction between feeling and desire, I turn to the distinction between feeling and cognition and show that while feelings are non-cognitive states, they have a form of derived-intentionality. §4 argues that what feelings are about, in this derived sense, is our relationship to ourselves and the world: they function as affective appraisals of the state of our agency. §5 shows that this function is necessary to the activity of the mind insofar as it is orientational. Finally, §6 discusses the examples of epistemic pleasure and moral contentment and argues that they manifest the conditions of cognitive and moral agency respectively. (shrink)

The article presents an inter-regional and inter-religious discussion of the crisis of liberalism that challenges some of the common assumptions in the study of intellectual history. The paper begins by painting with a broad brush the migration of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European liberal transformations to the rapidly changing Ottoman Empire in the nineteenth century. In the second part, the essay focuses on Paris’s interwar intellectual scene, where this expansion of liberalism is reflected critically from the perspective of the European crisis (...) of the 1930s. Moving from the East to the West, the chapter reconstructs step by step a growing convergence that established itself between the theopolitical question of the late Ottoman Empire and important intellectual trends in the interwar period in Paris. For this purpose, it uses as a guiding thread a Jewish intellectual episode: Leo Strauss’s rediscovery of a Jewish–Islamic philosophical model successfully developed during the Middle Ages. The reconstruction of this episode and its intellectual background in the 1930s illuminates an overlooked interconnection with similar questioning in the late and post-Ottoman Levant. (shrink)

Using Alasdair MacIntyre as a foil, I defend what I take to be a viable Nietzschean genealogical account, showing that a proper perspectivism is neither perniciously subjectivist nor absolutist. I begin by arguing against MacIntyre’s assertion that genealogists are committed to the view that rationality requires neutrality and that as there is no neutrality, there is no rationality. I then continue by offering something of a reconstruction of Nietzsche’s view, designed partly to clarify the error pinpointed in MacIntyre’s arguments, but (...) primarily to amplify the Nietzschean solution. This reconstruction involves claiming that Nietzsche is committed to three different senses of “truth:” the “Truth” (with a capital “T”) of correspondence theories, “truth” which is really pragmatic knowledge that helps us survive, and, finally, “truth” that is nothing more that “metaphors and metonyms” which are falsely taken to be useful to survival. (shrink)

Deepfakes are algorithmically modified video and audio recordings that project one person’s appearance on to that of another, creating an apparent recording of an event that never took place. Many scholars and journalists have begun attending to the political risks of deepfake deception. Here we investigate other ways in which deepfakes have the potential to cause deeper harms than have been appreciated. First, we consider a form of objectification that occurs in deepfaked ‘frankenporn’ that digitally fuses the parts of different (...) women to create pliable characters incapable of giving consent to their depiction. Next, we develop the idea of ‘illocutionary wronging’, in which an individual is forced to engage in speech acts they would prefer to avoid in order to deny or correct the misleading evidence of a publicized deepfake. Finally, we consider the risk that deepfakes may facilitate campaigns of ‘panoptic gaslighting’, where many systematically altered recordings of a single person's life undermine their memory, eroding their sense of self and ability to engage with others. Taken together, these harms illustrate the roles that social epistemology and technological vulnerabilities play in human ethical life. (shrink)

Do facts about what an agent would freely do in certain circumstances at least partly determine any of her moral obligations? Actualists answer ‘yes’, while possibilists answer ‘no’. We defend two novel hybrid accounts that are alternatives to actualism and possibilism: Dual Obligations Hybridism and Single Obligation Hybridism. By positing two moral ‘oughts’, each account retains the benefits of actualism and possibilism, yet is immune from the prima facie problems that face actualism and possibilism. We conclude by highlighting one substantive (...) difference between our two hybrid accounts. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to determine whether Kant’s account of freedom fits with his theory of the human sciences. Several Kant scholars have recently acknowledged a tension between Kant’s metaphysics and his works on anthropology in particular. I believe that in order to clarify the issue at stake, the tension between Kant’s metaphysics and his anthropology should be broken down into three distinct problems. -/- First, Kant’s Anthropology studies the human being ‘as a freely acting being.’5 This approach (...) thus presupposes that such an inquiry can acknowledge freedom and appeal to it in its accounts of human behaviour. Yet the Critique of Pure Reason clearly asserts that ‘as regard [man’s] empirical character there is no freedom; and yet it is only in the light of this character that man can be studied.’ This, in contrast, seems to indicate that the human sciences should be carried out independently of freedom. -/- Second, the Anthropology seems to suggest that empirical factors encompassed by culture, civilisation and mores can have an impact on the human being’s moral status by generating some form of moral progress. Yet if freedom and moral agency are restricted to the domain of the intelligible, they cannot be influenced by anything empirical. -/- Third, the Anthropology provides numerous moral and prudential recommendations as to how one should behave in particular circumstances. Thus it seems to presuppose that anthropological knowledge, as well as the practical guidance based on this knowledge, can have an impact on the free choices we make. Yet how can the human sciences be legitimately, and efficaciously, prescriptive vis-à-vis our free choices? -/- Regarding the first problem, which I tackle in section I, I will hold that the human sciences can legitimately refer to ‘practical freedom’ understood as the power to determine one’s aims and to act independently of sensuous impulses, through intentions and the representation of purposes. I will address the second and third problems in two steps. Section II will tackle them negatively through a distinction between the conditions of moral agency and the conditions of moral improvement. It will allow me to argue that the possibility of any direct influence of the empirical on the intelligible is metaphysically invalid in principle, and hence, that empirical factors cannot effect any direct change in one’s moral character. In the third section, I will turn to the positive side of my account by focusing on the issue of the moral relevance of culture and civilisation as well as that of the human sciences (which study their influence), and suggest that they are morally relevant insofar as they make us more morally efficacious. (shrink)