This volume is devoted entirely to exploring the role of animals in the thought of Immanuel Kant. Leading scholars address questions regarding the possibility of objective representation and intentionality in animals, the role of animals in Kant's scientific picture of nature, the status of our moral responsibilities to animals' welfare, and more.

Towards the conclusion of the First Section of the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Kant describes a process whereby a subject can undergo a kind of moral corruption. This process, which he calls a “natural dialectic”, can cause one to undermine one’s own or¬dinary grasp of the demands of morality. Kant also claims that this natural dialectic is the basis of the need for moral philosophy itself, since first-order moral reasoning is insufficient to protect against it. I show that (...) this passage is closely related to another in the First Section, one where Kant warns against the threat of “misology”, or the hatred of reason. I argue that both these passages must be read as engaging with specific claims from Rousseau’s writings. Uncovering the historical context and rhetorical function of Kant’s account of moral self-deception can re-orient the reader to his ambitions for the Groundwork itself. (shrink)

The role of analogy appears in surprisingly different areas of the first Critique. On the one hand, Kant considered the concept to have a specific enough meaning to entitle the principle concerned with causation an analogy; on the other hand we can find Kant referring to analogy in various parts of the Transcendental Dialectic in a seemingly different manner. Whereas in the Transcendental Analytic, Kant takes some time to provide a detailed (if not clear) account of the meaning of the (...) term ‘analogy’ and his reasons for his employment of it, in the Transcendental Dialectic on the other hand, Kant’s employment of the term seems far less technical. It would seem on the face of it, that Kant has two senses of ‘analogy’: one technical sense reserved for those constitutive principles of the understanding as laid out in the Analytic, and another casual and commonplace use of the term. This picture, although it contains elements of truth, is ultimately misleading. I argue for three claims in this paper. Firstly, I suggest that there can be found in the first Critique a unified conception of analogy. Secondly, I argue that Kant self-consciously differentiated his employment of analogy from the employment that can be found in many early modern philosophers, e.g. Locke. Thirdly, I will tentatively suggest that this interpretation of analogy can aid us in addressing certain contentious areas of transcendental idealism, most notably the account of causation. (shrink)

I argue that Kant’s transcendental idealism and Strawson’s descriptive metaphysics are both examples of what I call methodological conservativism. Methodological conservativism involves the claim that a subset of common first-order beliefs is immune to revision. I argue that there are striking differences between their respective commitments to this position, however. For Kant, his conservativism is based upon a commitment to the reliability of particular results of the sciences of his day. For Strawson, in contrast, his conservativism is based upon his (...) attempted liberation of arguments for the necessity of a certain conceptual scheme from any particular scientific commitments. In fact, for Strawson, no change in scientific commitments could displace the conceptual scheme employed to navigate the manifest world of ordinary perceptual experience. Each approach brings with it challenges with regard to how to accommodate potential scientific theory change. (shrink)

It is often maintained that one insight of Kant's Critical philosophy is its recognition of the need to distinguish accounts of knowledge acquisition from knowledge justification. In particular, it is claimed that Kant held that the detailing of a concept's acquisition conditions is insufficient to determine its legitimacy. I argue that this is not the case at least with regard to geometrical concepts. Considered in the light of his pre-Critical writings on the mathematical method, construction in the Critique can be (...) seen to be a form of concept acquisition, one that is related to the modal phenomenology of geometrical judgement. (shrink)

Strawson's philosophical attitude towards scepticism is frequently thought to have undergone a significant shift from the “strong” or “robust” employment of transcendental arguments in Individuals to a more “modest” understanding of the efficacy of such arguments in Skepticism and Naturalism: Some Varieties. I argue that this interpretation is based upon a misunderstanding of the function of transcendental arguments in Strawson's earlier works. Examining the continuity of Strawson's modest naturalistic approach to scepticism can offer some insight as to the continuing overestimation (...) of the anti-sceptical efficacy of transcendental arguments. (shrink)

It is quite common when explicating the nature of Kant's break with the preceding Early Modern tradition to cite his attitude towards the acquisition and deployment of concepts. It is claimed that Kant sought to distinguish two tasks that had become unfortunately intertwined and conflated — explaining how we come to acquire our concepts on the one hand and showing how we are justified in deploying them in judgement on the other. This conflation can be expressed in terms of a (...) conflation of the natural and the normative, of descriptive and prescriptive questions. The topic of the conditions ofconcept-possession, i.e. how we have come to possess the concepts that we do, is an entirely psychological inquiry, involving ‘natural’ descriptive inquiries. The topic ofconcept-deployment, the story about how we use our concepts in veridical judgements about the world, is an entirely philosophical question, since it involves the question of how weoughtto deploy those concepts in judgement. The fundamental distinction between the natural and the normative is drawn by Kant, it is claimed, in order to distinguish these two practices of acquisition and deployment.The manner in which this claim is expressed is through Kant's distinction between the question of fact (quaestio facti) and the question of right (quaestio juris). I want to claim that a proper understanding of this distinction doesn't support this notion of Kant's ‘normative turn’. In fact, the distinction is best understood within an interpretation whereby Kant is understood as continuing to endorse the Early Modern conviction that the provision of a concept's possession-conditionsissufficient to determine that concept's deployment-conditions, and that the task of the Transcendental Deduction is to determine thepossession-conditions for the Categories. (shrink)

It is well known that Kant uses the notion of the holy will in theGroundworkso as to contrast it with the finite wills of human beings. It is less clear, however, what function this contrast is supposed to perform. I argue that one role of the holy will is to illustrate transcendental idealism’s account of the relation between moral knowledge and moral practice. The position is one intended to negotiate between ostensibly competing traditions. Kant uses the holy will as a (...) way of endorsing the metaphysical picture of the scholastic tradition’s so-called ‘ethics of freedom’, whereby the ideal of moral perfection is conceived as the perfection of one’s power of freedom to the point where one is constitutively incapable of immoral action. This position is married however with the claim that the holy will’s inaccessibility to human cognition motivates a subject-oriented moral epistemology more usually associated with Enlightenment humanism. I conclude by claiming that the nuanced role for the holy will can be understood as part of Kant’s expansion of the value of religious faith [Glaube] to the domain of practical inquiry in general. (shrink)

It is well known that at the heart of Kant’s Critical philosophy is the claim that the mind possesses an essentially spontaneous power or capacity. It is also sometimes maintained that Kant’s appeals to this spontaneous power are intimately tied to his recognition of there being a fundamental and irreducible normative dimension to judgement. However, I attempt to complicate this picture by way of appeal to some less appreciated influences upon the development of Kant’s epistemology. A different conception of the (...) role of spontaneity in judgement has clear precedents, I claim, in the works of Cudworth and Rousseau. There the imagined role for the active power of the mind is not to identify criteria that might serve as norms for epistemically responsible judgement. Rather the spontaneous power of the mind is cited as the source of representational contents that secure the truth conditions of our everyday claims to empirical knowledge. (shrink)

Kant's particular philosophical position of transcendental idealism has been a less popular target for recovery than other broadly “Kantian” or “Critical” aspects of his thinking. This chapter outlines Kant's so‐called “Copernican Turn,” which is key to the methodological shift that makes transcendental idealism possible. It discusses the key terminologies of the Kantian project in the First Critique. The chapter then details how these concepts are put to positive use in validating certain traditional metaphysical concepts. It then explores the negative task (...) of Kant's project, which shows that certain other traditional metaphysical concepts are in his view incapable of either vindication or refutation. Finally, it examines how these negative restrictions of Kant's project are themselves geared towards a return to a positive register. Kant introduces or re‐introduces various pairs of notions to explain such achievements: a priori/a posteriori, concept/intuition, cognition/thought, receptive/spontaneous, synthetic/analytic, appearances/things in themselves. (shrink)

A short review of Gascoigne's Scepticism.

A short review of Contemporary Kantian Metaphysics.

Longer review of Waxman's recent book, Kant's Anatomy of the Intelligent Mind.

In Western political philosophy, democracy is generally the dominant view regarding what the best form of government is, and this holds even in respect to promoting minority rights. However, I argue that there is a better theory for satisfying minority interests and rights. I amass numerous studies from the social sciences demonstrating how democracy does poorly in accounting for minority interests. I then contend that a particular hybrid view that fuses a meritocracy with democracy can do a better job than (...) democracy in accounting for minority interests and in having more equal rights and fair policies coming from the legislative and executive branches. Finally, I defend this thesis from numerous counters. (shrink)

A brief reference article on cultural relativism, forthcoming in the Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology, 2nd edition.

Philosophy and the advances in cosmology, neurology, molecular biology, and the social sciences have made the convincing and converging arguments for God's existence more probable than ever in history. On God's Existence is a concise summary of these arguments as well as new arguments inspired by the advances of the sciences.--Publisher description.

These questions-in essence 'What are flourishing lives and how can we lead them?'-are long central to philosophy. Now, however, can be addressed in light of new insights in positive psychology, psychiatry, evolutionary biology, cognitive science, and behavioral economics as well new research in philosophy itself, including feminist theory, critical race studies, philosophical psychology, neuro-ethics, and more. The thirteen contributors chart new directions for understanding and securing human flourishing. Reflecting the fact that lives and cultures differ, the perspectives are pluralistic. Part (...) One considers the meaning of human flourishing through analyses of: the nature of purposeful, mattering lives; biological, psychological, and social levels of homeostasis; the nature of human agency and the role of narrative in it; the nature of the self and self-fulfillment; the centrality of subjective values and non-subjective conditions that make possible these values; and the need to encompass the wide diversity of human lives. Part Two considers conditions on which flourishing depends. These include: habits flexible enough to confront ever-changing realities; conditions of social justice rather than supposed self-help; epistemic responsibility and sensitivity to social relations; civility and values literacy; educational reconstruction, particularly in the humanities; a cultural focus on eudaimonic values rather than mere technical efficiency and marketplace consumerism; and the role of creative arts in transforming our abilities, promoting genuine self-government, and providing consolation in the face of loss. (shrink)

Over the past two centuries Western culture has largely valorized a particular kind of 'good' music--highly serious, wondrously deep, stylistically authentic, heroically created, and strikingly original--and, at the same time, has marginalized music that does not live up to those ideals. In Good Music, John J. Sheinbaum explores these traditional models for valuing music. By engaging examples such as Handel oratorios, Beethoven and Mahler symphonies, jazz improvisations, Bruce Springsteen, and prog rock, he argues that metaphors of perfection do justice (...) to neither the perceived strengths nor the assumed weaknesses of the music in question. Instead, he proposes an alternative model of appreciation where abstract notions of virtue need not dictate our understanding. Good music can, with pride, be playful rather than serious, diverse rather than unified, engaging to both body and mind, in dialogue with manifold styles and genres, and collaborative to the core. We can widen the scope of what music we value and reconsider the conventional rituals surrounding it, while retaining the joys of making music, listening closely, and caring passionately"-- $c Page [4] of cover. (shrink)

Introduction -- Building blocks -- The old way of thinking -- The new way -- Grammar and philosophy -- The grammar of mathematics -- The grammar of experience -- The grammar of psychology -- Part II -- What does it all mean?

No Professor's Lectures Can Save Us: William James's Pragmatism, Radical Empiricism, and Pluralism draws critically on the full range of the writings of William James--his psychology, theory of belief and truth, radical empiricism, pluralism, and his accounts of religion, ethics, politics, and society-to develop a powerful case for an original pragmatic world view and temperament resonant with James's philosophy. In a manner that avoids the "vicious intellectualism" that James criticized, the book engages more than a century of scholarship on James, (...) and places him in conversation with both his contemporaries and more recent writers. Throughout the book's seven interwoven chapters, the author moves both with James and at times against James to address and illuminate central issues about the nature of the self, freedom, morality, community, truth, reality, and possibility. The chapters take up, in turn, James's views on: faith and freedom; habit, attention, and flourishing; inclusive and ethical lives; democratic politics; the temperament of pragmatism; a radically empirical ontology of relations; and, a pluralistic and unfinished universe. The focus throughout is practical: the book aims to show the differences in concrete lives that it makes to take up a broadly Jamesian pragmatic, radically empirical, and pluralistic personal perspective across the fallible and "ever not quite" endeavours of our finite lives. "From this unsparing practical ordeal," James noted, "no professor's lectures and no array of books can save us." In this spirit, this book does not pretend to provide, by itself, salvation. Instead, it effectively develops insights in the writings of William James that continue to constitute invaluable resources for new problems, new possibilities, and new forms of personal and social life. (shrink)

While there has been much work on cosmological arguments, novel objections will be presented against the modern day rendition of the Kalām cosmological argument as standardly articulated by William Lane Craig. The conclusion is reached that this cosmological argument and several of its variants do not lead us to believe that there is inevitably a supernatural cause to the universe. Moreover, a conditional argument for atheism will be presented in light of the Big Bang Theory.

The other major question in the history of political philosophy besides the issue of distributive justice is what the best form of government is. In Western philosophy, the received view is democracy. However, this paper challenges this thesis by presenting arguments against democracy relying in significant part on empirical data from political science and political psychology. Moreover, it presents a general case for a hybrid view over democracy for the legislative and executive branches that appends a meritocracy or rule by (...) the merited from Eastern philosophy to democracy. (shrink)

It has often been suggested that people’s ordinary folk understanding of morality involves a rejection of moral relativism and a belief in objective moral truths. The results of six studies call this claim into question. Participants did offer apparently objectivist intuitions when confronted with questions about individuals from their own culture, but they offered increasingly relativist intuitions as they were confronted with questions about individuals from increasingly different cultures or ways of life. In light of these data, the authors hypothesize (...) that people do not have a fixed commitment to moral objectivism but instead tend to adopt different views depending on the degree to which they consider radically different perspectives on moral questions. [NOTE: This is a reprint of Sarkissian et al 2011]. (shrink)

The rift which has long divided the philosophical world into opposed schools-the "Continental" school owing its origins to the phenomenology of Husserl and the "analytic" school derived from Frege-is finally closing.

_A major theoretical statement by a distinguished political scholar explains why a policy of liberal hegemony is doomed to fail_ In this major statement, the renowned international-relations scholar John Mearsheimer argues that liberal hegemony, the foreign policy pursued by the United States since the Cold War ended, is doomed to fail. It makes far more sense, he maintains, for Washington to adopt a more restrained foreign policy based on a sound understanding of how nationalism and realism constrain great powers (...) abroad. It is widely believed in the West that the United States should spread liberal democracy across the world, foster an open international economy, and build institutions. This policy of remaking the world in America’s image is supposed to protect human rights, promote peace, and make the world safe for democracy. But this is not what has happened. Instead, the United States has ended up as a highly militarized state fighting wars that undermine peace, harm human rights, and threaten liberal values at home. Mearsheimer tells us why this has happened. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, EarlyView.

The key to understanding self-identity is identifying the transcendental structures that make a temporally extended, continuous, and unified experiential life possible. Self-identity is rooted in the formal, temporalizing structure of intentional experience that underlies psychological continuity. Personal identity, by contrast, is rooted in the content of the particular flow of experience, in particular and primarily, in the convictions adopted passively or actively in reflection by a self-identical subject in the light of her social and traditional inheritances. Secondarily, a person’s identity (...) is rooted in others’ characterizations of that person in the light of the social conventions and constructs of the cultures and traditions that have shaped the personal identity of the ones who make the attributions. Personal identity, on this view, is fundamentally rooted in beliefs, traits—especially character traits—sentiments, and moods, that is, in the subject’s convictions about the true, the good, and the right—and in the commitments to the pursuit of (apparently) worthwhile goods and to the practical identities rooted in those convictions. (shrink)

This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, an extensive bibliography, and hundreds of cross-referenced dictionary entries on key terms and ...

This article surveys arguments for the claim that employees have a right to strong forms of decision-making participation. Itconsiders objections to employee participation based on shareholders' property rights and it claims that those objections are flawed. In particular, it argues the employee participation rights are grounded on the same values as are property rights. The articlesuggests that the conflict between these two competing rights claims is best resolved by limiting the scope of corporate property rightsand by recognizing a strong employee (...) right to co-determine corporate decisions. (shrink)

In this paper I refute the chief arguments for cultural relativism, meaning the moral (not the descriptive) theory that goes by that name. In doing this I walk some oft-trodden paths, but I also break new ones. For instance, I take unusual pains to produce an adequate formulation of cultural relativism, and I distinguish that thesis from the relativism of present-day anthropologists, with which it is often conflated. In addition, I address not one or two, but eleven arguments for cultural (...) relativism, many of which contribute to its popularity but receive scant attention from its critics. To elicit the failings of these arguments I deploy a host of pertinent but often neglected distinctions. (shrink)

In the last two decades, interest in narrative conceptions of identity has grown exponentially, though there is little agreement about what a "life-narrative" might be. In connecting Kierkegaard with virtue ethics, several scholars have recently argued that narrative models of selves and MacIntyre's concept of the unity of a life help make sense of Kierkegaard's existential stages and, in particular, explain the transition from "aesthetic" to "ethical" modes of life. But others have recently raised difficult questions both for these readings (...) of Kierkegaard and for narrative accounts of identity that draw on the work of MacIntyre in general. While some of these objections concern a strong kind of unity or "wholeheartedness" among an agent's long-term goals or cares, the fundamental objection raised by critics is that personal identity cannot _be_ a narrative, since stories are artifacts made by persons. In this book, Davenport defends the narrative approach to practical identity and autonomy in general, and to Kierkegaard's stages in particular. (shrink)

[If you find this article interesting, let me mention another of my articles, “On Deducing Ethical Egoism from Psychological Egoism” (Theoria, 2023), which in many ways is a more thorough treatment of the topic. But it’s not an expanded version of this one. For instance, each article addresses arguments not addressed in the other.] Philosophers generally reject the view that psychological egoism (suitably supplemented with further premises) entails ethical egoism. Their rejections are generally unsatisfying. Some are too brief to win (...) confidence; others employ an uncharitable statement of psychological egoism. This is unfortunate, for the view that psychological egoism entails ethical egoism is philosophically significant (and not without proponents). Although it ultimately deserves rejection, it warrants better treatment than it typically receives. I thus examine it in some detail. Among other things, I carefully consider some original, sophisticated attempts to establish it, having first taken care to produce proper formulations of ethical and psychological egoism. (shrink)