What, if anything, can realism say about the normative conditions of political legitimacy? Must a realist political theory accept that the ability to successfully employ coercive power is equivalent to the right to rule, or can it incorporate normative criteria for legitimacy but without collapsing into a form of moralism? While several critics argue that realism fails to adequately differentiate itself from moralism or that it cannot coherently appeal to normative values so as to distinguish might from right, this article (...) seeks to help develop a realist account of legitimacy by demonstrating how it can successfully and stably occupy this position between moralism and Realpolitik. Through this discussion, however, the article also argues that political rule necessitates the use of coercive power which is imperfectly legitimated, and that this blurs the distinction between politics and successful domination which lies at the heart of many recent accounts of political realism. In at least this sense, realism retains important and under-acknowledged affinities to Realpolitik. (shrink)

A prevailing understanding of realism, chiefly among its critics, casts realists as those who seek a ‘distinctively political normativity’, where this is interpreted as meaning nonmoral in kind. Moralists, on this account, are those who reject this and believe that political normativity remains moral. Critics have then focused much of their attention on demonstrating that the search for a nonmoral political normativity is doomed to fail which, if right, would then seem to fatally undermine the realist endeavour. This paper makes (...) the case that casting the difference between realism and moralism in these terms is a mistake, one which overlooks the substantial body of realist work which is clear that it has no such aspirations to develop a nonmoral political normativity. The hope is that in drawing attention to this mistake a line can be drawn under these unhelpful debates, and we can move on to more fruitful constructive and critical discussions between realists and their critics. (shrink)

This paper provides a critical overview of the realist current in contemporary political philosophy. We define political realism on the basis of its attempt to give varying degrees of autonomy to politics as a sphere of human activity, in large part through its exploration of the sources of normativity appropriate for the political and so distinguish sharply between political realism and non-ideal theory. We then identify and discuss four key arguments advanced by political realists: from ideology, from the relationship of (...) ethics to politics, from the priority of legitimacy over justice and from the nature of political judgement. Next, we ask to what extent realism is a methodological approach as opposed to a substantive political position and so discuss the relationship between realism and a few such positions. We close by pointing out the links between contemporary realism and the realist strand that runs through much of the history of Western political thought. (shrink)

:This essay seeks to defend the claim that political philosophy ought to be appropriately guided by the phenomenon of politics that it seeks to both offer a theory of and, especially in its normative guise, offer a theory for. It does this primarily through the question of political values. It begins by arguing that for any value to qualify as a value for the political domain, it must be intelligible in relation to the constitutive features of politics as a human (...) activity. It then examines the extent to which the preconditions for the realization of values in practice ought to figure in our considerations as to whether they are values that fit or belong to our social world. We can understand these parts of the essay as responding to two related questions, respectively: Is this a political value at all? — which is to ask, is it a value that is appropriate for the political realm?; and then Is this a political value for us? The final section responds to the often-made complaint that political philosophy ought not to make any concessions to the actual world of politics as it really is, arguing that attending to the realities of politics, and in particular the constitutive conditions of political activity, gives meaning to the enterprise as the theorization of politics. Furthermore those same conditions provide the limits of intelligibility beyond which ideals and values can no longer be, in any meaningful sense, ideals and values for the political sphere. (shrink)

This article explores the prospects for developing a realist political theory via an analysis of the work of Bernard Williams. It begins by setting out Williams’s theory of political realism and placing it in the wider context of a realist challenge in the literature that rightly identifies several deficiencies in the liberal view of politics and legitimacy. The central argument of the article is, however, that Williams’s political realism shares common features with liberal theory, including familiar normative concerns and a (...) consensus view of the political and political legitimacy, which results in it replicating rather than overcoming the weaknesses that other realists have recognized in liberalism, thereby making it vulnerable to the same criticisms. Though these are taken to be significant problems for Williams’s theory, the purpose of making this argument is not to undermine the prospects for a realist political theory but to indicate obstacles and difficulties that any compelling account will need to address. (shrink)

This article explores and critiques the relationship between justice and legitimacy in contemporary liberal thought. The first half sets out the extent to which liberalism demands the same necessary and sufficient conditions of justice and legitimacy, and in doing so obscures their evaluative distinctiveness. It then offers an interpretation of the deeper theoretical assumptions that result in this unsatisfactory conflation, arguing that the primacy that liberal theory has given to justice, understood as a moral concept, has resulted in a failure (...) to appreciate the deeply multifaceted political nature of legitimacy. The suggestion is then made that it is only through recognizing this nature, including the different circumstances in which the demand for legitimation arises and the needs to which it responds, that this theoretical impasse can be overcome. The article ends on the more radical thought that this may require liberal theory to displace justice as the first virtue of political systems and replace it with the virtue of legitimacy. (shrink)

The central contention of this article is that contemporary liberal theory is without an account of what legitimates coercing those who reject liberalism that is consistent with its own stipulations of the conditions of political legitimacy. After exploring the nature of the liberal principle of legitimacy, and in particular how it is intended to function as a way of protecting individuals from domination and oppression by reconciling freedom and public law, the article considers four different possible accounts of what might (...) legitimate coercing non-liberals. While some of them have independent plausibility, the article argues that none of them meets the requirements of liberal legitimacy. The final section of the article considers the implications of this theoretical gap for liberal theory more widely. The argument is made that liberalism must accept that even liberal politics will necessitate the oppressive use of coercive power, i.e. compelling people to live according to wills other than their own, and that insofar as this is a position central to the recent burgeoning literature on political realism, liberalism ought therefore to be more realist. (shrink)

A common trait of all realistic political theories is the rejection of a conception of political theory as applied moral philosophy and an attempt to preserve some form of distinctively political thinking. Yet the reasons for favouring such an account of political theory can vary, a point that has often been overlooked in recent discussions by realism’s friends and critics alike. While a picture of realism as first-and-foremost an attempt to develop a more practical political theory which does not reduce (...) morality to politics is often cited, in this paper we present an alternative understanding in which the motivation to embrace realism is grounded in a set of critiques of or attitudes towards moral philosophy which then feed into a series of political positions. Political realism, on this account, is driven by a set of philosophical concerns about the nature of ethics and the place of ethical thinking in our lives. This impulse is precisely what motivated Bernard Williams and Raymond Geuss to their versions of distinctively realist political thought and is important to emphasise because it demonstrates that realism does not set politics against ethics (a misunderstanding typically endorsed by realism’s critics) but is rather an attempt to philosophise about politics without relying on understandings of morality which we have little reason to endorse. (shrink)

European Journal of Philosophy, Volume 30, Issue 2, Page 693-708, June 2022.

This paper explores the relationship between truth and loyalty as it pertains to epistemic issues within contemporary Western politics. One now familiar concern is how an increasing number of people determine their beliefs according to what demonstrating loyalty to their group requires instead of the facts of an independent and objective reality, as a proper concern for truthfulness demands. Whereas “they” base their beliefs on what is required to demonstrate loyalty to their group, “our” beliefs are justified by facts and (...) evidence. Such contrasts pit loyalty and truth as necessarily antagonistic. This paper gives us further reason for thinking that putting loyalty against truthfulness at some very general or conceptual level is deeply misguided. More significantly, it seeks to show that the more helpful contrast to make is between those who are loyal to identities that value truthfulness in such a way that there are no other parts of that identity which are not revisable if they come into conflict with truth, and those who are loyal to identities that subordinate truth to other ends or goals. Acknowledging this allows us to better appreciate various aspects of how the relationship between truth and loyalty is playing out in contemporary politics. Chief among these is how our own commitment to truthfulness is itself embedded in a particular identity, an identity that we not only often fail to acknowledge as such but which necessitates us thinking harder about the ways in which it might itself sustain the dynamics of conflict and contestation, antagonizing those who do not share it and driving them farther away from the truthfulness we extol. (shrink)

This article seeks to make two significant contributions to the debate surrounding the asymmetry objection to political liberalism. The first is to distinguish between and explicate moderate and radical versions of the asymmetry objection as two discrete forms that this criticism can take. The second contribution is to defend the radical version of the asymmetry objection as a serious challenge to political liberalism. It does this by arguing that the commitment to reciprocity that underpins the principle of legitimacy can be (...) the subject of reasonable disagreement, which therefore undermines the asymmetry central to political liberalism between the legitimacy of being able to coerce compliance with principles of right but not principles of the good on the grounds that the latter can be the subject of reasonable disagreement whereas the former cannot. (shrink)

Central to the apocalyptic imaginary is the notion that history has some sort of purpose, or that it provides a perspective from which we can authenticate or redeem our human activities. As such, one might reasonably expect that realists would view such apocalypticism as precisely the sort of moralisation that they urge us to be deeply suspicious of. Yet in Political Realism in Apocalyptic Times Alison McQueen argues not only that the relationship between realism and apocalyptic visions is much more (...) complex and nuanced than we might initially suspect, by exploring how it played out in the work of canonical figures in the realist tradition, Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes and Hans J Morgenthau, but also that, at a time when we live in the shadow of several possible global disasters, realist thought might offer us something in the way of instruction ‘in living through an age of catastrophe’. While McQueen is admirably honest as to the limitations of the realist approaches in the thinkers she focuses on, this review suggests that there may be good reason to be even less enthusiastic about their prospects. (shrink)

This article explores the problems and possibilities of offering a compelling Peircian epistemic justification of liberal institutions, primarily via critical engagement with the work of Cheryl Misak, and uses this to make some wider points about the criteria for a successful justification of liberalism in conditions of pluralism. Though the article argues that Misak’s argument fails to take seriously enough the problem that pluralism poses for the justification of liberal politics in modern democratic societies, and that in this sense a (...) version of political liberalism is superior, it nevertheless ends by tentatively suggesting an alternative account of a Peircian epistemological justification that has some potentially promising and attractive features. (shrink)

abstract One way in which we may be tempted to understand the distinction we make in practice between liberals and fundamentalists is via the issue of truth. Liberals are generally more sceptical about truth while fundamentalists tend to be more objectivist, believing not only that objective truth exists but also that they know it. I call this interpretation the ‘truth interpretation’. In this paper I attempt to undermine the ‘truth interpretation’ by showing that it does not map on adequately to (...) the sorts of distinctions that we actually make in practice. We will see that thinking that the distinction between liberals and fundamentalists revolves around the philosophical issue of truth, such that the ‘good guys’ are sceptics and the ‘bad guys’ objectivists, fails to connect with our practical distinctions. The second half of the paper then addresses the question of what role, if any, truth does play in distinguishing between liberals and fundamentalists, arguing that if truth does play a role we should see it as a very narrow and political, rather, than philosophical one. (shrink)

abstract One way in which we may be tempted to understand the distinction we make in practice between liberals and fundamentalists is via the issue of truth. Liberals are generally more sceptical about truth while fundamentalists tend to be more objectivist, believing not only that objective truth exists but also that they know it. I call this interpretation the ‘truth interpretation’. In this paper I attempt to undermine the ‘truth interpretation’ by showing that it does not map on adequately to (...) the sorts of distinctions that we actually make in practice. We will see that thinking that the distinction between liberals and fundamentalists revolves around the philosophical issue of truth, such that the ‘good guys’ are sceptics and the ‘bad guys’ objectivists, fails to connect with our practical distinctions. The second half of the paper then addresses the question of what role, if any, truth does play in distinguishing between liberals and fundamentalists, arguing that if truth does play a role we should see it as a very narrow and political, rather, than philosophical one. (shrink)

When we enquire into political legitimacy, we are, broadly speaking, exploring the question of whether a particular ruler or regime rules rightfully. We are interested in whether the rule is characterised by right or is merely a form of rule via coercion, a distinction that is usually put in terms of de jure and de facto order. While this question is basic to political experience, there nevertheless might be different ways in which it can be formulated which in turn will (...) influence what is going to count as an adequate answer. In this chapter I want to express some concerns as to the way in which much contemporary modus vivendi theories have either raised the question of political legitimacy or the sort of answer that it takes to be sufficient. That is to say, it has either tended to get the question wrong or the answer, or both. In the end, I want to suggest that modus vivendi can only represent a coherent and distinct political theory if it takes its Hobbesian heritage seriously and accept that the provision of order is both a necessary and a sufficient condition of legitimacy. Whether that is an attractive way of thinking about politics is a different question. (shrink)

Since its resurgence in the 1990s, character education has been subject to a bevy of common criticisms, including that it is didactic and crudely behaviorist; premised on a faulty trait psychology; victim‐blaming; culturally imperialist, racist, religious, or ideologically conservative; and many other horrible things besides. Matt Ferkany and Benjamin Creed examine an intellectualist Aristotelian form of character education that has gained popularity recently and find that it is largely not susceptible to such criticisms. In this form, character education is (...) education for practically intelligent virtue, or the intrinsically motivated and psychically harmonious exercise of robust and stable traits involving practical intelligence conducive to individual and collective human flourishing. (shrink)

Subjective theories of wellbeing place authority concerning what benefits a person with that person herself, or limit wellbeing to psychological states. But how well off we are seems to depend on two different concerns, how well we are doing and how well things are going for us. I argue that two powerful subjective theories fail to adequately account for this and that principled arguments favoring subjectivism are unsound and poorly motivated. In the absence of more compelling evidence that how things (...) go for us cannot directly constitute our wellbeing, I conclude that wellbeing is objective. (shrink)

It is a familiar story that, where Kant humbly draws a line beyond which cognition can’t reach, Husserl presses forward to show how we can cognize beyond that limit. Kant supposes that cognition is bound to sensibility and that what we experience in sensibility is mere appearance that does not inform us about the intrinsic nature of things in themselves. By contrast, for Husserl, it makes no sense to say we experience anything other than things in themselves when we enjoy (...) sensory perception. Kant’s conception, then, by doing just that, is nonsensical. I argue that Husserl’s account does not deliver on its promise. Things as they are in themselves are just as cognitively out of reach on Husserl’s understanding of them as they are on Kant’s. Further, the charge of nonsense Husserl raises against Kant’s conception of things in themselves applies—indeed, with greater force—to his own. (shrink)

In this paper we attempt to advance the enactive discourse on perception by highlighting the role of bodily affects as prenoetic constraints on perceptual experience. Enactivists argue for an essential connection between perception and action, where action primarily means skillful bodily intervention in one’s surroundings. Analyses of sensory-motor contingencies (as in Noë 2004) are important contributions to the enactive account. Yet this is an incomplete story since sensory-motor contingencies are of no avail to the perceiving agent without motivational pull in (...) one direction or another or a sense of the pertinent affective contingencies. Before directly addressing the issue of affect in perception, we explain our peculiar, low-level conception of affect as a form of world-involving intentionality that modulates (minimally) bodily behavior without necessarily possessing informational value of any kind. We then address the deficiency concerning affect in enactive accounts of perception by examining some exemplary forms of bodily affect that constrain perception. We show that bodily affect significantly contributes to (either limiting or enabling) our contact with the world in our perceptually operative attentive outlook, in a kind of perceptual interest or investment, and in social perception. (shrink)

The unconscious, cornerstone of psychoanalysis, was a key twentieth-century concept and retains an enormous influence on psychological and cultural theory. Yet there is a surprising lack of investigation into its roots in the critical philosophy and Romantic psychology of the early nineteenth century, long before Freud. Why did the unconscious emerge as such a powerful idea? And why at that point? This interdisciplinary study breaks new ground in tracing the emergence of the unconscious through the work of philosopher Friedrich Schelling, (...) examining his association with Romantic psychologists, anthropologists and theorists of nature. It sets out the beginnings of a neglected tradition of the unconscious psyche and proposes a compelling new argument: that the unconscious develops from the modern need to theorise individual independence. The book assesses the impact of this tradition on psychoanalysis itself, re-reading Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams in the light of broader post-Enlightenment attempts to theorise individuality. (shrink)

Evolutionary Debunking Arguments purport to show that our moral beliefs do not amount to knowledge because these beliefs are “debunked” by the fact that our moral beliefs are, in some way, the product of evolutionary forces. But there is a substantial gap in this argument between its main evolutionary premise and the skeptical conclusion. What is it, exactly, about the evolutionary origins of moral beliefs that would create problems for realist views in metaethics? I argue that evolutionary debunking arguments are (...) best understood as offering up defeaters for our moral beliefs. Moreover, the defeater in question is a paradigmatic instance of undercutting defeat. If anything is an undercutting defeater, then learning about the evolutionary origins of our moral beliefs is a defeater for those beliefs. (shrink)

The Reliability Challenge to moral non-naturalism has received substantial attention recently in the literature on moral epistemology. While the popularity of this particular challenge is a recent development, the challenge has a long history, as the form of this challenge can be traced back to a skeptical challenge in the philosophy of mathematics raised by Paul Benacerraf. The current Reliability Challenge is widely regarded as the most sophisticated way to develop this skeptical line of thinking, making the Reliability Challenge the (...) strongest epistemic challenge to normative nonnaturalism. In this paper, I argue that the innovations that have occurred since Benacerraf’s statement of the challenge are misconceived and confused in a number of ways. The Reliability Challenge is not the most potent epistemic challenge to moral non-naturalism. The most potent challenge comes from the fact that there is a causal condition on knowledge – or, more precisely, a becaual condition – that non-natural moral facts cannot satisfy. (shrink)

Several commentators have recently attributed conflicting accounts of the relation between veridical perceptual experience and hallucination to Husserl. Some say he is a proponent of the conjunctive view that the two kinds of experience are fundamentally the same. Others deny this and purport to find in Husserl distinct and non-overlapping accounts of their fundamental natures, thus committing him to a disjunctive view. My goal is to set the record straight. Having briefly laid out the problem under discussion and the terms (...) of the debate, I then review the proposals that have been advanced, disposing of some and marking others for further consideration. A.D. Smith’s disjunctive reading is among the latter. I discuss it at length, arguing that Smith fails to show that Husserl’s views on perceptual experience entail a form of disjunctivism. Following that critical discussion, I present a case for a conjunctive reading of Husserl’s account of perceptual experience. (shrink)

1. Generic statements are some of the most intriguing statements we make. They are so central to our commonsense reasoning that every attested human language can express them (Dahl 1995; Cohen 2013...

It is often said that the world is explained by laws of nature together with initial conditions. But does that mean initial conditions don’t require further explanation? And does the explanatory role played by initial conditions entail or require that time has a preferred direction? This chapter looks at the use of the ‘initialness defence’ in physics, the idea that initial conditions are intrinsically special in that they don’t require further explanation, unlike the state of the world at other times. (...) Such defences commonly assume a primitive directionality of time to distinguish between initial and final conditions. Using the case study of the time-asymmetry of thermodynamics and the so-called ‘past hypothesis’ — the hypothesis that the early universe was in a state of very low entropy —, I outline and support a deflationary account of the initialness defence that does not pre- suppose a basic directionality of time, and argue that there is a relevant explanatory asymmetry between initial conditions and the state of systems at other times only if certain causal conditions are satisfied. Hence, the initialness defence is available to those who reject a fundamental direction of time. (shrink)

Error theorists hold that, although our first-order moral thought and discourse commits us to the existence of moral truths, there are no such truths. Holding this position in metaethics puts the error theorist in an uncomfortable position regarding first-order morality. When it comes to our pre-theoretic moral commitments, what should the error theorist think? What should she say? What should she do? I call this the ‘Now What’ Problem for error theory. This paper suggests a framework for evaluating different approaches (...) to the ‘Now What’ Problem, and goes on to evaluate the three most common responses to this problem. All three are found to have noteworthy problems. Finally, I present my own solution, and argue that it presents the most appealing solution to the ‘Now What’ Problem. (shrink)

Both utilitarian and deontological moral theories locate the source of our moral beliefs in the wrong sorts of considerations. One way this failure manifests itself, we argue, is in the ways these theories analyze the proper human relationship toward the non-human environment. Another, more notorious, manifestation of this failure is found in Derek Parfit's Repugnant Conclusion. Our goal is to explore the connection between these two failures, and to suggest that they are failures of act-centered moral theories in general. As (...) such, they cannot be fixed by simply developing a better version of such a theory. Virtue-based theories, we suggest, provide a more promising alternative. (shrink)

This “fun, brain-twisting book... will make you think” as it explores more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, philosophy, physics, and the social sciences (Sean Carroll, New York Times–bestselling author of Something Deeply Hidden) Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician’s purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox doesn’t require tangibles, like rabbits or hats. Paradox works in the abstract, with words and concepts and symbols, to create (...) the illusion of contradiction. There are no contradictions in reality, but there can appear to be. In Sleight of Mind, Matt Cook and a few collaborators dive deeply into more than 75 paradoxes in mathematics, physics, philosophy, and the social sciences. As each paradox is discussed and resolved, Cook helps readers discover the meaning of knowledge and the proper formation of concepts—and how reason can dispel the illusion of contradiction. The journey begins with “a most ingenious paradox” from Gilbert and Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Readers will then travel from Ancient Greece to cutting-edge laboratories, encounter infinity and its different sizes, and discover mathematical impossibilities inherent in elections. They will tackle conundrums in probability, induction, geometry, and game theory; perform “supertasks”; build apparent perpetual motion machines; meet twins living in different millennia; explore the strange quantum world—and much more. (shrink)

The goal of this paper is to defend Simple Modest Invariantism (SMI) about knowledge from the threat presented by pragmatic encroachment. Pragmatic encroachment is the view that practical circumstances are relevant in some way to the truth of knowledge ascriptions—and if this is true, it would entail the falsity of SMI. Drawing on Ross and Schroeder’s recent Reasoning Disposition account of belief, I argue that the Reasoning Disposition account, together with Grice’s Maxims, gives us an attractive pragmatic account of the (...) connection between knowledge ascriptions and practical circumstances. This gives us the ability to explain away the data that is supposed to support pragmatic encroachment. Finally, I address three important objections to the view offered by giving a pragmatic account of when it is conversationally appropriate to cancel a conversational implicature, and discussing when sentences with true content can end up sounding false as well as cases where sentences with false content can end up sounding true. (shrink)

In this paper I explore buck passing analyses of deontic properties in terms of reasons. The preferred analysis is that the permissibility/impermissibility/optionality/requiredness/etc. of some agent's acting is to be couched in terms of reasons to respond in some way to that agent's action, or the prospect thereof. Along the way I try to accommodate supererogation, wrong kinds of reasons objections, and commonly accepted inferences in deontic logic.

Generic sentences are commonsense statements of the form ‘Fs are G,’ like ‘Bears have fur’ or ‘Rattlesnakes are poisonous.’ Kind theories hold that rather than being general statements about indivi...

Does having a mental disorder, in general, affect whether someone is morally responsible for an action? Many people seem to think so, holding that mental disorders nearly always mitigate responsibility. Against this Naïve view, we argue for a Nuanced account. The problem is not just that different theories of responsibility yield different verdicts about particular cases. Even when all reasonable theories agree about what's relevant to responsibility, the ways mental illness can affect behavior are so varied that a more nuanced (...) approach is needed. (shrink)

In a recent paper, Appley and Stoutenburg present two new objections to Explanationist Evidentialism : the Regress Objection and the Threshold Objection. In this paper, I develop a version of EE that is independently plausible and empirically grounded, and show that it can meet Appley and Stoutenburg’s objections.

The Skillfulness of Virtue provides a new framework for understanding virtue as a skill, based on psychological research on self-regulation and expertise. Matt Stichter lays the foundations of his argument by bringing together theories of self-regulation and skill acquisition, which he then uses as grounds to discuss virtue development as a process of skill acquisition. This account of virtue as skill has important implications for debates about virtue in both virtue ethics and virtue epistemology. Furthermore, it engages seriously with (...) criticisms of virtue theory that arise in moral psychology, as psychological experiments reveal that there are many obstacles to acting and thinking well, even for those with the best of intentions. Stichter draws on self-regulation strategies and examples of deliberate practice in skill acquisition to show how we can overcome some of these obstacles, and become more skillful in our moral and epistemic virtues. (shrink)

The first of the new Theory and History series, Matt Perry's punchy andaccessible volume examines Marxism's enormous impact on the way historians approach their subject. Perry offers both a concise introduction to the Marxist view of history and Marxism historical writing, and a guide to its relevance to students' own work.

We evaluate people all the time for a wide variety of activities. We blame them for miscalculations, uninspired art, and committing crimes. We praise them for detailed brushwork, a superb pass, and their acts of kindness. We accomplish things, from solving crosswords to mastering guitar solos. We bungle our endeavors, whether this is letting a friend down or burning dinner. Sometimes these deeds are morally significant, but many times they are not. Simply Responsible defends the radical proposal that the blameworthy (...) artist is responsible in just the same way that the blameworthy thief is. We can be responsible for all kinds of different activities, from lip-synching to long division, from murders to meringues, but the relation involved, what author Matt King calls the basic responsibility relation, is the same in every case. We are responsible for the things we do first, then blameworthy or praiseworthy for having done them in light of whether they're good or bad, according to a variety of standards. Why is this a radical proposal? Firstly, because so much of the contemporary literature on moral responsibility has moralized its nature. According to most accounts, moral responsibility is either a special species of responsibility or else depends on moralized capacities. In contrast, King argues that we get a more complete and unifying picture of responsible agency from a more general theory of responsibility. Secondly, the proposal is radical due to its drastic simplicity. King foregoes many of the complications that feature in other accounts of responsibility, arguing that we can make do with less demanding theoretical elements. (shrink)

The prominence of Bayesian modeling of cognition has increased recently largely because of mathematical advances in specifying and deriving predictions from complex probabilistic models. Much of this research aims to demonstrate that cognitive behavior can be explained from rational principles alone, without recourse to psychological or neurological processes and representations. We note commonalities between this rational approach and other movements in psychology – namely, Behaviorism and evolutionary psychology – that set aside mechanistic explanations or make use of optimality assumptions. Through (...) these comparisons, we identify a number of challenges that limit the rational program's potential contribution to psychological theory. Specifically, rational Bayesian models are significantly unconstrained, both because they are uninformed by a wide range of process-level data and because their assumptions about the environment are generally not grounded in empirical measurement. The psychological implications of most Bayesian models are also unclear. Bayesian inference itself is conceptually trivial, but strong assumptions are often embedded in the hypothesis sets and the approximation algorithms used to derive model predictions, without a clear delineation between psychological commitments and implementational details. Comparing multiple Bayesian models of the same task is rare, as is the realization that many Bayesian models recapitulate existing (mechanistic level) theories. Despite the expressive power of current Bayesian models, we argue they must be developed in conjunction with mechanistic considerations to offer substantive explanations of cognition. We lay out several means for such an integration, which take into account the representations on which Bayesian inference operates, as well as the algorithms and heuristics that carry it out. We argue this unification will better facilitate lasting contributions to psychological theory, avoiding the pitfalls that have plagued previous theoretical movements. (shrink)

In this lively and accessible book, Matt Matravers considers the highly contested role of responsibility in politics, morality, and the law. He asks, what are we doing when we hold people responsible in deciding questions of distributive justice or of punishment? and considers the role of philosophy in answering this very contemporary question.

The aim of this volume is to critically assess the philosophical importance of phenomenology as a method for studying the normativity of meaning and its transcendental conditions. Using the pioneering work of Steven Crowell as a springboard, phenomenologists from all over the world examine the promise of phenomenology for illuminating long-standing problems in epistemology, the philosophy of mind, action theory, the philosophy of religion, and moral psychology. The essays are unique in that they engage with the phenomenological tradition not as (...) a collection of authorities to whom we must defer, or a set of historical artifacts we must preserve, but rather as a community of interlocutors with views that bear on important issues in contemporary philosophy. -/- The book is divided into three thematic sections, each examining different clusters of issues aimed at moving the phenomenological project forward. The first section explores the connection between normativity and meaning, and asks us to rethink the relation between the factual realm and the categories of validity in terms of which things can show up as what they are. The second section examines the nature of the self that is capable of experiencing meaning. It includes essays on intentionality, agency, consciousness, naturalism, and moral normativity. The third section addresses questions of philosophical methodology, examining if and why phenomenology should have priority in the analysis of meaning. Finally, the book concludes with an afterword written by Steven Crowell. -/- Normativity, Meaning, and the Promise of Phenomenology will be a key resource for students and scholars interested in the phenomenological tradition, the transcendental tradition from Kant to Davidson, and existentialism. Additionally, its forward-looking focus yields crucial insights into pressing philosophical problems that will appeal to scholars working across all areas of the discipline. (shrink)

En apparence l'enjeu est clair, il s'agit de dépasser la métaphysique ou de la déconstruire pour retrouver la question primordiale du sens de l'être. Comment faut-il entendre la nécessité de ce " dépassement de la métaphysique "? Heidegger a répondu à ces questions en mentionnant, de manière explicite, le " tournant " (Kehre) propre de sa pensée, lequel permet moins d'effectuer le " dépassement " (Überwindung) que l' "appropriation " (Verwindung) de la métaphysique. Après cet épisode du " tournant " (...) que l'on peut faire remonter à 1930, Heidegger se dé-tournera de la métaphysique pour se consacrer à la pure pensée de l'être, dans laquelle la poésie, celle de Hölderlin en particulier, jouera désormais un rôle déterminant. Le poète précède toujours le penseur au cœur de cette forêt profonde qu'est l'Être. Pour Heidegger comme pour Dante, l'homme est un poème qui s'achève sous le regard scintillant d'une étoile. (shrink)