This chapter contains sections titled: Abstract Introduction Three Objections From Relativism Bare Bones Moral Realism References.

This paper responds to Antje du-Bois Pedain’s discussion of the wrongfulness constraint on the criminal law. Du-Bois Pedain argues that the constraint is best interpreted as stating that φing is legitimately criminalised only if φing is wrongful for other-regarding reasons. We take issue with du-Bois Pedain’s arguments. In our view, it is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of legitimate criminalisation that φing is wrongful in du-Bois Pedain’s sense. Rather, it is a necessary condition of legitimate criminalisation that φing is (...) what we call bare wrongful —that is, that the reasons in favour of φing are defeated by the reasons against. Though du-Bois Pedain is critical of this view, we argue that her criticisms do not convince. (shrink)

Courts and jurors sometimes refuse to assign liability to defendants on the basis of statistics alone, despite their apparent reliability. I argue that this refusal is best understood as a recognition of defendants’ right to security. Understood as a robust good in Philip Pettit’s sense, security requires that someone risking harm to others’ protected interests adopt a disposition of concern that controls against wrongfully harming them. Since trials risk harm, the state must adopt such a disposition. Statistics leave open the (...) possibility of innocence and so wrongful harm in a way that the state cannot ignore; if it does use such statistics, it makes defendants wrongfully insecure. This explanation of the problem of bare statistical evidence is especially apt because security grounds the right to a fair trial and judicial procedural rights more generally. (shrink)

According to criminal law a person should not be punished for a bare intention to commit a crime. While theorists have provided consequentialist and epistemic justifications of this tenet, no convincing retributive justification thereof has yet been advanced. The present paper attempts to fill this lacuna through arguing that there is an important moral difference between a future-directed and a present-directed intention to act wrongfully. Such difference is due to the restraining influence exercised in the decisional process by the (...) ‘now-belief’, i.e. the belief that the time has come to act, which is exclusively involved in the latter type of intention. (shrink)

In this powerful new study Edward Baring sheds fresh light on Jacques Derrida, one of the most influential yet controversial intellectuals of the twentieth century. Reading Derrida from a historical perspective and drawing on new archival sources, The Young Derrida and French Philosophy shows how Derrida's thought arose in the closely contested space of post-war French intellectual life, developing in response to Sartrian existentialism, religious philosophy and the structuralism that found its base at the École Normale Supe;rieure. In a history (...) of the philosophical movements and academic institutions of post-war France, Baring paints a portrait of a community caught between humanism and anti-humanism, providing a radically new interpretation of the genesis of deconstruction and of one of the most vibrant intellectual moments of modern times. (shrink)

In the Realm of Criminal Law, Antony Duff seeks to defend the view that we should criminalize conduct only if it is wrongful. Skeptics of legal moralism argue that this occurs all the time in supposedly overinclusive offenses whose definitions capture not only the kind of conduct that constitutes the target wrong, but also a wider class of conduct that is not wrongful prior to prohibition. An example is statutory rape. Duff, in response, contends that such offenses need not violate (...) the requirements of legal moralism. Having exploitative sex with juveniles is obviously wrong even prior to its legal regulation. But having non-exploitative sex with juveniles is also potentially wrong, inasmuch as it involves a violation of a prohibition that society has decided is justified for instrumental reasons. While Duff’s analysis offers an ingenious explanation for why offenses like statutory rape need not violate the bare minimum requirements of legal moralism, it simultaneously exposes separate, largely unacknowledged, problems of fair labeling and proportionality. By combining in a single offense wrongs that are primarily malum in se with ones that are primarily malum prohibitum—a process referred to as “wrongfulness conflation”—we risk treating unlike wrongs alike, imposing disproportionate punishments, and blurring offense labels. And such problems occur not just in the context of statutory rape, but also with respect to a host of other supposedly overinclusive offenses, including various forms of sexual assault. (shrink)

Alasia Nuti’s important recent book, Injustice and the Reproduction of History: Structural Inequalities, Gender and Redress, makes many persuasive interventions. Nuti shows how structural injustice theory is enriched by being explicitly historical; in theorizing historical-structural injustice, she lays bare the mechanisms of how the injustices of history reproduce themselves. For Nuti, historical-structural patterns are not only shaped by habitual behaviors that are or appear to be morally permissible, but also by individual wrongdoing and wrongdoing by powerful group agents like (...) states. In this article, I extend Nuti’s rich analysis, focusing on two questions that arise from her theory of historical-structural injustice: Beyond being blameworthy for wrongful acts themselves, are culpable wrongdoers blameworthy for contributing to structural injustice? Does historical moral ignorance mitigate moral responsibility for past injustice? Regarding, I distinguish between the local and societal structural effects of wrongdoing. Though I think this distinction is well-founded, it ultimately leads to tensions with structural injustice theory’s idea of ordinary individuals being blameless for reproducing unjust structures. Regarding, I argue that even though it is natural for the question of historical moral ignorance to arise in considering past wrongdoing, at least in the case of powerful group agents, we should not overlook forms of cruelty which present-day moral concepts are not needed to condemn. (shrink)

This article reconsiders Sartre's seminal 1945 talk, “Existentialism is a Humanism,” and the stakes of the humanism debate in France by looking at the immediate political context that has been overlooked in previous discussions of the text. It analyses the political discussion of the term “humanism” during the French national elections of 1945 and the rumbling debate over Sartre's philosophy that culminated in his presentation to the Club Maintenant, just one week after France went to the polls. A consideration of (...) this context helps explain both the rise, and later the decline, of existentialism in France, when, in the changing political climate, humanism lost its centrality, setting the stage for new antihumanist criticisms of Sartre's work. (shrink)

In the middle decades of the twentieth century phenomenology grew from a local philosophy in a few German towns into a movement that spanned Europe. In Converts to the Real, Edward Baring uncovers an unexpected force behind this prodigious growth: Catholicism. Participating in a tightly-knit transnational community, Catholics helped shuttle ideas between national traditions that were otherwise inward-looking and parochial. In the first half of the twentieth century, they wrote many of the first articles and books introducing phenomenological ideas to (...) new contexts. They even organized the rescue of Edmund Husserl's manuscripts out of Nazi Germany in 1938. But the Catholic fascination with phenomenology was intermixed with a profound anxiety. Catholics worried that phenomenological ideas might prove dangerous to the faith, a possibility exemplified by the intellectual trajectory of Martin Heidegger, whose movement away from the Church was facilitated by his reading of Husserl. Converts to the Real uncovers a surprising genealogy for post-war European thought, with important implications for our understanding of the process of secularization and for the set of schools and ideas we now call "continental philosophy."--. (shrink)

This article describes aspects of our biological nature that have contributed to the dangerous current state of societal, ecological and climatological affairs. Next, it deals with stratagems to take these aspects into account, so as to allow us better choices. I will concentrate on the concepts of evolved group mechanisms and “neoteny” and explain why they direct our responses throughout our lives. The connection between our biological make‐up and our vulnerability to the current rise of certain kinds of irrational, undemocratic, (...) populism is also laid bare. I will end by listing some simple, but possibly controversial, proposals that might have value in combating these societal tendencies and help decision making in a reality‐based, more scientific, manner. (shrink)

SummaryThis article examines the international debate over the most appropriate name for what became known as ‘existentialism’. It starts by detailing the diverse strands of the Kierkegaard reception in Germany in the early inter-war period, which were given a variety of labels—Existentialismus, Existenzphilosophie, Existentialphilosophie and existentielle Philosophie—and shows how, as these words were translated into other languages, the differences between them were effaced. This process helps explain how over the 1930s a remarkably heterogeneous group of thinkers came to be included (...) under the same label. The article then shows how the word ‘existentialism’ and its cognates in other languages gained prominence because they were considered to represent best the diversity and richness of the movement. In detailing this process the article helps elucidate how existentialism emerged as an international philosophy in the period immediately following World War II, and sheds light on the ambivalence with which many have viewed both the term and the philosophy it represents. (shrink)

The present study focuses on a grammatical category called evidentiality. The primary meaning of evidentiality is concerned with information source. That is, it expresses whether something has been seen, heard or inferred. The aim here is to conduct a conceptual study of evidentiality in which use is made of formal tools. The fundamental intuition is that the distinction between ‘evidence’as ‘proof’and ‘evidentiality’as ‘to do with proof’is a crucial one. Evidentiality is a dynamic notion to be analysed through the use of (...) knowledge by the agents, a knowledge in action, which involves an in-coming state and an out-coming state that is typical of the transmission of information. We propose our own approach in which the dynamics of knowledge in action is grasped in the context of a dynamic epistemic logic. (shrink)

Mirativity is a grammatical category or a linguistic strategy that makes explicit the surprising aspect of a piece of information. Different mirativity strategies appear in different languages. Evidentiality is a grammatical category that explicitly expresses the source of information, i.e. if something has been seen, heard or inferred. Whether mirativity forms part of evidentiality is an open question. An agent makes use of a mirativity marker when she or he expresses something about a surprising fact with respect to her or (...) his background knowledge. But there are different kinds of mirativity markers. Some of them are simple and direct and others, more complex, involve inferential processes. Here, we focus on complex mirativity and we compare it with inferred evidentials and deferred realizations. Our proposal goes beyond the purely linguistic analysis, since we try to interpret mirativity, and its role in interaction, as forming part of or involving a particular kind of inference, namely abduction. Mirativity can be used to express the surprising state that triggers an abductive reasoning but it can also encapsulate its result in such a way that it can be understood in relation to evidentiality. Thus, at least in some cases of complex mirativity, mirativity may convey indication about the source of information. Interesting for studies on dialogue is that they also indicate the degree of commitment of the speakers with the content of their own utterances. (shrink)

The normative mechanics of promising seem complex. The strength and content of promissory obligations, and the residual duties they entail upon being violated, have various prima facie surprising features. We give an account to explain these features. Promises have a point. The point of a promise to φ is a promise-independent reason to φ for the promisee’s sake. A promise turns this reason into a duty. This explains the mechanics of promises. And it grounds a nuanced picture of immoral promises, (...) an argument against promissory bare wrongings, and a constraint on theories of why we have promissory obligations at all. (shrink)

This paper deals with the ontological genesis of the series point-line-plane-solid in Plato’s philosophy. The texts of the Dialogues concerning this subject are presented, and passages of the Unwritten Doctrines that we know from Aristotle and other sources are specially considered. Certain problems within this context, such as the postulation of indivisible Iines, or the relation between each of the dimensions and the figures that can be placed in them, are considered in detail.

The negative particles lā/ ’al in Ugaritic change from positive to negative in modal contexts, conditional, questions, disjunctions, etc. They have usually been studied from a Semitic and linguistic points of view. On the basis of their occurrence in Ugaritic texts, we pretend to explain their uncommon behaviour from a philosophical and logico-semantic perspective. Is it possible to translate this linguistic structure in our Modern languages? Starting from a general view of their use in Ugaritic language, we claim that this (...) phenomenon can be more clearly understood in relation to modality. We interpret these negation as a negative evidential paradigm and we explain how they change in different contexts. Methodologically, we make use of formal tools of Dynamic Epistemic Logic in order to provide a more fine-grained understanding of these negations, and their dynamics. (shrink)

This essay reads Derrida's early work within the context of the history of philosophy as an academic field in France. Derrida was charged with instruction in the history of philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure, and much of his own training focused on this aspect of philosophical study. The influence of French history of philosophy can be seen in Derrida's work before Of Grammatology, especially in his unpublished lectures for a 1964 course entitled “History and Truth,” in which he analyzed (...) the semantic richness of the word “history.” According to Derrida, “history” comprised both the ideas of change and of transmission, which allowed the writing of history at a later time. In the Western tradition, Derrida suggested, philosophers had consistently tried to reduce the idea of history as transmission, casting it simply as empirical development in order to preserve the idea that truth could be timeless. Derrida's account of the evolving opposition between history and truth within the history of philosophy led him to suggest a “history of truth” that transcended and structured the opposition. I argue that Derrida's strategies in these early lectures are critical for understanding his later and more famous deconstruction of speech and writing. Moreover, the impact of this early confrontation with the problem of history and truth helps explain the ambivalent response by historians to Derrida's analyses. (shrink)

Resumen: Nos proponemos recorrer un delimitado tramo del corpus nietzscheano a fin de poner en diálogo el ideario de El nacimiento de la tragedia con el de Humano demasiado humano. Se trata de ofrecer las líneas de lectura que justifiquen la siguiente interpretación: aun cuando Nietzsche, a fines de los setenta del siglo XIX, desista de la posibilidad de acceder a la realidad en sí desde la inmediatez dionisíaca, mantiene la pretensión de avanzar en un conocimiento profundo de sí mismo (...) y la realidad, que contraste con los errores heredados de épocas metafísicas y artísticas pasadas, y conserva el interés por una modalidad de conocimiento autoexperimental que sirva de procedimiento iniciático para nuevas prácticas filosóficas.: We propose to do a lecture tour of a limited stretch of Nietzsche’s corpus to put into dialogue the ideas of The Birth of Tragedy with those of Human, All Too Human. The work’s aim is to provide the scan lines that justify the following interpretation: Although Nietzsche, in the late seventies of the nineteenth century, abandons the possibility of accessing to reality itself from the Dionysian immediacy, he maintains the aspiration of advancing in a deep knowledge of himself and reality, that contrasts with the inherited errors of artistic and metaphysical times in the past. Additionally, he retains the interest in a form of self-experimental knowledge to serve as an initiation process for new philosophical practices. (shrink)

In the first part of this article I will explore the reasons for the loss of the Divine Feminine and the powerful mythologies and beliefs which have structured our present view of reality. These have split Nature from Spirit and mind from soul and led to the idea of our dominance of Nature rather than to a caring relationship with it. In the second part I will explore the transformation of this outdated view as our consciousness moves to a new (...) level of understanding and embraces a New Story. The greatest challenge of our time is to heal the split between Spirit and Nature and reconnect our rational mind with our neglected soul. (shrink)

The thematization of writing has often been seen as Derrida's personal contribution to modern philosophy, but it is significant that in his earliest extended discussions of it, he presented it as a sign of the times. This chapter focuses on Derrida's discussion of writing in the first part of Of Grammatology and provides an analysis of its stakes by bringing it into conversation with Althusser's new theory of reading. Althusser was the most powerful figure in the philosophy department. Derrida's first (...) publication, the “Introduction” was a contribution to the history and philosophy of science, a fact recognized by the Société des Amis de Jean Cavaillès, which awarded it their book prize in 1964. Writing, especially mathematical writing, for instance in algebra, seemed to represent best the formal systems of mathematics. (shrink)

Derrida’s writings on the question of religion have played a crucial role in the transformation of scholarly debate across the globe. The Trace of God provides a compact introduction to this debate. It considers Derrida’s fraught relationship to Judaism and his Jewish identity, broaches the question of Derrida's relation to the Western Christian tradition, and examines both the points of contact and the silences in Derrida's treatment of Islam.