Two decades ago, problems of alienation and fetishism were the focus of most English speaking studies of Marx’s philosophy. More recent work on Marx and Marxist themes has tended to avoid these questions in favor of discussions of explanation, exploitation, distributive justice and problems of class formation and co-ordination. The latter set of problems seem more readily addressable, if not always more tractable, using contemporary tools drawn from the philosophy of science, as well as methods of decision theory, game theory, and welfare economics. But the change in emphasis has not been without costs; gains in clarity and rigor have come at the price of abandoning Marx's most fundamental criticism of capitalism as a way of life. I shall argue that it is no coincidence that the shift to ‘rational choice’ Marxism has had precisely that cost.

Contending views of social justice often confront each other over claims about basic rights. In this paper I will begin with a familiar dispute of this kind, the crux of which proves to be the distribution of economic benefits and burdens. I will argue that it is is indeed illuminating to consider basic rights, and important in particular to examine an especially fundamental set of rights, namely, those that attach to the moral relationships that define the moral community. The blocking of these rights is a moral concern in itself and also often underlies more obvious social and economic inequalities. By considering this set of rights, we can uncover an unsuspected kind of justice which makes moral demands independently of a concern for distributive justice.

There is a longstanding and influential tradition of claiming that the duties of justice are solely “negative” duties. On this view the concerns of justice are concerns about “negative rights” of an especially basic kind, usually subsumed under the heading of “individual freedom.” Justice consists in our “not interfering with” these basic negative rights.

It is generally agreed that some anaphoric pronouns with (what appear to be) quantifier antecedents occur outside the syntactic scope (i.e., the c-command domain) of their antecedents. First, there is “donkey anaphora,” of both the conditional and relative clause varieties:

1. (1) If Sarah owns a donkey, she beats it.

2. (2) Every woman who owns a donkey beats it.

Without going through the details, let me just assert that there is good reason to think that the pronouns in (1) and (2) do not occur in the syntactic scope of the quantifier’ a donkey’ . A second sort of case in which a pronoun with a quantified antecedent occurs outside the syntactic scope of its quantifier antecedent is one in which the pronoun and its antecedent occur in different sentences.

A second sort of case in which a pronoun with a quantified antecedent occurs outside the syntactic scope of its quantifier antecedent is one in which the pronoun and its antecedent occur in different sentences. Examples of such “discourse anaphora,” from the very simple to the slightly complex, include:

1. (3) A man is following Sarah. He is from the Internal Revenue Service.

2. (4) A man is following Sarah. Melanie believes he is from the Internal Revenue Service.

3. (5) It is possible that several students flunked at most five exams. Melanie believes they didn’t study for them.

4. (6) Suzi ought to apologize to most of Ann’s dinner guests. It is certain that she insulted them. But it is unclear whether they noticed.

Here is Frege in Foundations of Arithmetic, §64:

The numerous difficulties facing the traditional Humean regularity approach to the problem of causation have been discussed in the literature at great length. In view of the current interest in possible worlds semantics, it is not surprising that the only serious alternative treatment of causation presently available, the counterfactual approach, has been explored recently as a means of circumventing the apparently unresolvable difficulties facing regularity causal theories. It is the purpose of this paper to suggest that such a strategy holds little promise. Specifically, I will argue that, in addition to giving rise to problems directly analogous to those facing regularity accounts, the counterfactual approach fails in principle to reflect important properties of causal relations as we understand them intuitively. David Lewis's possible worlds account, the most comprehensive counterfactual theory to date, is further criticized for implicit problems with natural lawhood even more serious than those typically raised for regularity accounts, for additional inadequacies in its analysis of causal relations, and for its failure to satisfy basic empiricist epistemological standards.

Mill is neither an act-utilitarian nor a rule-utilitarian. Although he professes to regard “utility as the ultimate appeal on all ethical questions”, he in fact makes no appeal to it in determining in Utilitarianism what actions are “of more absolute obligation than any others”. Nor does he appeal to it in his arguments for the two main conclusions of his essay, On Liberty.

There is a difference between those things one does that manifest agency and those things that merely happen to one or that are the effects of one's agency. My typing these words manifests my agency – is an action of mine – whereas growing older is merely happening to me and making sounds as I type is but an effect of my action. Actions are sometimes but not always done for reasons and are characteristically but perhaps not invariably known by the agent without observation or inference. I'm typing in order to get my paper done on time, and I don't need to look to know that this is what I am doing, though I wouldn't know without hearing it that I am making noises as I type. In this paper I will offer an account of these facts about action. The account starts from the idea that an agent performing an action guides what she is doing.

By a ‘semantic determinant’ I will mean“…a structural feature of the world necessary for the determination of truth and falsity …,” or briefly, “Semantic determinants are things that determine valuations.” (Thomason (1972), pp. 301, 302), where such determination is functional and where valuations are themselves functions from sentences into truth values. A familar example is the ‘domain of individuals’ relative to which truth conditions are given for sentences containing “all,” “some,” and related expressions, where these can be construed as ‘quantifiers.’ Thus, e.g., “Some men are albinos” is true just in case at least one individual in the domain which is a man is also an albino. For this truth condition to be making a definite claim we must suppose that the domain is a definite (though not necessarily finite) set of individuals fixed in advance.

Contemporary empiricism is closely allied with naturalism. Not only do empiricists hold that all our knowledge is based upon sensory experience, but they also tend to offer some sort of causal account of how this experience comes about. The causal ingredient in knowledge seems very plausible — after all, my knowing that there is a tea cup on my desk is based on sense impressions which are caused by the cup itself. Photons come from the cup to my eye; a signal is then sent down the optic nerve into the visual part of the brain, and so on. And without that causal process, I likely wouldn't have the knowledge that I do have.

The relationship between Marxism, morality, and ideology has been fraught with controversy and heated debates throughout the century. Advocates of ‘scientific socialism’ tend to dismiss morality as mere ideology, which serves as a camouflage for class interests. In this view, Marxism is a science, separate from and opposed to morality; morality is conceived of as part of the ideological superstructure: false consciousness, containing lies and illusions, which seduces the bourgeoisie into self-satisfaction and complacency, while blinding the working class to their own class-interests and exploitation by the ruling class and the capitalist mode of production. Since, however, there are powerful moral impulses in Marx's own critique of capitalism and call to socialist revolution, and since those engaged in political struggle invariably make use of moral terms and exhortations, the self-reflexive ‘scientific socialist’ comes to devise some sort of moral doctrine: Engels, Kautsky, Trotsky and others talked of a higher socialist morality which would govern the future socialist society and, in some versions, which is to become already the guiding morality for a socialist revolutionary.

The suggestion that at least some emotions are modular captures a number of our intuitions about emotions: they are generally fast responses to a stimulus, they are involuntary, and they are easily distinguished (at least in most cases) from one another; we simply know that, for example, anger feels different than fear. Candidates for modular emotions are usually the so-called “basic” emotions - anger and fear are good examples of these. Defenders of emotion theories that focus on basic emotions, such as Paul Ekman in psychology and Paul Griffiths in philosophy, emphasize the advantages of theories that stress the evolutionary continuity of emotional expression and link emotions to the activity of neural circuits that are similar in human beings and other animals.

In this paper, however, I will examine arguments for the discontinuity of emotions in human beings, as compared with other animals. Owing to a combination of cultural practices and neuroanatomy, both our emotional “wiring” and our emotions are unique.

Teleosemantics asserts that mental content is determined by natural selection. The thesis is that content is fixed by the historical conditions under which certain cognitive mechanisms – those that produce and those that interpret (respond to) representational states – were selectively successful. Content is fixed by conditions of selective success. The thesis of this paper is that teleosemantics is mistaken, that content cannot be fixed by conditions of selective success, because those conditions typically outnumber the intentional objects within a given representational state. To defend against this excess, advocates of teleosemantics must attempt to privilege some conditions of success while ignoring others. This results in selective explanations that are ad hoc, thereby depriving teleosemantics of the virtues it hoped to inherit from the theory of evolution by natural selection, including its alleged naturalistic credentials.

The main aim of this paper is to present a certain notion — that of Coordination — and an associated requirement — the Coordination Requirement (CR) —,and to show how they help us to better understand the communicative role of proper names. A second aim of the paper is to use these notions to defend the kind of view I favour regarding the meaning of proper names — a certain kind of descriptivist theory — by showing that this view is not subject to two seemingly powerful considerations against it that have been provided from two different camps: one from the anti-descriptivist camp (by Saul Kripke in Naming and Necessity), another from the neo-Fregean camp (by Richard Heck in The Sense of Communication). In dealing with these matters, I will have to discuss the role that complex individual concepts (or ideas) play in allowing us to understand and use proper names.

Moral perception, as the term is used in moral theory, is the perception of normatively contoured objects and states of affairs, where that perception enables us to engage in practical reason and judgment concerning these particulars. The idea that our capacity for moral perception is a crucial component of our capacity for moral reasoning and agency finds its most explicit origin in Aristotle, for whom virtue begins with the quality of perception. The focus on moral perception within moral theory has made a comeback in the last few decades, especially in the hands of self-proclaimed neo-Aristotelians such as John McDowell, Martha Nussbaum, and Nancy Sherman. For these writers, our perceptual capacities are not static, and the laborious honing of our perceptual skills is a crucial moral task. On this picture, as Nancy Sherman puts it, “How to see becomes as much a matter of inquiry as what to do.”

Moral particularists—including but not restricted to the neo-Aristotelians—have emphasized the centrality of moral perception to moral agency and judgment, as a corrective to moral theories that treat deliberation in terms of universal principles as the privileged keystone of moral agency.

This is an exploratory paper, the kind of thing to which philosophers often give a title beginning with the word “towards,” as in, “Towards a Theory of the Ethical Significance of Concepts of Life Span and Life Stage.” We give titles like this when we think we may be on to something interesting but can so far only gesture at what it means. This paper is part of a larger ongoing project, and it is programmatic at best. Throughout much of this work. I have felt, I believe with justification, that there is relatively little philosophical background for what I am trying to do.

In her classic paper, “A Defense of Abortion,” Judith Jarvis Thomson suggests that if human pregnancy lasted only one hour, or conversely, if it lasted nine years, then our views about the morality of abortion would justifiably change from what they are now.

Does the existence of a capitalist market economy foster the character trait of selfishness? Does a market elicit narrowly self-interested conduct? Many great minds have advanced notably weak arguments to support affirmative answers to these questions. In section I, I canvass several unsuccessful attempts by Karl Marx to demonstrate that market economies are causally implicated in the production of undesirable character traits. Sections II and Ill venture a suggestion that partially vindicates Marx's hunch. The suggestion I develop relies on the truth of an empirical hypothesis regarding the effect on the disposition to altruism of activity by public authority that is perceived by those affected to be fair.

Methodological individualism is a thesis generally associated with the social sciences, the thesis that ultimately all social explanations should be given in terms of properties only of individuals, never of social groups, societies, etc. It is a methodological thesis grounded on a metaphysical view: it is impossible for a social group to have any property not entailed by properties of its constituent individuals. This latter thesis, finally, is a straightforward consequence of a standard reductionist assumption, that the behavior of wholes can be fully accounted for in terms of the behavior of their parts.