In this paper, I attempt to set out some of the main views about essence which Aristotle puts forward in Book Z of the Metaphysics. A central feature of Aristotle's account, as we shall see, is his distinction between primary and secondary cases of essence, and a similiar distinction in connection with the related notions of substance and definition. This division between primary and secondary cases means that Aristotle may well have two very different sorts of remark to make about essence, or definition, or substance, according to which of the two kinds of case he has in mind. There is no reason to suppose the same logical properties apply to both the primary and the secondary cases. And when we come to define the various notions, we shall see that if our definitions are right, the logical properties in the two kinds of case are in fact quite different.

I have argued elsewhere1 that Rawl's method (i.e., the original position and so forth, as distinct from the principles that Rawls derives by using the method) provides us with the proper way to determine whether the structure of any society is exploitative. The argument trimmed to the bare bones is this. Since exploitation is the suppression of some peoples’ interests for the benefit of others, an argument that a set of social relations would be unanimously agreed to by rational individuals concerned to secure maximum opportunity to control their lives and possessed of correct knowledge of the nature of social reality and free of interests or attitudes deriving from the society they occupy or the position they occupy in it, is an argument that those social relations are not exploitative. If we take ideology to be false beliefs or interests or attitudes arising from society which lead people to think that their society is rational for all to accept when it would not be rational in the absence of such beliefs or interests or attitudes, then we can see that Rawls has constructed a method for arguing around ideology.

A particularly important topic for Marxist theory is that of popular politics: the ways in which the underclasses of society express their interests and values through collective action. Classical Marxism postulates a fundamental conflict of interest among classes. It holds that exploited classes will come to an accurate assessment of their class interests, and will engage in appropriate collective actions to secure those interests. The result is a predicted variety of forms of underclass collective action: boycotts, rent strikes, tax and food riots, rebellion, and revolution. Underclass members of society instigate and support such protests because it is in their material class interest to do so. It will emerge, however, that this account is too schematic to provide a basis for explanation of popular politics. The microfoundations approach to Marxist theory will prove useful in this context because it directs us to some of the resources needed to provide a more adequate account of popular collective action.

‘The similes of the Sun, Line, and Cave in the Republic remain a reproach to Platonic scholarship because there is no agreement about them, though they are meant to illustrate.’ So wrote A.S. Ferguson in 1934, and so he could write to-day. Four decades have produced at least twenty more substantial contributions to the debate, but no agreement. I shall not attempt to arbitrate between existing interpretations, nor shall I offer an account of the ‘simile of light’ as a whole. I shall confine my attention to a single point: the significance of the shadows in the cave, and of the objects which cast them. The suggestion I shall make seems an obvious one, but I have not found it in the literature. I hope to show at least that it deserves serious consideration.

The main argument in Parmenides’ didactic poem begins with these remarks by the unnamed goddess who delivers the revelation (B2 in Diels-Kranz Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker):

Can utilitarianism be reconciled with individualism? The short answer might be that Mill tried to reconcile them, and failed: the quite uncompromising individualism of On Liberty is commonly thought to be inconsistent with his utilitarianism. This is in part because of his rejection of paternalism, which seems to imply that spontaneity and freedom are more valuable than happiness. Mill himself argued that they are, at least in the long run and for the community as a whole, the surest means to happiness. But, while this is defensible, it is hard to see how it could be conclusively demonstrated; and it seems clear that Mill's belief that it is so is the result rather than the cause of his attachment to freedom. Moreover, Mill is, as Fitzjames Stephen pointed out, committed to the assertion that the suppression of opinion always, whatever the circumstances, has worse consequences than not suppressing it; and this seems much too sweeping a principle not to have some exceptions.

In this paper I shall attempt to locate and articulate Aristotle's answer to a foundational question in the theory of action - viz., ‘what is the proximate (efficient) cause of action?’ This task is certainly of historical importance, since one cannot hope to understand Aristotle's interesting and influential theory of action without understanding his views on the proximate efficient cause of action. But the present project is not, I should think, of historical interest alone; for it has recently been argued by a leading figure in the study of action, Myles Brand, that What [proximately] initiates action?’ is the fundamental question in action theory, and we shall see that Aristotle has the makings of a very plausible answer.

My purpose here is to show how rights relate to utilities by showing how they arise from interests. My account will support a classic objection to utilitarianism—that the utilitarian who simply adds and balances utilities on an equal scale cannot generate a plausible analysis of rights. On the other hand, I will maintain that rights are recognized only to protect or guarantee the satisfaction of certain interests. One central claim will be that certain interests must be internally ordered in a nonadditive way, while others are merely added or balanced in sum in deciding moral courses of action or social policy. I will also indicate how different contractarian frameworks generate systems of rights from interests and how priorities among rights can be established by thinking of these different frameworks.

Are emotion-producing processes modular? Jerry Fodor, in his classic introduction of the notion of modularity (Fodor 1983), holds that its most important feature is cognitive impenetrability or information encapsulation. If a process possesses this feature, then, as standardly understood (Currie and Sterelny 2000), “what we want or believe makes no difference to how [it] works” (147).

In this paper, we will start with the issue of the cognitive impenetrability of emotion-producing processes. It turns out that, while there is abundant evidence of emotion-producing processes that are not cognitively impenetrable, some nonetheless are. We will look at two sorts of case. The first concerns emotional reactions to observed faces, and the second involves what we can call “primitive emotions,” emotions that can be activated by non-doxastic input into regions of the brain we share with more primitive animals.

In seeing how some emotion-producing processes can be cognitively impenetrable while others are not, we need to use two commonsensical theses. First, a discussion of modularity must in general operate with a taxonomy that allows for sub-processes or stages of processes.

The proper study of Mankind is animal evolution. If one looks back on the evolutionary time-scale one finds all kinds of animals surviving in our midst which have very simple nervous systems and whose behaviour amounts to little more than a stereotyped running off of genetically stored behavioural routines. On the other end of this scale, and including man, are animals with large nerve ganglia, or brains, who are far less dependent upon what is already in the genotype, far more capable of selective attention to incoming stimuli and able to lay down new neural connections in accordance with their experience: in a word, largely self-adaptive creatures. Such animals—the more highly evolved birds and all mammals—give much the same kind of evidence of being conscious as one's fellow men do. One is naturally tempted to suppose that consciousness, correlated as it seems to be with possession of a complex nervous system and self-adaptive behaviour, has some selective advantage for evolution of higher animals: if it does not, then how is it we are conscious?

In the Anglican theological circles in which I move, the doctrine of transubstantiation is apt to be declared guilty by association with its Aristotelian underpinnings, most notably its ‘out-moded’ substanceaccident ontology. These negative assessments, based as they usually are on cursory acquaintance with the theory’s most enthusiastic medieval exponent, Thomas Aquinas, abstract from historical complications. For eleventh-century theologians had already debated the manner of Christ’s presence in the Eucharist: whether it was merely symbolic (as Berengar of Tours was accused of holding) and/or spiritual (as some passages of St. Augustine would suggest); or whether the Body and Blood of Christ were really present in the Eucharist under the forms of bread and wine? Once the Church pronounced in favor of ‘the real presence,’ several competing theories were advanced to explain it: (i) ‘impanation,’ according to which the Body of Christ assumed the substance of the bread, the way the Divine Word assumes Christ’s human nature; (ii) ‘annihilation,’ according to which the substance of the bread is annihilated; (iii) ‘consubstantiation,’ which stipulates that the substance of the bread remains and the Body of Christ coexists with it; and (iv) ‘transubstantiation,’ which says the bread is neither annihilated nor remains, but is converted into the Body of Christ.

The phrase “statements of fact” has a clear, unequivocal ring. It speaks of a stable place untouchable by contests in epistemology and in more secular places, around questions of constructivism, subjectivism, and the politics of knowledge. It offers fixity, a locus of constancy in a shifting landscape where traditional certainties have ceased to hold, maintains a vantage point outside the fray, where knowledge-seekers can continue to believe in some degree of “correspondence” between items of knowledge and events in the world. Within the social institutions and practices where knowledge is an issue, it designates a secure starting place for deliberation, a way of ensuring that processes of decision-making remain cognizant of the “realities” they have to address.

In the institutions of knowledge production and knowledgeable practice that generate the examples I appeal to in this essay – medicine and law – “statements of fact” appear to comprise an incontestable core around which interpretive strategies may indeed have to be enlisted, but which itself functions as a kind of interpretation-exempt zone. There are good reasons for its retaining that status, for resisting the instabilities and sheer whimsicalities that would follow from dislodging it.

Democracy is committed to procedures of decision-making which express the values of both political equality and truth. One current program, that of strong or deliberative democracy, explicitly defends institutions which reflect the dual commitments to truth and equality. Like many other political theorists, however, deliberative democrats do not address the issue of a minority group which always loses the vote. The presumption is that free and equal deliberation by agents who think in terms of the common good is sufficient for political equality. I will argue, however, that the proposed deliberative procedures do not preclude persistent failure for a minority, and that this problem should lead us to acknowledge that power relations can underpin decision-making arrangements even within the ideal framework of deliberative democracy. Political equality and effective political equality seem to come apart.

In order to come closer to the idea of effective political equality, this paper will look at the notion of equality of influence. It may seem tautological, and so redundant, to argue that political egalitarians and particularly deliberative democrats need to recognize equality of influence.

Yes and no. It depends on the meaning of the question. Traditionally, those on the affirmative side — predominantly neo-Fregeans — hold that Ralph's believing about Ortcutt, de re, that he is a spy is identical with, or otherwise reducible to, Ralph's believing some proposition or other of the form The such-and-such is a spy, for some concept the such-and-such that is thoroughly conceptual or qualitative (or perhaps thoroughly qualitative but for the involvement of constituents of Ralph's consciousness or of other mental particulars), and that uniquely determines, or is uniquely a concept of, Ortcutt (in Alonzo Church's sense of ‘determines’ and ‘concept of’). Concerns over Ralph's believing that whoever is shortest among spies is a spy while not suspecting anyone in particular have led some neo-Fregeans (not all) to qualify their affirmative response by requiring that the concept the such-and-such and its object bear some connection that is epistemologically more substantial than that between the shortest spy and the shortest spy.

In recent years, functionalism has emerged as the most appealing candidate for a materialistic theory of mind. Its central thesis - that types of mental states can be defined in terms of their causal and counterfactual relations to the sensory stimulations, other internal states, and behavior of the entities that have them - offers hope for a reasonable materialism: it promises type-identity conditions for beliefs, sensations, and emotions that are not irreducibly mental, yet would permit entities that are physically quite different to be in mental states of the same type.

Samantha Brennan notes in her survey article, “Recent Works in Feminist Ethics,” that “the reshaping of moral concepts in light of feminist critiques of individualism and feminist development of relational alternatives represents significant progress in feminist ethics, indeed in ethics at large.” Two suggestions in this claim serve as a starting point for my application of a relational approach to inequalities in a global context. First, equality is a moral concept that has been and continues to be central to Western liberal theory. The global context reveals liberalism's dominance on the world scene as well as increases in inequalities of wealth both within and across borders. I claim that this context calls for renewed vigilance in the “reshaping of moral concepts” that are central to liberal theory. To clarify, I do not argue that feminists must work with these concepts. Rather I hold that some concepts, one of them being equality, have enduring moral value and this makes continued feminist analyses of them important, particularly in the contemporary global context.

In a recent survey of contemporary philosophy of emotion, Ronald de Sousa states that “in recent years … emotions have once again become the focus of vigorous interest in philosophy, as well as in other branches of cognitive science” (de Sousa 2003, 1). He then goes on to make the important observation that “in view of the proliferation of increasingly fruitful exchanges between researchers of different stripes, it is no longer useful to speak of the philosophy of emotion in isolation from the approaches of other disciplines, particularly psychology, neurology and evolutionary biology” (de Sousa 2003, 1). This last remark is particularly apt in the case of a topic like modularity and emotion, which represents an ideal opportunity for reflecting on the emerging alliance between the philosophy of emotion and emotion science. In addition to being interesting in its own right, the topic also illustrates some of the perils associated with the new alliance, as different academic traditions must adapt to interdisciplinary dialogue.

The general framework of this paper relies on the observation that the practice of science as an experimental research program involves a social network of subjects working together (Latour 1988; Stengers 1994), both as co-researchers and as co-subjects of experiments. We want to take this basic observation seriously in order to explore how the objectivity of scientific results obtained thereby is highly affected and dependent on multifarious ‘intersubjective regulations.’ By intersubjective regulations we mean the different ways in which each subject/ researcher is able to account for his or her experience and share it with other subjects/researchers (comparing it, differentiating between each of them, seeing similarities and even identities, but also producing conflictive accounts) to the point of giving way to a re-styled objectivity founded on such ruled inter-individual practices (Husserl1954, 1973; Depraz 1995; Varela 1999):