The Republic contains: (1) an implicit argument that slavery is unjust, (2) a bar against Greeks having Greek slaves that (3) allows barbarian slaves. The scholarship has failed to notice the first, that the second is a performative addressed to Greeks, and mistakes the third as explicit. Four passages are examined: (1) a catalogue of a Greek city’s social classes (433d1–5); (2) a bar against Greek slaves, asserting the continuation of barbarian slavery (469b5–71c3); (3) an assertion that the Best City can exist at any time and any place (499c7–d1); and (4) a passage asserting the injustice of enslavement (615a6–b6).

This study of Clément Rosset’s work focuses on the concept of repetition with regards to notions such as duplication, uniqueness, tragedy and joy. Explaining how Clément Rosset’s philosophy relies on the conception of tragic knowledge and how it leads to a specific form of beatitude sheds light on the originality of his interpretation of Nietzsche, as well as the relationship between his thought and Deleuze’s.

In this paper, I propose a reading of Spinoza’s theory of the eternity of the mind in light of his theory of essence and existence. Opposing in particular recent Platonist readings of this theory, rejecting the dichotomy between formal essence and actual essence, upon which they mostly rely, I argue that Spinoza’s conception of the eternity of the mind must be grasped in terms of different aspects of one and the same existence. I moreover suggest that, for Spinoza, the mind was both sempiternal and eternal, without, however, those two aspects of the mind’s existence being identical.

From the testimony of the Carnets de la drôle de guerre[War Diaries: Notebooks from a Phony War] and the Cahiers pour une morale[Notebooks for an Ethics], this article shows how Sartre uses Stoicism for his philosophical concerns: commitment and responsibility. Sartre’s frequent references to the Stoics, as well as the “stoic” attitude he claims to adopt at the time of mobilization in World War II, attest to the influence of Stoicism. Based on key passages in these two unfinished writings that chronologically frame L’être et le néant[Being and Nothingness], this article shows that Sartre borrows his own moral categories from Stoicism. As he voices it in the Carnets, Sartre attempts to reach a synthesis of Stoicism and authenticity, a key idea in his philosophy.

I argue that acceptance of realist intentional explanations of cognitive behaviour inescapably lead to a commitment to the language of thought (LOT) and that this is, therefore, a widely held commitment of philosophers of mind. In the course of the discussion, I offer a succinct and precise statement of the hypothesis and analyze a representative series of examples of pro-LOT argumentation. After examining two cases of resistance to this line of reasoning, I show, by way of conclusion, that the commitment to LOT is an empirically substantial one in spite of the flexibility and incomplete character of the hypothesis.

Jean-Luc Marion’s phenomenology reveals two attitudes regarding the classification of phenomena. On the one hand, they are classified by type. On the other, the “banality of saturation” reduces these types to possible interpretations, in which case saturation isn’t a qualitative rupture anymore, but a possible hermeneutic attitude to any phenomenon. Hence, there is, in Marion’s phenomenology, a tension between a metaphysical attitude that maintains categorial discontinuities, and a hermeneutic temptation driven by the recovery of quantitative continuities between all phenomena. Yet, Marion does not push this quantitative temptation to its limits; he steps back in front of a specifically saturated phenomenon: the icon.

The possibility of knowledge attributions across contexts (where attributor and subject find themselves in different epistemic contexts) can create serious problems for certain views of knowledge. Amongst such views is subject-sensitive invariantism—the view that knowledge is determined not only by epistemic factors (belief, truth, evidence, etc.), but also by non-epistemic factors (practical interests, etc.). I argue that subject-sensitive invariantism either runs into a contradiction or has to make very implausible assumptions. The problem has been very much neglected but is so serious that one should look for alternative accounts of knowledge.