ABSTRACT: The analytic method by which Descartes established the first principle of his philosophy (cogito, ergo sum) is a unique cognitive process of direct insight and non-logical inference that differs markedly from the deductive model of noetic apprehension long associated with seventeenth-century rationalism. In this paper, it is shown that the same analytic process is at work in the Third Meditation proof of the innateness of the idea of God, where, however, there are serious doubts about its legitimacy.

ABSTRACT: The Bible illuminates Kant’s distinction between appearances and things-in-themselves. The two biblical creation stories, in Genesis 1 and in Genesis 2, offer different ontological parsings, only the second of which, like Kant’s appearances, is relativized to the human case. But while Kant’s other region remains undercharacterized (it is either understood negatively, as differing from the realm of appearances, or else uninformatively, as the object of supra-human cognition), the Bible articulates quite fully the world as it is before the advent of men and women. The Bible treats this realm from the sub-human standpoint. This broadly anthropological approach to the idea of appearances clarifies transcendental idealism.

ABSTRACT: This article seeks to demonstrate that in his reading of the role of religion in the public realm, Habermas has overlooked religion’s power to symbolically institute communities. Although Gauchet starts from a vision of religion in which this dimension is central, I contend that he too underestimates the extent in which religion has retained this power within postsecular society.

ABSTRACT: Looking at specific populations of knowers reveals that the presumption of sameness within knowledge communities can lead to a number of epistemological oversights. A good example of this is found in the case of survivors of sexual violence. In this paper I argue that this case study offers a new perspective on the debate between the epistemic internalist and externalist by providing us with a fresh insight into the complicated psychological dimensions of belief formation and the implications that this has for an epistemology that demands reasons that are first-person accessible.

ABSTRACT: This paper aims at providing a general assessment of Habermas’s recent positions on the place of religion in the public sphere. After reviewing and contrasting Rawls’s and Habermas’s respective positions on the issue, it argues that Habermas’s contribution raises some difficulties both theoretical and practical. At the theoretical level, it is shown that Habermas’s contribution poses a problem of coherence with respect to his more general conception of deliberative democracy. At the practical level, the soundness of Habermas’s view of the respective roles expected of religious and secular citizens in the public sphere is brought into question.

ABSTRACT: Critics have charged that there are gaps in the logic of Kant’s derivation of the formula of universal law. Here I defend that derivation against these charges, partly by emphasizing a neglected teleological principle that Kant alluded to in his argument, and partly by clarifying what he meant by actions’ “conformity to universal law.” He meant that actions conform to universal law just when their maxims can belong to a unified system of principles. An analogy with objects’ conformity to universal law in nature helps show how Kant was correct in deriving the formula of universal law from the premises of his argument.