Luck egalitarians argue that distributive justice should be understood in terms of our capacity to be responsible for our choices. Both proponents and critics assume that the theory must rely on a comprehensive conception of responsibility. I respond to luck egalitarianism’s critics by developing a political conception of responsibility that remains agnostic on the metaphysics of free choice. I construct this political conception by developing a novel reading of John Rawls’ distinction between the political and the comprehensive. A surprising consequence is that many responsibility-based objections to luck egalitarianism turn out to be objections to Rawls’ political liberalism as well.

ABSTRACT: In a seminal article on the origin of philosophical idealism in the western philosophical tradition, Myles Burnyeat argued that idealism could not have come about prior to Descartes. According to Burnyeat, Descartes introduced a radical version of external world scepticism which made it possible for subsequent philosophers (Berkeley, e.g.) to argue that reality is composed exclusively of immaterial minds and their contents (ideas). I argue that (1) the success of Burnyeat’s argument depends upon the meaning of the term ‘idealism’ and (2) that one of Burnyeat’s definitions of the term does not rule out the possibility of Pre-Cartesian idealism.

We demonstrate that many philosophers accept the following claim: When an aesthetic object is apprehended correctly, taking pleasure in said object is a reliable sign that the object is aesthetically successful. We undermine this position by showing that what grounds our pleasurable experience is opaque: In many cases, the experienced pleasure is attributable to factors that have little to do with the aesthetic object. The evidence appealed to is a form of Higher-Order Evidence (HOE) and we consider attempts to overcome said evidence. We argue they are unsuccessful. We conclude by considering what this means for our practice of making aesthetic judgements.

The fourteenth-century English philosopher and theologian Richard Kilvington (1302/5–61) presents a useful correction to popular views of medieval philosophy in two ways. On the one hand, he reminds us that to think of medieval philosophy in terms of Aquinas, Duns Scotus and Ockham, or to think of medieval logic in terms of Aristotelian syllogistic, is to overlook vast areas of intellectual endeavour. Kilvington, like many before and after him, was deeply concerned with problems that would now be assigned to philosophy of language; philosophical logic and philosophy of science. He discussed topics in epistemic logic, semantic paradoxes, problems of reference, particularly those connected with the interplay between quantifiers and modal or temporal operators, and problems arising from the use of infinite series in the analysis of motion and change. On the other hand, this very account of his work raises the important issue of conceptual domain. I have spoken as if Kilvington's work can be neatly classified in terms of contemporary interests; and the temptation to read medieval philosophy in modern terms is only strengthened when one recognizes Kilvington as the first member of the group of Oxford calculatores, men such as William Heytesbury and Richard Swineshead, whose discussions of mathematics and physics have caused them to be hailed as forerunners of modern science.

An Adequate theory of meaning and truth is semantically important. Such a theory necessarily includes in its analysis nonentities, items that do not exist. So what is semantically, and hence logically, important is bound to include nonentities. In virtue of the modifier ‘semantically“, the first premiss is analytic (what is semantically important may not be important), and it is comparatively uncontroversial. By contrast the second premise of the syllogism, which we want to stick to, is decidedly controversial. So too is the thesis (advanced in [2] and [3] and in Chisholm [15]) – which implies the inadequacy of classical logical theories – that there are a great many natural language statements, statements an adequate theory should be able to treat of, which cannot be analysed logically, and semantically, without the equivalent of an appeal to nonentities. Defence of the thesis has been somewhat piecemeal, taking the form that all the theories so far offered which try to dispense with nonentities break down or run into insuperable difficulties, difficulties which are readily surmounted given appropriate talk about nonentities. In what follows we shall outline more general sorts of argument for the thesis, designed to show that no theory which dispenses with nonentities as objects of discourse can do justice to the data.

La sémiologie est une discipline en gestation: ni ses concepts de base, ni sa méthode, ni son champ d'application ne sont encore parfaitement délimités. En cette nébuleuse nous voudrions toutefois montrer que s'esquisse un système stellaire polarisé par la notion de signe. Qu'un tel système ne soit pas encore visible à l'œil nu, cela dépend surtout, croyons-nous, d'une part du vocabulaire utilisé par les sémiologues, qui tantôt manipulent les mêmes termes en des acceptions différentes, tantôt conférent à des termes différents le même sens, d'autre part du fait que les distinctions sous-jacentes à certains choix ne sont pas considérées comme les éléments d'une combinatoire susceptible d'articuler les diverses positions possibles. Notre démonstration portera sur le champ d'application de la sémiologie: nous nous livrerons en premier lieu à un inventaire des principales tendances qui le parcourent, pour ensuite comparer ces tendances entre elles et reconstruire le système à l'intérieur duquel elles s'insèrent.

We argue that friendship is constituted in the practice of narration, not merely identified through psychological or sociological criteria. We show that whether two people have, as Aristotle argues, ‘lived together’ in ‘mutually acknowledged goodwill’ can be determined only through a narrative reconstruction of a shared past. We demonstrate this with a close reading of Thomas Bernhard’s Wittgenstein’s Nephew: A Friendship (1982). We argue that this book provides not only an illustration but also an enactment of the practice of friendship as the urge to redeem—and thus to instantiate—Aristotelian suzên (‘living together’) by means of its telling.

In a recent article, D. H. Finkelstein offers a new proposal about the distinction between conscious and unconscious belief. On his proposal, someone's belief is conscious if he has an ability to express it simply by self-ascribing it; and someone's belief is unconscious if he lacks such an ability. In this article, I argue that his proposal is inadequate, and then offer a somewhat different proposal. On my proposal, someone's belief is conscious if he has self-ascribed this belief without recourse to any evidence about his behaviour, and someone's belief is unconscious; if it is not conscious.

An obligation, in the sense in which it was of interest to medieval logicians from about the early thirteenth century to the end of the scholastic period, is, according to Paul of Venice, a relation limiting one to take some statement affirmatively or negatively. This relation is based on the actions of two individuals: one (the opponent) obligates the other (the respondent) by first putting forward a sentence which the respondent agrees to affirm or deny for a limited time. The sentence the respondent agrees to affirm is called the positum; that which he agrees to deny, the depositum; and his act of agreeing, the admissio. After this relation is established between the opponent and respondent, the opponent proceeds by putting forward a series of sentences to which the respondent replies by granting, denying, or doubting — all in accordance with certain rules the two individuals have previously accepted as governing their exchange. If the respondent at any time grants what is inconsistent with the sentence he agreed to uphold, or responds in a way that violates the accepted rules, the exchange comes to an end. The respondent has failed in his obligation.

When the history of philosophy is painted in broad strokes, the philosophy of Descartes is generally regarded as the major watershed between classical and modern outlooks. Although Descartes himself was more concerned with epistemology and metaphysics than with axiology, his successors have generally drawn as an axiological corollary of his metaphysical bifurcation of reality the thesis that all final or intrinsic values, if they exist at all, exist only in the domain of conscious subjects, or at the very least as relata dependent upon such subjects. These subjects may indeed extend beyond humankind to include gods or beasts or even, according to the speculative flights of some, the “occasions of experience” of Whiteheadian panpsychists or the universal mind of the idealists. The common denominator of all these accounts, however, is that values essentially depend upon human or quasi-human entities, i.e., conscious, experiencing subjects. This post-Cartesian thesis is in marked contrast to the axiological realism of the classical world of Plato and Aristotle, which concurs with large segments of common sense in finding objects to exist with their axiological properties independently of human and similar subjects. The Cartesian legacy in axiology has been to encourage the exploration of human values and experiences of value while creating a moratorium on the investigation of subject-independent values.

In a recent article, Don Marquis canvasses the arguments on both sides of the abortion controversy and then puts forward his own argument against abortion:

A. To deprive someone of the value of his or her future is prima facie wrong.

B. The future an adult has is included in the future of the fetus it developed from.

C. Abortion deprives the fetus of the value of its future.

D. Therefore, abortion is prima facie wrong.

I wish to show that this reasoning in no way settles the issue of whether abortion is wrong. Section 1 concerns premise B, Sections 2 and 3 C, and Section 4 A.Notes