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.

A common argument for relativism invokes the appearance of faultless disagreement. I contend that the appearance is possible only under conditions that disqualify it as evidence: gross ignorance or irrationality, or else a prior commitment to an especially crude and implausible form of relativism.

According to David Rosenthal’s higher-order thought (HOT) theory of consciousness, a mental state is conscious just in case one is aware of being in that state via a suitable HOT. Jesse Mulder (2016) recently objects: though HOT theory holds that conscious states are states that it seems to one that one is in, the view seems unable to explain how HOTs engender such seemings. I clarify here how HOT theory can adequately explain the relevant mental appearances, illustrating the explanatory power of HOT theory.

In this article I defend the view that all feminists should be contractarians. Indeed, I argue that feminists should be Hobbesian or rational-choice contractarians at that. The argument proceeds by critically examining some of the main reasons why feminists have been resistant or even hostile to contractarian moral theory, and showing that the criticisms are misguided against Hobbesian versions of the theory. I conclude with a brief positive argument to the effect that contractarianism provides a plausible explanation of what is wrong with patriarchy and so can serve as the theoretical basis for feminist ethics.

David Brink has recently argued for the “parity” of ethics and the sciences. While the parity claim alone might be metaphysically neutral, Brink favours a form of ethical naturalism on which moral properties “are” natural properties, just as non-moral macrophysical properties “are” the microphysical states that compose them. Brink supports this claim by showing that both types of properties share certain important features: specifically, that both may be (and typically are) constituted, supervening and synthetically necessitated. I shall argue that notwithstanding these common features, there remain significant modal differences in the way the two types of properties are assigned to the world. These differences represent an important respect in which moral properties are not on par with their scientific counterparts.

As the sixteenth Century drew to a close, the human race teetered at the brink of an unprecedented intellectual revolution. The Aristotelean conception of a small, spherical, Earth-centered cosmos ceased to confine the imagination of an increasing number of thinkers; the recently proposed Copernican system, problematic though it was, sketched a provocative alternative with some real explanatory advantages (e.g., its uniform explanation of the existence, amount, and timing of retrograde motions); and distinct intellectual currents converged in the growing search for a new dynamics that would encompass at once all motion, superlunary and sublunary. In the event, the cosmology, the planetary astronomy, and the dynamics finally came together in Newton's uniquely coherent synthesis, and by the dawn of the eighteenth century we had exchanged the dubious comfort of Aristotle's enveloping egg for the more chilling contemplation of a spatially infinite universe.

Selon les stoïciens, il y a en tout être vivant une impulsion vitale, un élan de la nature qui le porte à persévérer dans son être. En la plupart des êtres, cette inclination naturelle (ρμ) est fatale, aveugle et inconsciente. Chez l'homme, au contraire, cette tendance initiale s'élève peu à peu à la conscience et se transforme ainsi en désir. Il semble bien que l'ρμ stoïcienne présente quelque analogie avec le conatus spinoziste. Spinoza, en effet, affirme que chaque chose s'efforce de persévérer dans son être : « Unaquaeque res, quantum in se est, in suo esse perseverare conatur». Cet effort, quand il se rapporte à 1'homme considéré comme formé d'une âme et d'un corps, est appelé appétit. Quant au désir, il n'est autre chose que l'appétit avec conscience de lui-même : «Il n'y a nulle différence entre l'Appétit et le Désir, sinon que le Désir se rapporte généralement aux hommes, en tant qu'ils ont conscience de leurs appétits ». A ce niveau, il existe done une étrange ressemblance entre le désir selon les Stoïciens et le désir selon Spinoza, puisque tous deux ont une racine commune, à savoir la tendance de l'être à persévérer dans son être : le désir est cette tendance elle-même, telle qu'elle se manifeste chez l'être raisonnable, conscient de ses appétits.

The recent literature has seriously challenged, and in my view defeated, the traditional representationalist interpretation of Descartes. One contributor to it, John Yolton, has recently extended its arguments to argue that the traditional representationalist interpretation of Locke must be relinquished as well, that Locke, following the Cartesian path of Arnauld, held a semiotic theory of ideas which “de-ontologized” them and construed them as signs or cues in the direct perception of physical objects. The Cartesian support for this view, especially in La Dioptrique, has been questioned by R.F. McRae, who argues that “if Locke accepts Descartes' theory of vision, then Descartes' conception of sensations as signs provides no support for the direct realist interpretation of Locke.” My aim here is not to resolve the representationalism issue, but to show the irrelevance to it of the kinds of questions the Yolton-McRae exchange raises concerning sense perception. I shall try to show that there stems from Descartes a single account of those questions the essentials of which are embedded in theories falling on both sides of the representationalism issue. That single account involves a theory of judgment and vision, especially of distance, which in the case of Malebranche and Berkeley, even involves the same confusions.

This article attempts to define the status of the political order in Pascal's thought by examining the coherence of the fragments on custom, imagination, force and justice in the Pensées. Situating this order between divine Justice and unjust human justice, Pascal offers a contribution to the Augustinian account of the relationship between moral and political existence by his description of the experience of temporal authority and of the spiritual skill which that experience requires.

In a recent series of papers, Donald Davidson has put forward a challenging and original philosophy of mind which he has called anomalous monism. Anomalous monism has certain similarities to another recent and deservedly popular position: functionalist cognitive psychology. Both functionalism, in its materialist versions, and anomalous monism require token-token psychophysical identities rather than type-type ones. (Token identities are identities between individual events; type identities represent a stronger claim of identities between interesting sorts of events.) Both deny that psychology can be translated into, or scientifically reduced to, neurophysiology. Both are mentalistic theories, allowing psychology to make use of intentional descriptions in its theorizing. Anomalous monism uses a belief/desire/action psychology; cognitive science makes use of information-bearing states. But these similarities must not be allowed to conceal an essential difference between the two positions. Cognitive psychology claims to be a science, making interesting, lawlike generalizations for the purpose of explaining mental activity. Anomalous monism denies that psychology is a science by denying that psychological laws can be formulated. Davidson has other ideas for psychology connected with his work on meaning and truth. Hence, the title of one of his essays on anomalous monism is “Psychology as Philosophy”.

This text views the case of Quebec nationalism from the vantage point of the debate between Habermas and Taylor on this question. This case highlights the problem of articulating the sphere of civic rights, whose claims are universalist, to that of culture and collective identity, whose essence is particularist. It seems that the multinational context of the Quebec-Canada confrontation needs to be approached in a manner that cannot be fulfilled by a strict proceduralism and a purely formal universalism. The Habermasian position will thus be criticized for these reasons, while Taylor's stance, which contemplates the integration of material considerations in a dialogue open to ideological alterity, will be taken into account so as to make up for the shortcomings of the former.