Derek Parfit is surely right when he says, at the beginning of Reasons and Persons, that many of us want to know what we have most reason to do. Several theories attempt to answer this question, and Parfit begins his discussion with the best-known case: the Self-interest Theory, or S. When applied to actions, S claims that “(S2) What each of us has most reason to do is whatever would be best for himself, and (S3) It is irrational for anyone to do what he believes will be worse for himself” (Parfit 1984, p. 8). Objections to this theory are of many kinds, and in the first part of his book Parfit examines the objection that S is, in various ways, self-defeating. One such objection is that S implies we sometimes cannot avoid acting irrationally, but Parfit claims it is not a good objection to S that it has this implication. I disagree. The purpose of this paper is to introduce the objection in more detail (section 1), and then to argue that each of Parfit's responses to the objection is inadequate (sections 2, 3 and 4).

ABSTRACT: Are individual citizens of imperfect democracies morally responsible for unjust wars waged by their state? Moral responsibility for unjust wars involves both retrospective and social responsibility. Citizens of imperfect democracies are retrospectively responsible when they choose to vote for a leader they know will wage an unjust war. This situation may occur very rarely. For example, US citizens did not have this political option at the outset of the Vietnam and Iraq Wars. However, even when citizens are not retrospectively responsible they have the social responsibility to engage in collective action to address the harms unjust war causes.

In this paper, I engage with the works of Richard Bodéüs about Aristotle’s understanding of the relationship between law, virtue, and education. I argue that there is an important difference between the demands of the law and those of reason, especially in the defective, but more common, regimes. This difference is also found in the best regime possible for most cities, the mixed regime Aristotle calls ‘polity’ (or, in Greek, politeia), insofar as it represents a balance between oligarchy and democracy. To educate citizens in this regime requires what Aristotle calls “political philosophy.”

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I carry out an application of the debate between simulationism and theory theory to the issue of episodic memory. I first criticize the approach favored by the theory theory. Then I advance a simulationist conception of the relationship between the phenomenology of episodic memory and its specific kind of self-consciousness. On my view, subjectivity belongs to the very content of episodic memory, not as an element of its content, but as the perspective it gives to the content that makes the simulation of past experience possible. In support of that view, I provide an analysis inspired by J. Perry of the semantics of de se thought. It gives the remembering subject a non-representational presence in the mnesic content.

According to Kant, there is some doctrine, which he sometimes calls ‘empirical realism,’ such that it was doubted by Descartes, denied by Berkeley, and endorsed by Kant himself. The primary aim of this paper will be to reconstruct Kant’s own narrative of the historical relationship between Descartes, Berkeley, and himself, in order to identify the doctrine Kant calls ‘empirical realism.’ I argue that the empirical realism that Descartes doubted, Berkeley denied, and Kant endorsed is the doctrine that the concept of extended substance has legitimate application.

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.

Le processus d'autonomisation des patient.es qui s'opéra en France au cours du XXe siècle peut, artificiellement, être divisé en trois grandes périodes marquées par les principes de solidarité, d'agentivité et d'autorité. Cette tripartition permet de mieux saisir les enjeux de ce mouvement et de comprendre en quoi l'avènement de la démocratie sanitaire, auquel il a abouti au début du XXIe siècle, consiste, par sa dépolitisation des enjeux d'autonomie, au renvoi des patient.es vers une forme de subalternité qu'incarnent, paradoxalement, les nouvelles figures de patient expert ou partenaire.

The modern self, with its inwardness, its freedom and its individuality (p. ix), suffers, Taylor tells us, from disenchantment (p. 500, cf. pp. 17-18, 186). Moreover, disenchantment has come in spite of the advance, to which Taylor wishes to give full credit, that modernity has made in giving great value to ordinary life at work and in the family (p. 211). For religion, though still present as one layer of sentiment among many in the historical deposits that compose modern culture, has given ground to “disengaged instrumentalism” or to its antagonist, romantic “expressivism” (p. 498). Taylor, a philosopher of uncommonly generous spirit, is willing to find good in each of these orientations: the first, for example, has with utilitarianism put the relief of needless suffering at the top of the moral agenda (p. 331), along with redeeming from superstitious repression a number of innocent pleasures; the second has deepened human capacity, on the one hand by deepening emotions (both in the sense of oneself and in concern for others), on the other hand by gaining for them intellectual respect (pp. 294, 372, 419).

It is not difficult to sympathize with the strong impulse among philosophers to attempt to explain, justify, and even define moral concepts in factual terms. For without some kind of grounding in the facts of human nature, we may be quite perplexed concerning what relevance moral concepts have to our actual decisions, actions, and social relationships. Put another way, without grounding moral concepts in facts we may be quite puzzled as to the connections between principles and practice, between the ideal and the actual. The history of ethical theory contains several serious efforts by various philosophers to provide factual grounding for moral concepts, efforts which we cannot here take up.

The doctrine I have in mind is the theory of intensional meanings, the theory according to which unitary descriptive expressions (and some complex ones) have not only extensions, but intensions as well. According to this theory, found in fullest flower in Carnap's Meaning and Necessity, individual expressions, one-place predicates and sentences, have corresponding to them individual concepts, properties and propositions respectively, these latter being the intensions, or, meanings, or, logical contents, of the expressions in question. In the first part of this paper I shall attempt to show that the whole theory of intensional entities represents not just an ontological extravagance, but a fairly clear absurdity. In the second I shall sketch briefly an alternative semantical method and in the third shall attempt to exploit this method for the clarification of a couple of puzzles.

David Gauthier's impressive new book, Morals by Agreement, attempts to resuscitate something like Lockean natural rights on an essentially Hobbesian basis—a project eminently worth doing, if it can be done. Hubin and Lambeth offer some interesting criticisms of his project, and as they also raise some fundamental questions about the character and derivation of rights, it is important to see whether those criticisms hold up. I wish to comment on the one I think to be most crucial.

Le trait sémantique le plus distinctif du discours au sujet des êtres fictifs consiste peut-être dans le fait que nous évaluons celui-ci d'une façon contradictoire. Il est évident que nous sommes disposés à rejeter la phrase «Sherlock Holmes lived on Berczy Street» en faveur de «Sherlock Holmes lived on Baker Street» mais, néanmoins, nous considérons cette dernière phrase comme fausse; et un recensement complet de l'époque montrerait que nous avons tout à fait raison.

L'effort principal de Merleau-Ponty, au début de son cheminement philosophique, consiste à amener l'expérience perceptive à l'expression de son propre sens.

Pourquoi fallait-il commencer par le retour à l'expérience perceptive? Pour deux raisons qui finalement n'en font qu'une, mais dont la première fut plus explicitement reconnue par Merleau-Ponty au moment où il décida de consacrer ses thèses au problème de la perception. Il lui était évident, dès les années 1933–1934, que la perception est une forme d'expérience particulièrement mutilée et faussée par les philosophies d'inspiration criticiste qui l'interprétaient «comme une opération intellectuelle par laquelle des données inextensives (les «sensations») sont mises en relation et expliquées de telle sorte qu'elles finissent par constituer un univers objectif». Il est clair déjà que cette interprétation intellectualiste se base, par un côté, sur la conception empiriste des «sensations», et que la critique de l'intellectualisme devra être tout à la fois une critique de l'empirisme.

Contemporary writing on human action sometimes distinguishes a presentoriented form of intentionality from a future-oriented form. Tense is then invoked mainly for a classificatory purpose, with little regard in this context to whether it may not have analytical (and therefore closer) connections with intentionality in general. That merits some surprise, in view of the crucial role assumed, in current debate between A- and B-theories of time on the subject of tense, by a wider intentionality that extends to cognitive and other mental states. In the wider context there is room for an interesting antithesis between analyses of the temporal in terms of intentionalistic concepts and retroanalyses that go the other way.