In this introduction, I offer a broad overview of Asha Bhandary's Freedom to Care: Liberalism, Dependency Care, and Culture so that readers can better situate the suggestions of this symposium's contributors: Clark Wolf, Elizabeth Edenberg, and Helga Varden. Bhandary develops and defends the theory of liberal dependency care in response to the failure of past liberal theorizing to appreciate that dependency care — which is essential to our survival — is a matter of justice. By concluding with a Hamptonian framing, I hope to further generate discussion of this novel work that broadens the influence of contemporary feminist liberal theorizing.

John Rawls and Asha Bhandary use David Hume's conditions of justice to frame the original position choice from which principles of justice are selected. To use Hume's conditions in this way excludes from representation those who are not full cooperators, including people who need lifelong dependency care. This implies that their claim to dependent care is not a fundamental claim of justice, but must have significantly lower priority. This article argues that an appropriate theory of liberal dependency care will abandon this Humean framing assumption, and will treat the claim to dependency care as a fundamental requirement of justice.

Even if it cannot be found elsewhere, it does at least appear that logical infallibility, or incorrigibility, can be found in the belief that one is, or is not, in pain, as well as in the Cogito. But how could the existence of a (true) belief and the existence of the fact believed be the same existence? An answer is proposed. Sometimes a belief can be a desire.

Le concept de valeur est souvent disqualifié pour son ambivalence : la valeur croît et décroît ; elle est reconnue par les uns, mais pas par les autres. Les philosophies de la valeur seraient subjectivistes ou contaminées par une rationalité économique. Nous montrons, à partir de Gilbert Simondon, que la valeur peut être conçue comme une grandeur variable sans tomber dans le nivellement ou le relativisme axiologique. Ceci implique de congédier la séparation néokantienne de l'ontologie et de l'axiologie, de rejeter la conception de la culture comme ensemble de valeurs (et la bipolarité des oppositions de valeur), et enfin de mobiliser une analogie physico-mathématique plutôt qu’économique pour penser la valeur.

Success semantics holds, roughly, that what it is for a state of an agent to be a belief that P is for it to be disposed to combine with her desires to cause behaviour that would fulfill those desires if P. J. T. Whyte supplements this with an account of the contents of an agent's “basic desires” to provide an attractive naturalistic theory of mental content. We argue that Whyte's strategy can avoid the objections raised against it by restricting “basic desires” to sensory inclinations that cause us to do things independently of our beliefs about their contents.

I argue, through Heidegger, that the notion of τὸ ἐξαίφνης in the Parmenides does not signify eternity, or a trace of eternity in time, but rather implies a primordial conception of time. In deduction two, the relationship between stasis and kinesis becomes problematic due to the notion of τὸ νῦν. This leads Parmenides, in deduction three, to posit the notion of τὸ ἐξαίφνης to solve this problematic relationship, implying a primordial conception of time.

L'ambition de cet article est de restituer la radicalité de l'argument central contre les logiques déviantes que W.V.O. Quine déploie dans Philosophy of Logic. Cet argument a pour objet de mettre au jour l'inanité du concept de logique déviante, c'est-à-dire son caractère dénué de sens. En rendre compte requiert alors de prendre la mesure de sa dimension anti-psychologiste. Nous tâchons ainsi de montrer que le défi le plus radical de Quine ne consiste pas à opposer au logicien déviant que changer de lois logiques, c'est changer la signification des termes de constantes logiques.

I am broadly sympathetic to D. C. Matthew's analysis. However, in what follows, I restrict my remarks to a few areas where I think he either lacks empirical precision, or overstates his case.

In “Racial Integration and the Problem of Relational Devaluation,” I argue that blacks should reject racial integration on self-protective and solidarity grounds. Integration will intensify the self-worth harms of stigmatization and phenotypic devaluation by leading blacks to more fully internalize their devaluation, and while the integrating process itself might reduce the former, it may well leave in place the latter. In this paper, I reply to the challenges to these arguments presented by Sharon Stanley, Andrew Valls, Elvira Basevich, Michael Merry, and Ronald Sundstrom.

D. C. Matthew argues that although integration offers blacks social and economic benefits, it also creates the conditions for phenotypic devaluation that leads to harm against black self-worth and servile behaviour. Therefore, he advises against integration because the resulting self-worth harms outweigh the benefits of integration. I argue that Matthew's cost-benefit calculation against integration lacks the requisite evidence, and amounts to a luxury belief that will result in more harm. Moreover, his interpretation of behaviour — which he construes as being indicative of a lack of self-worth — is unfounded. Further, his cost-benefit calculation results in socially reactionary sexual policing and ideological purity tests.

Le rapport qu'a entretenu G. W. F. Hegel avec la pensée de F. H. Jacobi a été constant. Il s'attarde avant tout à la question du savoir, de la vérité et de sa saisie, immédiate ou médiatisée. Or, l'un des concepts centraux à la pensée de Jacobi, et sur lequel se fonde en un sens sa conception du savoir immédiat, est celui de perception entendue comme saisie du vrai (Wahr-nehmen). C'est en partant de ce concept, largement discuté au chapitre deux de la Phénoménologie de l'esprit, que nous tenterons d’éclairer sous un angle inédit la critique hégélienne de Jacobi.

I defend Edith Stein's theory of empathy as an alternative to simulation theories of empathy. Simulation theories of empathy involve using one's own cognitive resources to replicate the mental states of others by imagining being in their situation. I argue that this understanding of empathy is problematic within the context of mental healthcare because it can lead to the co-opting and assimilation of another person's experiences. In response, I maintain that Stein's theory is preferable because it involves appreciating others’ experiences as it is for them, and this alternative account of empathy avoids the assimilation of the experiences of others.

Immanuel Kant maintained throughout his life that non-human persons likely exist but he failed to specify how we could recognise them. In this article, I argue (a) that non-human organisms can be considered non-human persons if they can be judged as belonging to a species with a moral vocation, and (b) a species can be judged as having a moral vocation if at least one of its members is able to make what I will call a “moral sacrifice” in which that member sacrifices its physical life for the sake of its moral life.

When discussing well-being, subject-relative concerns are intuitively important ones. In this article, I argue that Immanuel Kant's theory of well-being can be satisfactorily subject-relative, despite his emphasis on objective moral well-being. Because the specifics of agents’ situations affect agents’ moral endowments, duties regarding moral well-being can be altered for subject-relative reasons. When it comes to thinking about the well-being of others, the important Kantian notion of respect for rational agents ensures that this will be decidedly subject-relative, too, and, what is more, that this will be aimed specifically at natural well-being (happiness).

There is a ubiquitous claim in the grounding literature that metaphysical foundationalism violates the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) in virtue of positing a level of ungrounded facts. I argue that foundationalists can accept the PSR if they are willing to replace fundamentality as independence with completeness and deny that ground is a strict partial order. The upshot is that the PSR can be compatible with both metaphysical foundationalism and metaphysical infinitism, and so presupposing this fixed explanatory demand need not beg the question in favour of either view.

The literature on the metaphysics of gender is partially marked by a tension between conceptions that understand gender categories as importantly at least partly self-determined identities and those that understand them as social or cultural categories imposed upon others as a tool of oppression. I argue that this tension can be mediated by understanding gender categories as essentially contested. I then draw on “radical functionalism” to argue that, while, divorced of context, competing conceptions can simultaneously explicate an essentially contested concept, within context, some conceptions better meet background purposes underlying the use of the concept than others.

A legal fiction is a knowingly false assumption that is given effect in a legal proceeding and that participants are not permitted to disprove. I offer a semantic pretence theory that shows how fiction-involving legal reasoning works.

According to A. John Simmons's anarchist scepticism, there is no duty to obey the law as things stand, as legal obligations have legitimacy only when voluntarily incurred by most or many citizens. However, an alternative, pluralist position is suggested by Simmons's sensitivity to the diversity of reasons and to the possibility of unresolved conflict. It shows that the grounds of legitimate authority are plural, and include distributive justice. Also, even voluntarily incurred obligations can be defeated by conflicting reasons, as when we are duty bound to an unjust regime.

In Fellow Creatures, Christine Korsgaard claims that human beings ought to treat all sentient animals as ends in themselves. However, in this article, I argue that Korgaard's method goes beyond what a coherent constructivist conception allows, and I claim that we should therefore adopt a Humean rather than a Kantian version of constructivism. I believe that such a conception permits us to hold substantial ethical positions about non-human animals without having to compromise our ontological commitments.

L'hédonisme axiologique a une longue histoire en philosophie. Pourtant, il garde une mauvaise réputation qui lui vaut d’être parfois écarté sans ménagement de la discussion philosophique. Cet article se propose de défendre l'hédonisme axiologique en exposant les principaux arguments en sa faveur et en répondant aux principales critiques et confusions dont il fait l'objet. Une attention particulière sera portée aux arguments établissant la spécificité du plaisir et du déplaisir par rapport à toutes les autres choses — amitié, savoir, justice, etc. — dont on pourrait argumenter la valeur finale.