ABSTRACT: This paper proposes a Habermasian analysis of bullshit which diverges from the well-known account offered by Harry Frankfurt. It aims to show that Habermas’s theory of communicative action provides superior conceptual tools for such an analysis, but also that the phenomenon of bullshit ought to be deeply troubling to Habermasians. Bullshit frustrates the transition to discourse, interrupts the binding force of communicative action (the basis of Habermas’s account of social integration) and, if sufficiently widespread as to alter fundamental attitudes toward public speech, bullshit challenges the status of Habermas’s theory of communicative action as a reconstruction of the intuitive knowledge of competent speakers, which status is intended to justify its claim to provide the normative foundations for a critical theory of society in the Frankfurt School sense of an immanent critique.

ABSTRACT: This article focuses on the role that Hegel’s concept of essence (Wesen) played in the thinking of Charles Sanders Peirce and Josiah Royce, two of the primary figures in the canon of classical American philosophy. It elaborates on Robert Stern’s discussion of Hegel and Peirce by claiming that the second book of Hegel’s Logic, entitled “The Doctrine of Essence,” can be understood as Hegel’s attempt to account for the experimental and turbulent character of human experience, a character that Peirce would term “Secondness.” While Pierce remained dissatisfied with Hegel’s relative neglect of Secondness, Peirce recognized the importance of this attempt in the yearly years of the twentieth century, with the help of the Josiah Royce’s detailed understanding of Hegel.

ABSTRACT: I distinguish two sorts of motivation for dualism. One motivation is driven by the distinctive character of conscious phenomenology. The other is driven by the special character of normativity: Is rationality an even “harder” problem than consciousness? There is no dramatic climax in which I show that these two dualist currents have a common source; in fact, I think they are relatively independent.

ABSTRACT: I explain and rebut four objections to the claim that attributions of intentional attitudes are normative judgments, all stemming, directly or indirectly, from the widespread assumption that the normative supervenes on the non-normative.

ABSTRACT: Indifference is a term often used to describe the sort of freedom had by the will according to the libertarian, or Molinist account. It is thought to be a univocal term. In fact, however, it is used in at least seven different ways, in a variety of domains during the early modern period. All of them have plausible roots in Descartes, but he himself uses the term in only one sense, and failure to notice this consistent use by him has bedeviled interpretations of his account of the will.

ABSTRACT: In a recent paper (2008), I presented two arguments against the thesis that intentional states are essentially normative. In this paper, I defend those arguments from two recent responses, one from Nick Zangwill in his (2010) and one from Daniel Laurier in the present volume, and offer improvements of my arguments in light of Laurier’s criticism.

ABSTRACT: I argue that when Spinoza describes substance and its attributes as “infinite,” he means that they are utterly indeterminate. That is, his conception of infinitude is not a mathematical one. For Spinoza, anything truly infinite eludes counting – not because it is so large as to be uncountable, but because it is just not the kind of thing that can be enumerated or measured. Contra the contemporary mathematical conception of the infinite, I argue that Spinoza’s conception is closer to a grammatical one. I conclude by considering a number of arguments against this account of the Spinozan infinite as indeterminate.

ABSTRACT: The paper argues that applications of the principle that “ought” implies “can” (OIC) depend on normative considerations even if the link between “ought” and “can” is logical in nature. Thus, we should reject a common, “factualist” conception of OIC and endorse weak “normativism.” Even if we use OIC as the rule “‘’therefore‘ought not’,” applying OIC is not a mere matter of facts and logic, as factualists claim, but often draws on “proto-ideals” of moral agency.

RESUME: Cet article défend que les applications du principe «“devoir” implique “pouvoir”» (OIC pour l’anglais ‘ought’ implies ‘can’) dépendent de considérations normatives quoique ce lien soit de nature logique. Nous devrions donc rejeter la conception «factuelle» de l’OIC et plutôt défendre un «normativisme» faible. Même en supposant que l’on utilise l’OIC comme étant la règle «“ne pas pouvoir” implique “ne pas devoir”», appliquer l’OIC n’est pas seulement une question de faits et de logique, comme le soutiennent les «factualistes», mais découle souvent de «proto-idéaux» de l’agentivité morale.

ABSTRACT : According to the most popular version of virtue ethics (Hursthouse, 1991; Zagzebsk,i 1996), the right action in a given situation is the action that a fully virtuous agent would do given the circumstances. However, this criterion raises two objections: in some situations, it does not determine the right action correctly, and in other situations, it does not determine any right action at all. In this article, we argue that these objections stem from either simple imaginative resistance or a question-begging stance. We propose thereby to modify the criterion in such a way as to exclude the character of the non-virtuous agent from the morally relevant circumstances. Finally, we examine the implications of our proposal for the issue of moral development.