Many neo-Aristotelians argue that practical identities are normative, that is, they provide us with reasons for action and create binding obligations. Kantian constructivists agree with this insight but argue that contemporary Aristotelians fail to fully justify it. Practical identities are normative, Kantian constructivists contend, but their normativity necessarily derives from the normativity of humanity. In this paper, I shed light on this underexplored similarity between neo-Aristotelian and Kantian constructivist accounts of the normativity of practical identities, and argue that both ultimately fail. I end by suggesting an alternative justification of the claim that practical identities are normative.

People disagree about the causes of social inequality and how to most effectively intervene in them. These may seem like empirical questions for social scientists, not philosophers. However, causal explanation itself depends on broadly normative commitments. From this it follows that (moral) philosophers have an important role to play in determining those causal explanations. I examine the case of causal explanations of poverty to demonstrate these claims. In short, philosophers who work to reshape our moral expectations also work, on the back end, to restructure acceptable causal explanations—and hence solutions—for social inequality. Empirical and normative inquiry, then, are a two-way street.

A recurrent theme in Ralph Waldo Emerson’s writings is his struggles with the problem of scholarly inaction. Commentators have given much attention to “The American Scholar” but less to his remarks about the “pale scholar.” In this paper, I focus on the latter and argue that understanding the evolving nature of Emerson’s views about what counts for action could not only deepen our understanding of his philosophy and its orientation toward the conduct of life but also explain why, according to Emerson, there seems to be no reconciliation between “the theory and practice of life.”

This article examines the relationship between blindness and the Enlightenment concept of the system, arguing that blindness is used as a weapon to discredit 17th-century metaphysics, as well as a tool through which thought can take shape or even systematize itself apart from dogmatism. Philosophers use blindness metaphorically, thus equating systematics within the obscurity of ignorance; yet, with Diderot, they also demonstrate that philosophy, for better or for worse, is literally an affair of blindness.

In this paper, I describe some of the history of work on human reasoning done by philosophers and experimental psychologists. This particular interdisciplinary work is interesting because it shows the ways that interdisciplinary research can solidify pervasive preconceptions in a particular field. Work in experimental psychology has shown that certain normative systems fail to model reasoning in natural language contexts. Thus, I will argue, philosophers could instead take this psychological research as motivation to amend these normative models or radically change our ideas about how these models are applied to reasoning in natural language.

In 1772, Kant outlined the new problem of his critical period in terms of four possible “ways” of understanding the agreement of knowledge with its object. This study expands Kant’s terse descriptions of these ways, examining why he rejected them. Apart from clarifying the historical context in which Kant saw his own achievement (the Fifth Way), the chief benefits of exploring the historical background of Way Two, in particular, are that it (1) explains the puzzling intuitus originarius/intellectus archetypus dichotomy, and (2) casts doubt on the received idea that Kant broke with the traditional theocentric model of cognition.

The paper challenges the view that public justification sits well with emancipatory and egalitarian intuitions. I engage political liberalism’s view of public justification. A standard objection to this view is that public justification should be more inclusive in scope. This is both plausible and problematic in emancipatory and egalitarian terms. If inclusive public justification allocates discursive standing that has much discursive purchase, as seems desirable in emancipatory terms, it is unable to allocate equal discursive standing within relevant scopes. And, if it must allocate equal discursive standing, discursive equality should be construed in terms that allow for unequal discursive purchase.

This paper focuses on the link between systems criticism and anti-mathematicism in the French-speaking philosophical literature of the mid-18th century. Moving from Condillac’s omissions to the exemplary cases of Diderot and Buffon—as well as considering Formey’s crucial remarks—I reconsider the complex relationship that the authors of the French Enlightenment have with the Newtonian model. Finally, I inquire into the fate awaiting both mathematics and systems in this context after 1750.

A fictional work contains a cliffhanger if it ends with a central character finding herself in perilous circumstances. The goal of this paper is to establish that authors’ narrative intentions determine what happens next in works that end in cliffhangers when no sequel is produced. To this end, I argue from the fact that a sequel written by the original author would uniquely resolve a fictional work that ends in a cliffhanger to the conclusion that the author’s narrative intentions serve as truth-makers for claims about what happens next in the absence of some such sequel.

Amos Tversky, Daniel Kahneman, Dan Ariely and others detect irrationality when decision makers get led astray by how a decision problem is framed. They find that test subjects respond inconsistently when the same decision problem is described differently. But when are two decisions the same? The participants in their experiments are not decision theorists and cannot be counted on to read or approach the problems ‘properly.’ They may find sources of utility where researchers least suspect, and change payoffs that ‘ought’ to remain constant.

This paper is a study of the way D’Alembert envisioned error and the right to make mistakes (the verb ‘errer,’ in French, also means ‘to wander’) in science. By reading two texts (D’Alembert’s Preliminary Discourse to the Encyclopedia, and Diderot’s Thoughts on the Interpretation of Nature), I explain the epistemological issues of the debate between empiricism and rationalism, especially those involving the concepts of fact, hypothese, and system. It turns out that D’Alembert’s reflections on error, on the right to wander in science, and on the function of hypotheses stem directly from a great scientist Lady.

Recently American scholars have examined the politics of mourning in relation to anti-black racism in the United States. Drawing on the work of queer theorist Maggie Nelson, I will illustrate that a political sense of mourning is also relevant to queer theory and life as a way to bear witness to the violence of the sex-gender system even as we find ways of navigating through it. Lastly, I will defend the claim that a sense of mourning-without-end is political for any marginalized population that suffers from social death and from the disavowal of its suffering through the normalization of violence against them.

The recent push to diversify philosophy courses is often motivated by a desire to include underrepresented students. Although incorporating non-Western philosophy would achieve greater diversity, there seems to be no special reason to select non-Western traditions for this purpose. I argue this appearance is deceiving. Data suggests an absence of non-Western content in the curriculum causes alienation for some of our students of colour. Given the minimal burden it would impose on philosophy instructors to address this suffering, we have good reason to include some non-Western content in our introductory courses, where it is likely to have the greatest impact.

Kirk Lougheed has argued that the Objective Meaningful Life Argument establishes a type of anti-theism, the view that a theistic God’s existence would make things worse and thus it’s rational to prefer that God not exist. The objective version of this argument is said to be an improvement over my subjective version of the Meaningful Life Argument. I argue that Lougheed’s version fares no better than the subjective version.

In the third Critique, Kant claims that beauty is the symbol of morality and that the consideration of this relation is a duty. This paper declares Kant’s argument to be twofold: firstly, experience of beauty strengthens our moral feeling. Secondly, in judging the beautiful, we assume some indeterminate purpose underlying nature, based on which we can conceive of nature as cooperative with our practical pursuit. Hence, for the sake of moral cultivation and moral motivation, it is our duty to regard beauty as the special symbol of morality.

In discussions of the underrepresentation of women in professional philosophy, those sceptical of discrimination as an explanation often suggest that gender differences in interests are a plausible alternative hypothesis. Some suspect that if women’s differing interests explains underrepresentation, then interventions suggested by the discrimination hypothesis might be unnecessary—or even risky. I argue that one needs to consider how stereotypes might influence interests, and that doing so can provide a more even-handed assessment of the risks involved in proposed interventions.

In recent decades, speech act theorists began analyzing discourses in order to describe the logic that governs the use and understanding of language in the context of interlocutions. This paper is in the wake of those studies. It questions the fruitfulness of the notion of speech acts in literary pragmatics, analyzes some literary genres and proposes a discourse typology containing eight generic categories that reflect the possible links between factual and fictional discourses. In doing so, it offers a response to a question raised many years ago by a literary theorist that is directed to speech act theorists.