This article clarifies Hegel’s argument within “Force and the Understanding” in his Phenomenology of Spirit by developing Hegel’s underlying point through discussion of recent and ongoing issues concerning explanation in natural and psychological science. The latter proceeds by way of a critical discussion of the problem of other minds and the “theory theory of mind.” The article thereby shows how and why Hegel’s analysis of the understanding inaugurates a crucial transition in his Phenomenology, from consciousness toself-consciousness and life. Putting Hegel’s underlying points into conversation with recent science shows how his point—that scientific understanding is not abstract but embedded in human life—still speaks to science.

Are there moral norms or virtues, the application or exercise of which are necessary for successful progress in enquiry? This paper considers the work of one thinker who is convinced of an affi rmative answer to this question, Alasdair MacIntyre. For MacIntyre, the possibility of progress in enquiry depends, ultimately, on the way in which the virtues, and related normative requirements such as that demanding narrative unity to a life, shape and govern the context and practice of enquiry. Correlatively, MacIntyre has identified the role that moral failings can play in intellectual error and corrupted forms of enquiry.

The functional pragmatism advocated by Nicholas Rescher derives from the conviction that we have no strict evidence for the existence of extramental reality and therefore must postulate it in order to make any sense of truth, communication, and scientific projects. This essay challenges Rescher’s starting point by arguing that the reason extramental reality cannot be argued to is because it is immediately evident. But then to claim that one must postulate it is to adopt only a second-best kind of realism.

This essay attempts to provide an alternative approach to the philosophy of religion through a new interpretation of Daoist philosophy in light of Husserl’s phenomenology. I argue that Lao-Zhuang’s wu-wei should be understood as a reduction of our existential and conceptual beliefs about the reality of this world. In Lao-Zhuang, wu-wei is related to the theme of decentering of the subject. In order to be a true self, we have to make space at the core of our being for Dao to appear. The authentic selfhood is constituted in its correctrelation to Dao. In Daoist philosophy of religion, the center of gravity in the relation between Dao and the world (or worlds) is shifted from this world to Dao, and the problematic in the philosophy of religion is displaced from a truth-oriented issue to a receptivity issue.

Aquinas argues that an agent’s act may be voluntary, involuntary, or even nonvoluntary. An agent performs a non-voluntary act on these conditions: (a) the agent does not know the act falls under a certain description D, (b) the act under D is not contrary to the agent’s will, and (c) if the agent had known that the act fell under D, the agent would still have performed it. Aquinas’s full account of non-voluntary acts is terse and ambiguous and seems to contradict his fuller, more articulate, and philosophically rich views on voluntary and involuntary acts. The appearance of inconsistency, however, is illusory. Once understood, his account of non-voluntary acts clarifies various aspects of his theory of responsibility that are hard to glean from other discussions and reveals just how strongly Aquinas is inclined to Augustinian internalism.

Gadamer’s hermeneutic project is an effort to rejoin what he called the “unbroken tradition of rhetorical and humanist culture” to its own thought. My focus here is on the distinctive hermeneutic schematism of persons and culture in conjunction with the Renaissance doctrine of prudence. The complex hermeneutic understanding of human community requires a balancing act that privileges the agency of language and culture by denying the dominion of the sovereign self. Further, it employs a reflux or interanimation that refuses to diminish the dignity of the person. Classical and Christian humanism already had something of this complex notion of agency that served as a seedbed for the hermeneutic achievement. By reading that earlier conception through the lens of his own time, Gadamer’scomplex voicing of personhood expresses the dispersion and unity of human being as a unique balance of classical and modern insight.