This essay attempts to counter the claim that there is a significant shift or even a break in the body of Merleau-Ponty’s work, one that dramatically moves from a focus on perception to a focus on language. This break proves to be untenable for the following reasons: (1) The early studies of perception do not disregard the importance of language. (2) The later studies of language do not disregard perception and are purposely taken up to help more fully enlighten the importance of the earlier works. (3) The relatively recent appearance of Merleau-Ponty’s later Nature reveals that the author returns to earlier ontological studies in order to develop them more fully, and that he does so, in part, to more fully understand the emergence of human perception and its connection to language.

Spinoza assigns to the imagination a wide-ranging and often disparate looking set of operations. Commentators have long recognized that these operations share a certain proximity to the body and a common tendency to lead people into error. Yet others remark on the apparent thinness of an overarching theme. This article examines the prominent and often underappreciated role of memory in unifying Spinoza’s account of imaginative cognition. The discussion revisits various aspects of imagination in light of their integrated characterization as forms of remembering. The article also assesses reasons other than memory that Spinoza has for grouping them in common. The examination focuses on the intrinsic character of the imagination and its related operations in the Ethics, while occasionally bringing other works into play.

Christian philosophers have always been interested in clarifying the relationship between God and ethics. The theories presented on this topic can be divided into two kinds: “divine command” and “other.” In this paper I evaluate two interesting but ultimately incompatible versions of the “other” variety: one by George Mavrodes and one by Søren Kierkegaard. In the course of my analysis I argue that anyone who reads Kierkegaard’s Works of Love as presenting a divine command theory (e.g., C. Stephen Evans in his recent book Kierkegaard’s Ethic of Love) is mistaken.

Plato’s use of afterlife myths is often viewed as an abandonment of rational discourse for a coercive practice designed to persuade citizens to be concerned about the condition of their souls by appealing to their worst fears about the afterlife. But such interpretations overlook the frequently critical tenor of Plato’s myths. In this paper I develop the claim that Plato appeals to muthos as a means of critiquing various specific logoi by focusing upon the relationship between the myth of the earth in the Phaedo and the four logoi about immortality that precede it. I argue that these logoi fail to be persuasive because they rely upon a construal of the relationship between body and soul that denies them meaningful reference to the lives and deaths of embodied beings. The myth of the earth provides a critical engagement with the perspective from which Socrates and his interlocutors have produced these logoi.

The relation between the concepts of the subject of apperception, the phenomenal self, and the noumenal self has long puzzled commentators on Kant’s theoretical account of the self. This paper argues that many of the puzzles surrounding Kant’s account can be resolved by treating the subject of apperception and other transcendental predicates of thinking as a dimension of the noumenal self. Yet this interpretation requires a clarification of how the transcendental predicates of thinking can be attributed to the noumenal self without violating the thesis of noumenal ignorance. The clarification is achieved through a careful analysis of the meaning of the latter thesis. The paper’s interpretation is then shown to be consistent with Kant’s rejection of traditional ontology and with the dual-aspect view. The paper’s final section argues that transcendental predicates are properly construed as logical predicates but must be distinguished from ordinary examples of the latter.

In his discussions of “sensibility” and “feeling,” Hegel has a compelling interpretation of the emotional foundations of experience. I begin by situating “mood” within the context of “sensibility,” and then focus on the inherently “outwardizing” or self-externalizing character of mood. I then consider the different modes of moody self-externalization, for the sake of determining why we express ourselves in language. I conclude by demonstrating why the notions of emotion and spirit are necessarily linked.