This paper attempts to present, both historically and analytically, the way philosophy had been exercised and developed in Modern Greece from the middle of the eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century in connection with its culture and history. It aims to introduce the reader to Neohellenic philosophy and its distinctive characteristics, and to acquaint her with the endeavours of many outstanding Greek intellectuals to continue the Hellenic philosophical and cultural tradition, going back to Greek Antiquity that had been transmitted through the Byzantine learning, while, at the same time, to incorporate into their thinking Western philosophical traditions. My exegesis starts from the fifteenth century, when the Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople, the capital of the Byzantine Empire, and the Greek intellectuals went into exile in the West. Dealing with issues of educational reforms and with philosophical and linguistic controversies (seventeenth–nineteenth centuries), I shall examine, systematically and selectively, the Western influences that made possible the revival of traditional philosophy in Greek thought as well as the renewal of Greek cultural identity that led to the Greek War of Independence (1821–1827) and into the modern period of Greek history and intellectual thought.

Le dualisme de Braïlas (1812–1884) qui fut l’unique partisan de Victor Cousin (1792–1867) à avoir, après lui, constitué un système philosophique complet, est un dualisme modéré, du fait qu’en premier lieu, entre la matière et l’esprit, tout un groupe d’activités de la conscience humaine y est censé s’interpoler; qu’en deuxième lieu, le dogmatisme rationaliste braïlien est fondé sur une correspondance rigoureuse entre l’ordre universel et l’ordre rationnel, qui n’est guère dérangé que par l’intuition d’un ordre supérieur et plus parfait, conçu et reproduit par l’imagination, grâce à des processus créationnels; et qu’en troisième lieu, la philosophie braïlienne, quant à ses caractères dominants, s’avère, surtout du point de vue épistémologique, non pas une application servile, mais, par contre, une considération critique des thèses de l’éclectisme cousinien.

Heidegger’s 1927 lecture course, The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, includes an examination of the Kantian conception of being as it appears within the first Critique’s refutation of the ontological proof of God’s existence. There, Heidegger maintains that the Kantian definition of being as position is beset with an ambiguity that Kant could not resolve, as such a resolution would require the repudiation of the traditional ontology of the subject that Kant presupposes. Heidegger then claims that his own ontology of Dasein, articulated in Being and Time, addresses the ambiguity in the Kantian position, and thus in Kantian being, through a phenomenology of the intentio/intentum relation—an analysis in which Heidegger attempts to move beyond the traditional ontology. Heidegger’s assessment of Kant, here, is characteristic of Heideggerian Kant-interpretation. That is, Heidegger typically views Kant as having pushed the traditional ontology to its limits, and then as having retreated from the radical implications of his own thought, due to his allegiance to that ontology. And in the context of his Kant-interpretations, Heidegger characterizes his own philosophical position as resulting from the pursuit of these radical implications of Kantian thought.

The Evidence Thesis is the intuitively plausible principle that in order to know that p one must base her belief that p on adequate evidence. Despite the plausibility of this principle, Andrew Moon (2012) has recently argued that the principle is false. Moon’s argument consists of presenting what he takes to be a clear instance of knowledge and arguing that the subject in the case does not have this knowledge on the basis of any evidence. I argue that Moon’s example fails to be a genuine counterexample to the Evidence Thesis.

The aim of this paper is to shed light on Nietzsche’s late investigation of the Western human being, with particular reference to Twilight of the Idols. I shall argue that this investigation can be seen as a “pragmatic anthropology,” according to the meaning that Kant gave to this notion in 1798. Although the paper focuses on Nietzsche’s thought, an analysis of Kant’s anthropology and the comparison between it and Nietzsche’s late views of the human being will show both their differences and similarities on the topic.

For the process of extending democracy and the rule of law beyond national borders, German public lawyers have developed the concept of a “constitutionalisation of international law.” Let me first explain this concept (I) and then, in a second part, use some aspects of the present European crisis as an example for identifying one major obstacle on the road that eventually may lead us to a political constitution for a multicultural world society without a world government (II).

Direct realist versions of foundationalism (hereafter, DRF) have recently been advocated by (among others) Pryor, Huemer, Alston, and Plantinga. DRF can hold either that our foundational observation beliefs are about the simple perceptible qualities of objects (like color, shape, etc.), or that our foundational observation beliefs are more complex ones about objects in the world. I will show that whether our observational beliefs are simple or complex, the agent must possess other epistemically significant states (knowledge, or justified beliefs) in order for these observational beliefs to be justified. These other states are therefore epistemically prior to observation belief, and prevent them from being epistemically foundational.

After having presented some key concepts in Kierkegaard’s works this paper focuses on how they have been interpreted and created the ground for various disputes about the use and understanding of Kierkegaard. It first presents some aspects of the debate in Denmark about Kierkegaard and then discusses the difference between two overall interpretations of Kierkegaard’s works by two non-Danish Kierkegaard scholars: Henri-Bernard Vergote and Mark C Taylor. This difference raises the question about the relationship between Kierkegaard and Hegel and thereby about the relationship between poetics and politics.

Leibniz was interested in China throughout his life, and he admired its culture. Originally, his interests revolved around Chinese characters, but widened when meeting the Jesuit China missionary P. Grimaldi in Rome 1689. From that time on, Leibniz pursued the project of a knowledge exchange between both sides of the world. He was convinced that Europe and China were on the same cultural level, while diverging over advances in distinct fields. In his view, Europe was more advanced in theoretical areas, such as logic, mathematics, geometry, physics, mathematical astronomy, and theory of natural religion, while China was superior in empirical disciplines, such as in observational astronomy, medicine, historiography, and moral philosophy, which he understood as natural (i.e. rational) theology. This project of knowledge exchange presupposed the recognition of Chinese culture. In this sense, Leibniz strongly supported the Jesuit position, according to which the rites of ancestral worship and reverence of Confucius are riti politici rather than literal expressions of religious faith. Leibniz’s main objection to the Pope’s negative assessment of Chinese rites was that one cannot settle the so-called Rites Controversy as long as one fails to interpret adequately Chinese culture and Confucian thought in particular.

Although Kant is most well-known for his arguments in support of pure or a priori concepts, he also attempts to give an account of how empirical concepts are acquired. In this paper I want to take a close look at this account. Specifically, I am interested in a recent criticism that Kant’s explanation of empirical concept acquisition is, in some sense, circular. I will consider and criticize a recent attempt to solve this problem. Finally, I will argue for my own solution to the circularity problem relying, oddly enough, on Kant’s commitment to pure or a priori concepts of the understanding as well as the pure forms of the imagination. Briefly, I want to argue that Kant can give a coherent and non-circular account of empirical concept acquisition relying primarily on the a priori conceptual tools developed in the Critique of Pure Reason.

Is genuinely normative political theory necessarily informed by distinctively moral values? Eva Erman and Niklas Möller (2015) answer that question affirmatively, and highlight its centrality in the debate on the prospects of political realism, which explicitly eschews pre-political moral foundations. In this comment we defend the emerging realist current. After briefly presenting Erman and Möller’s position, we (i) observe that freedom and equality are not obviously moral values in the way they assume, and (ii) argue that a non-moral distinction between politics and sheer domination can give us a distinctively political normativity. The two points are related but freestanding.

In a previous article, we unpacked the so-called “ethics first premise”—the idea that ethics is “prior” to politics when theorizing political legitimacy— that is denied by political realists. We defended a “justificatory” reading of this premise, according to which political justification is irreducibly moral in the sense that moral values are among the values that ground political legitimacy. We called this the “necessity thesis.” In this paper we respond to two challenges that Robert Jubb and Enzo Rossi raise against our proposal. Their first claim is that our argument for the necessity thesis is question begging, since we assume rather than show that freedom and equality are moral values. The second claim is that Bernard Williams’s Basic Legitimacy Demand demonstrates the possibility of giving political legitimacy a non-moral foundation, since it allows for a distinction to be made between politics and sheer domination. We refute both claims.

In this rejoinder to Erman and Möller’s reply to our “Political Norms and Moral Values,” we clarify the sense in which there can be specifically political values, and expound the practice-dependent notion of legitimacy adopted by our preferred version of political realism.

It has recently been argued that the Special Theory of Relativity entails that shapes are not intrinsic properties of objects. Rather, they are properties an object has only relative to an inertial frame. In this discussion note I argue that this position, while correct, is incomplete. Objects have frame-dependent shapes because they have an intrinsic property that is the same in all inertial frames.

Lynne Rudder Baker offers an account of what it is to be a human person, involving what she calls a “first person perspective,” that is separable from her constitution-view of human persons and adaptable to a variety of rival views of personal ontology. I argue that this account fails, no matter what view of personal ontology it is coupled with, on account of giving biological humanity an absurd role in determining the personhood of both possible human and non-human person-candidates. The failure of Baker’s account suggests difficulties for any view that would grant personhood to marginal case humans while denying it to non-humans with relevantly similar psychological properties.

There are three widely held beliefs among epistemologists: (1) the goal of inquiry is truth or something that entails truth; (2) epistemology aims for a reflectively stable theory via reflective equilibrium; (3) epistemology is a kind of inquiry. I argue that accepting (1) and (2) entails denying (3). This is a problem especially for the philosophers (e.g., Duncan Pritchard and Alvin Goldman) who accept both (1) and (2), for in order to be consistent, they must reject (3).