This paper examines the nature of what I call moral commitment: that is, a standing commitment to live up to moral demands. I first consider what kind of psychological state moral commitment might be, arguing that moral commitment is a species of commitment to a counterfactual condition. I explore the general structural features of attitudes of this type in order to shed light on how moral commitment might function in an agent’s motivational economy. I then use this understanding of moral commitment to respond to charges raised by prominent critics of moral theory; I argue that the counterfactual-condition account of moral commitment can successfully defuse the worries they express about the effects of moral commitment on one’s other attachments. In the final section, I suggest that these attractive general results may not be available to the consequentialist, which, if true, is a count against consequentialism.

In this paper I argue that the influence of Lutheran and Calvinist theology on the philosophy of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is the reconception and consequent curtailment of the power and role of language in philosophical thought. Prior to this influence, ethics is the basis for pre-Reformation philosophy, in that it entails a basic teleological conception of human nature upon which other branches of philosophical thought are based. Thus the primary objective of pre-Reformation philosophy is the justification of humanity, the laying out of how humanity might become right, complete, balanced, and just. What allows humanity to achieve its own good by seeking out the good in nature is language and the ability to wield it. The conclusion drawn is that philosophy prior to the Reformation is the justification of humanity as language.

Hare shares with other critics an objection to the use of moral judgments in the method of reflective equilibrium. However, the reasoning behind his criticismdistinguishes it from the more common criticisms that the use of moral judgments is unwarranted because of their suspect origin. While these objections challenge the epistemic worth of moral beliefs, Hare’s objection goes beyond to also critique the deeper theoretical commitments of the method. Hare’s acceptance of a strict differentiation between the meaning and applications of words and consequent rejection of holistic justification follow from his acceptance of the analytic/synthetic distinction, while Rawls’s holistic method of theory justification requires a rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction. In this essay, I explain how Hare’s criticism of the method of reflective equilibrium and his acceptance of the meaning/application distinction result from his acceptance of the analytic/synthetic distinction and draw from this specific discussion more general conclusions regarding the implications of accepting or rejecting the analytic/synthetic distinction for the use of moral judgments in moral theory justification. I conclude that an acceptance of the distinction precludes the use of moral judgments, while its rejection leaves open the possibility that they could be used, if the issue of their epistemic status can be successfully resolved.

The main premise of this article is that contemporary just-war theory offers only a weak response to its two main rivals: realism and pacifism. These alternativeperspectives on the ethics of war and peace are dismissed too readily by just-war theory, often for the wrong reasons. In light of this deficiency, this paper seeksto forward the debate in two ways: 1) by reconstructing realism and pacifism in a rigorous and charitable fashion; and 2) by contending that, even in the face of such formidable rivals, just-war theory remains the most plausible and principled account of the deep moral and political problems associated with the momentous issue of armed conflict.

The focus on the institutional implications of democratization in postcolonial plural societies invites the following conclusion. While procedural democracy, the general rules for aggregating preferences, is easily defeated, an alternative formulation, proportional representation or consociational democracy is defended. Consociational democracy has explicable reparable flaws and can be brought into coherence. The tools for repair require the embodiment of deliberative principles in the organs of consociational democracy. I argue in my conclusion that this theoretical argument can be utilized to explicate the ethnic conflict in Burundi.

European thought has had contradictory visions of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Some believed that humanity might survive indefinitely. Yet most of the modern thinkers assumed that humanity, in general, was not different from other species and would eventually disappear. In Russia, a different view prevailed. It was assumed that humanity belonged to a sort of “chosen species” and would have a different destiny from the other species. This idea of “humanity as a chosen species” was supported with the idea of Russia as a “chosen nation” that would lead humanity to mastery over nature and ensure its immortality. The end of the conception of the omega of world history in post-Soviet Russia had led to the discarding of humanity’s mastery over nature and its special position in the cosmos. From then on, it was stressed that humanity was an insignificant and perishable speck, and the future would most likely lead to humanity’s disappearance.

The present article examines the philosophical temperaments of James and Royce, as well as the kind and development of their philosophical styles. After surveying their stances toward the universe, attitudes toward the more, and their openness to other philosophers’ ideas and critiques, this article focuses on the streams of philosophical thought from which James and Royce chose to “drink”-British, German, Asian, and the work of logicians. Some evidence is drawn from their correspondence and places of study. Their philosophical styles, despite many common traits, differed in ageric tone, use of dichotomies, and frequency of reduplicative expressions, here called “double-barreled shotgun expressions.” Clearly, this research constitutes only one piece in the full mosaic of the increasingly studied James-Royce relationship.

Recent commentaries on “The Fixation of Belief” have located and emphasized an inconsistency or “tension” in Peirce’s central argument. On the one hand, Peirce maintains that “the settlement of opinion is the sole object of inquiry”; on the other, he wants to establish that the method of science is superior to all other methods of inquiry. The tension arises from the fact that whereas Peirce dismisses the methods of tenacity, authority, and a priority on the grounds that they cannot fulfill the “sole object of inquiry,” his defense of the scientific method makes no appeal to its ability to “settle opinion.” In this paper, the author reconstructs Peirce’s argument in a way that resolves this tension.

Many readers have suspected that Hegel---in arguing against Kant’s individualistic and critical way of approaching ethics and favoring instead an “ethical life” he associates with custom and habit---is in effect eliminating both individual judgment and any basis for criticism of corrupt or unjust communities. Most specialists reject this view of Hegel’s ethical theory, but they haven’t explained precisely how, on the contrary, ethical life preserves individual judgment and criticism within a new way of thinking about ethics. The goal of this paper is to do that.

Henry Allison criticizes and rejects naturalism because the idea of freedom is constitutive of rational spontaneity, which alone enables and entitles us to judge or to act rationally, and only transcendental idealism can justify our acting under the idea of freedom. Allison’s critique of naturalism is unclear because his reasons for claiming that free rational spontaneity requires transcendental idealism are inadequate and because his characterization of Kant’s idealism is ambiguous. Recognizing this reinforces the importance of the question of whether only transcendental idealism “can ground the right to the conceptual space” that we occupy when thinking spontaneously or acting under the idea of freedom. Only with a clear answer to this question can Kant’s idea of freedom provide a basis for assessing today’s naturalist orthodoxy.

The importance of the connotation theory in Ockham’s semantics and metaphysics can hardly be overstated---it is the main mechanism that brings forth Ockham’s famous ontological elimination. Yet none of the extant interpretations can satisfactorily accommodate three widely accepted theses: (1) there is no synonym in mental language; (2) a connotative term has a semantically equivalent nominal definition; and (3) there are simple connotative terms in Ockham’s mental language. In this paper I offer an interpretation that I argue can accommodate all.

It is generally agreed that Parmenides’ fragment B3 posits some type of relation between “thinking” and “Being.” I critically examine the modern interpretations of this relation. Beginning with the ancient sources and proceeding into modern times, I try to show that the modern rationalist reading of fragment B3 conflicts with its grammatical syntax and the context of the poem as a whole. In my critique, I suggest that rather than a statement about epistemological relations, it is, as it was originally understood, a religious assertion of metaphysical identity.

This paper on Aristotle’s De Amilla attempts to understand the treatise as a unified whole---a unity, it may be argued, that is only as problematic as is the unity of the soul of which it speaks. Aristotle’s treatise on the soul must strike its reader as being all too perplexing, and the subject of touch in particular seems to arouse such perplexity. But Aristotle would have it that “in our inquiry into the soul, in going forward, we must be thoroughly perplexed” (403b20). Touch, as a locus of perplexity in the De Amina, thus seems to provoke the kind of forward motion that leads to the human soul’s knowledge of itself. As such a locus of perplexity, I hope to show, the discussion of touch serves as a thread that provides the seams needed to tie the text together as an integrated whole. By focusing on Aristotle’s account of the faculty of touch, I believe I have come close to capturing the essence of what Aristotle means by entelecheia. Soul understood as an entelecheia amounts to the location of the soul’s highest possibilities in the activity of learning rather than knowing. Aristotle is much more Socratic than he might at first appear.