In this article I examine the ethical concept of responsibility as presented by Emmanuel Levinas and Karol Wojtyła. I focus throughout on questions pertaining to the relations between identity and alterity and between heteronomy and autonomy. To do so involves looking at the contrary roles that these two authors give to selfhood and freedom when accounting for our sense of obligation and responsibility toward others and toward ourselves. I then put Levinas’s phenomenological account of responsibility into dialogue with Wojtyła’s personalist account in an examination of the question of animal ethics. Specifically, I discuss the extent to which their ideas on our responsibilities toward others can be extended to the domain of non-human animals.

In Authority and Estrangement, Richard Moran provides a fascinating account of how we know what we believe that he calls the “transparency account.” This account relies on the transparency relation between the question of whether we believe that p and the question of whether p is true. That is, we can consider the former by considering the grounds for the latter. But Moran’s account has been criticized by David Finkelstein, who argues that it fails to explain how we know our attitudes and emotions more generally. The aim of this paper is to show how Moran’s transparency account can be extended to meet this criticism by modifying it, using insights from Davidson’s view on attitudes and emotions.

This essay touches on the following topics: imagination, caprice, relative and absolute presuppositions, language, knowledge, moral and aesthetic values, art, evolution, and dreams. Collingwood distinguished between pre-reflective and reflective consciousness and identified four features of consciousness: forms (simple or primitive, practical, and theoretical or specialized), objects, feelings, and selective attention or focus. He also spoke of the corruption of consciousness that psychologists of his day called repression. This is a way in which we can falsify consciousness that can lead to inauthentic thinking and to error. The phenomenological description of these processes that he gave us is a promising over-all account. This essay also utilizes some of the contemporary literature on consciousness to draw comparisons and contrasts with Collingwood’s account. As a historical note, it offers some parallels between Leibniz and Collingwood on attention, awareness, and consciousness.

If Wittgenstein’s later writings have implications for ontological investigations, they would appear to center on the thought that metaphysical claims, along with ontological commitments more broadly conceived, are problematically distanced from our everyday activities of language use and the contexts these involve. If they are taken in this way, it can seem natural to view them as furnishing a basis for thinking that ontological realism, at least when construed as metaphysically motivated, can be ruled out on linguistic-conceptual and/or ethical grounds as incompatible with how language figures in our lives. This paper argues against such a conclusion by claiming that on each of the currently prevalent approaches to interpreting Wittgenstein’s later thought, if we construe him as essentially an anti-dogmatic thinker, then we cannot draw such implications from his work without uncharitably attributing to him an internally inconsistent stance—one involving some sort of dogmatic commitment itself.

In this paper I argue that the right to equal respect and consideration that Rawls incorporates into the original position by means of the veil of ignorance cannot provide support for his two principles of justice independently of an appeal to considered judgments. The trouble is that this right is intolerably vague. The crucial terms are neither transparent in meaning nor clearly definable, and so they can only be understood against a background of considered judgments. To the extent that the principle is kept vague, it places no constraints on the conditions of the original position. To the extent that its meaning is specified, its interpretation presupposes the very principles and considered judgments that are supposed to be independently justified by the device of the original position. Finally, I respond to Norm Daniels’s claim that “wide reflective equilibrium” provides a way to test moral principles independently of their respective considered judgments.

Accounts of flourishing have been employed in many disciplines. Aristotelian moral philosophers have developed accounts of flourishing based on the characteristic forms of life of living things. In this paper we develop an Aristotelian account of flourishing for living things in general as part of a larger Aristotelian natural philosophy. We relate accounts of flourishing to evolutionary theory, behavioral studies, and ecology as well as to what flourishing is for individual organisms in their parts and activities. We distinguish between contingent and determinate activities by arguing that the behavior of living things are their contingent activities. We consider the structure of cognitive capacities in living things and their relation to flourishing, and we follow out the implications of the distinctively human capacities of cognition. Our consideration of humankind alloww us to show that the study and practice of human flourishing entail stewardship of nature.

Pamphilus’s introductory letter opens up contradictory ways of reading Hume’s Dialogues. The first, suggested by his claim to be a “mere auditor” to the dialogues that were “deeply imprinted in [his] memory,” is the empiricist reading. This traditional reading has gone several ways, including to the conclusions that the design of the mosquito and other “curious artifices of nature” that inflict pain and suffering on all bespeaks an utterly careless and insensate (if not malign) creator. Pamphilus’s preface also opens a more philosophical reading by his consideration of the ancient literary form of dialogue. This second interpretive path suggests that there is more design in its writing, and more revealed in it, than simple empiricist readings allow. Dialogically elucidating the Dialogues confronts us with the limits of empiricism in moral and religious philosophy. Hume’s last work, if read philosophically, exhibits the vacancy of empiricism.

In §§62–82 of Kant’s Critique of the Power of Judgment we find several references to the supersensible in the context of the solution of the antinomy of the power of teleological judgment. It is not, however, plainly clear how these references relate to each other or how they contribute to the proposed solution. Specially puzzling is the way in which the idea of an intelligent author of the world is related to the idea of an intuitive understanding. Some interpreters have considered that the intelligent author of the world should possess an understanding capable of intuition. Kant, however, never expressly establishes this relationship. In this paper I intend to show that the idea of an intelligent author of the world cannot be enlarged with the idea of an intuitive understanding. Both of the references to the supersensible perform different functions.

Descartes’s description of his method for discovering truth provides a helpful tool for interpreting his writings. In this article I offer a sample of how to interpret Descartes by understanding his algebraic method. My test case is the Cartesian teaching on divine freedom, which is well known to be inconsistent and often considered unfounded. I reconstruct the equations that led to these doctrines, arguing that Descartes held that the divine act of creation was both necessary and arbitrary because of the equations that resulted when he applied his method to the natural world.

This article analyzes the “Interlude” in Kierkegaard’s Philosophical Fragments. In particular, it examines Johannes Climacus’s response to Hegel’s view that a past actuality is necessary. I provide an in-depth analysis of Hegel’s view of modality (possibility, actuality, necessity) and of what he means when he says that a past actuality is necessary. In contrast to the standard scholarly interpretation, I argue that Climacus need not reject Hegel’s view because Hegel’s view of the necessity of the past is not so controversial or difficult to accept. Finally, I show that Climacus’s main critique is that we cannot know the past as necessary in any meaningful way. He worries that we might get so preoccupied with the futile task of trying to know the Hegelian necessity of the past that we forget to personally appropriate the past in a way that can help us live in the present.

Kant defined moral evil as reversing the order between self-love and morality. For many critics, however, his egoistically-orientated notion of self-love fails to make sense of the infinitely manifold incentives of evil under the human condition. Against this criticism, my article will re-interpret Kantian self-love and empirical self-conception from both the transcendental and empirical level, thus offering a transcendental grounding for the empirical manifestations of evil. In this way I will argue that we can explain rather sufficiently the infinite manifoldness of evil incentives in real human life with Kant’s prima facie simplistic definition of evil.

This essay offers a critical examination of Neil Ormerod’s treatment of the debate between Lonergan and Gilson on the question of being. Although this debate concerns a highly technical issue of metaphysics and epistemology, it remains germane and relevant, especially within the field of Christian thought. In Ormerod’s careful and for the most part generous examination of this debate, he argues that being for Gilson is perceived through the senses, whereas for Lonergan being is intended in the questions that arise from the relevant sense data. Where Gilson’s philosophy gives priority to the metaphysics of being, Lonergan gives priority to epistemology and cognitional theory. In arguing for the superiority of Lonergan’s approach to the question of being, Ormerod relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of Gilson’s metaphysics. By appeal to the more recent work of Kenneth Schmitz, this essay proposes a proper understanding of Gilson’s metaphysics as a basis for a more conciliatory relationship between these two giants in modern Christian philosophy who too often are pitted against one another.