ABSTRACT: In this paper, I revisit arguments for and against various theses concerning higher-order knowledge in order to fully gauge their impact on the principles of positive and negative introspection. I argue that the expression “knowing that one knows” has at least two salient understandings: the more common one, labelled “transparentist”, validates the principle of positive introspection, while the other which is less common, labelled “agrippean”, supports some of the arguments against this principle.

ABSTRACT: Qualia, the subjectively known qualities of conscious experience, are judged by many philosophers and scientists to lie beyond the domain of scientific explanation, thus making the conscious mind partly incomprehensible to the objective physical sciences. Some, like Kripke and Chalmers, employ modal logic to argue that explanations of qualia are impossible in principle. I argue that there already exist perfectly normal scientific explanations of qualia, and rebut the arguments of those who deny this possibility.

ABSTRACT: In this paper I argue that John McDowell’s objections to Philipa Foot’s ethical naturalism do not justify a rejection of her views, but only clarifies what we can defensibly take from her position. Moreover, his comments suggest a way in which Foot’s naturalism may help to secure the realism McDowell defends in his own work. In seeing how Foot’s naturalism can reassure us of the reality of ethical reasons, we can understand how McDowell needs something like Foot’s naturalism in order to redeem his own realist aspirations for ethics.

ABSTRACT: The traditional conception of experience — also known as the causal conception — has been criticised in the last thirty years or so by proponents of the disjunctive conception. This article examines an argument recently put forward by John McDowell in support of disjunctivism. Broadly speaking, his argument can be seen as an attempt to show that, unlike the disjunctive conception, the traditional conception cannot account for a crucial aspect of experience. I aim here to show that McDowell’s argument — which is of a transcendental kind — does not have sufficient resources to achieve its intended goal.

ABSTRACT: In his recent collection of essays, Language, Truth and History (2005), Donald Davidson appears to endorse a philosophy of language which gives primary importance to the notion of the speaker’s communicative intentions, a perspective on language not too dissimilar from that of Paul Grice. If that is right, then this would mark a major shift from the formal semanticist approach articulated and defended by Davidson in his Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (1984). In this paper, I argue that although there are many similarities between these two thinkers, Davidson has not abandoned his earlier views on language

ABSTRACT: The aim of this two-part article is to develop a non-foundational re-reading of Jonas’ ethics. In Part 1 the argument is situated within Jonas’s concern with and understanding of nihilism. In order to delineate the proposed non-foundational reading, a philosophical and a theological discursive type in Jonas’s work is identified and the limits and failures thereof are discussed. In stead of the metaphysical foundation of ethicity, a re-reading of his work is developed out of his myth. This reading maintains the initial aim of defeating nihilism. The limitations and possibilities of this alternative reading of the philosophy of responsibility are explored.

ABSTRACT: The two main goals of this paper are to question the possibility of the existence of moral emotions and to decipher the notion of moral emotion. I start with a brief critical analysis of various philosophical understandings of moral emotions before setting out an evolutionary line of approach that seems promising at first glance: according to the functional evolutionary approach, moral emotions have the evolutionary function of sustaining cooperation. It turns out ultimately that this approach has its own drawbacks. I finally propose to give up the idea of moral property intrinsic to some emotions; “moral” seems instead merely to label emotions (or more precisely emotional episodes) when they occur in morally relevant contexts.

ABSTRACT: Careful analysis of the details of the text allows us to refine Socrates’ understanding of manliness. Laches submits without a fight to Socrates’ objections to his definition of manliness as prudent perseverance. He does not appreciate that Socrates objections merely require that he make his definition more precise. Nicias refuses to consider objections to his understanding of manliness as avoiding actions that entail risk. The two sets of objections show that manliness entails first calculating that a risk is worth taking and then subsequently not rejecting that calculation without due consideration.

ABSTRACT: In a seminal article on the origin of philosophical idealism in the western philosophical tradition, Myles Burnyeat argued that idealism could not have come about prior to Descartes. According to Burnyeat, Descartes introduced a radical version of external world scepticism which made it possible for subsequent philosophers (Berkeley, e.g.) to argue that reality is composed exclusively of immaterial minds and their contents (ideas). I argue that (1) the success of Burnyeat’s argument depends upon the meaning of the term ‘idealism’ and (2) that one of Burnyeat’s definitions of the term does not rule out the possibility of Pre-Cartesian idealism.