Sophia

AbstractAccording to some, luck forms an inevitable part of admirable moral agency. According to others, it is incompatible with a basic principle of moral worth. What's the issue? Is there a ‘problem’ of moral luck; or are there many, or none? With reference to the practice of moral praise, I suggest that there is no single problem of moral luck as traditionally understood. Instead, there is a family of issues regarding the interpretation and assessment of moral performance. In the background is a mixture of descriptive and normative issues, including how to understand the legitimacy of social expectations, the value of effort, and the duties of communities to enable their members to live good and virtuous lives.

AbstractThis paper raises a new problem for the widely held view that, according to the Confucian philosopher Mencius, being a benevolent person necessarily entails being affectively disposed in morally relevant ways. I argue that ascribing such a view to Mencius generates an inconsistent triad with two of his central philosophical commitments on what it means to be a benevolent ruler. I then consider possible ways of resolving the triad and I argue that the most attractive option is to reject the view that a benevolent person must be affectively disposed in morally relevant ways; instead, being disposed to perform benevolent actions is enough.

AbstractKant's emphasis on the aesthetic idea permeates the judgment of beauty and the creation of beauty. This paper argues that both natural and artistic beauty are concrete expressions of aesthetic ideas. Regarding natural beauty, the subject appreciates the natural object through a dual grasp of the aesthetic normal idea and the rational idea. Regarding artistic beauty, the aesthetic idea can make the rational idea sensible, allowing the subject to derive aesthetic pleasure by reflecting on the aesthetic representations of rational ideas. Moreover, genius as a natural gift is capable of giving rules for creating artistic beauty, in which the spirit realizes the universal expression of the aesthetic idea. In Kant's framework, the combination of taste and genius provides a context for reflective judgment, which can thus be reconciled with the “free play of the imagination and the understanding.” In this way, the aesthetic idea embodies the dual perspective of subject and object, thereby furnishing a normative dimension to Kant's aesthetics.

AbstractThis paper discusses a thesis put forward by Robert Stern. The thesis is that Hegel's conception of forgiveness should not be read as something in which the ethics of the second person is expressed. The paper develops an alternative reading of forgiveness that takes Stern's objections to a direct second personal approach of forgiveness seriously. Forgiveness is second‐personal and we have the authority to forgive if we at the same time deny our individual standpoint as absolute. We thus get a concept of second‐personal action which implies that the authority is grounded in society or the community and not in the person as an individual.

AbstractA longstanding interpretive issue concerning Chapter IV of the Phenomenology of Spirit is how to understand the singularly difficult discussion of the role of life in the development of self‐consciousness. Some readers hold that self‐consciousness consists in the recognition of one's independence from the demands of life, while others have argued that self‐consciousness is both life and more than life at once. This paper rejects these readings and contributes to the ongoing discussion surrounding “additive” versus “transformative” models of rationality by arguing that Hegel develops a third way in Chapter IV, what I call the constitutive model of rationality (CMR). I argue that the master–slave dialectic in Chapter IV vindicates the CMR by attempting to deny it. On my reading, Hegel shows that organic desire in creatures like us cannot be satisfied as such in the absence of the reciprocal recognition of the rationality of desire.

AbstractIn this paper, I provide a history of Kant's extensive experimentation with the doctrine of the schematism. I claim that diverse interpretations of schemata—as syntheses or intuitions; as attributable to the imagination or to the understanding; even as wholly incomprehensible—mark specific stages in Kant's own thought, and that the changes in the doctrine reflect changes in the very idea of transcendental philosophy. Ultimately, I argue that the instability here lies at the heart of Kant's critical project: the schematism plays an essential role in securing its most basic presupposition, but it is difficult to account for within that project. This is a problem that Kant recognizes and grapples with directly, without completely resolving it to his own satisfaction.

AbstractIn contemporary philosophical discourse, there is a widespread assumption that meaning in life is individual: that it is a value inherent in individual human lives, that the content of this meaning varies from individual to individual, and that it differs in degree based on the individual. Despite these claims, however, objectivist theories of meaningful life have so far failed to do full justice to this assumption of individuality, leading to certain deficiencies and distortions in the understanding of meaningful life. This paper aims to highlight these shortcomings and to explain how the individuality of meaning in life can be better understood within an objectivist framework. This proposed individuality account provides a necessary correction and complement to existing objectivist accounts of meaningful life. The paper demonstrates how the individuality account successfully addresses common shortcomings, withstands various objections, and differs significantly from current approaches.

AbstractQuassim Cassam argues that contemporary philosophers largely neglect the kind of “substantial” self‐knowledge most people care about – knowledge of my character, beliefs, and desires – in favor of “trivial” forms of it that are nevertheless philosophically illuminating. This article takes up Cassam's challenge to turn toward accounts of substantial self‐knowledge, and, building on the work of Gadamer, makes the case that any such account has to address the question of the historical formation of the knowing subject. That historical formation – our ‘historicity’ – both erects barriers to self‐knowledge and serves as a source of it, and raises the question of how much self‐knowledge is even possible for historically situated knowers. To answer that, I take up Collingwood's claim that the aim of historical research is self‐knowledge, and his view that, since its scientific turn in the nineteenth century, history has enabled self‐knowledge of an especially significant sort. Developing these and other ideas in Collingwood, I draw a distinction between what I call “historico‐philosophical” self‐knowledge, which includes knowledge of our historicity, and “garden‐variety historical” self‐knowledge, which is focused on the particular historical formations in which we find ourselves. I argue that both count as substantial self‐knowledge and round out an understanding of myself that includes any grasp I might have of my character, beliefs, and desires.

AbstractReadings of Hegel's account of modality tend to emphasize the “necessity of contingency” thesis. In this paper, I argue that this is not the primary aim of Hegel's “Actuality” chapter in the Science of Logic. Instead of arguing simply for the necessity of contingency, Hegel argues for the identity between contingency and necessity. I offer a reading of formal, real, and absolute modality in Hegel's Logic that shows how this identity claim is established, demonstrating that necessity is not simply that which cannot be otherwise, but a process whereby something becomes what it is in becoming its other.

AbstractIn this paper, I explore several issues surrounding what is called “telepathy” in the context of the problem of other minds. I begin with a quick review of the conditions in which this notion arose and the difficulties to which it gave rise upon its introduction. This review will allow me, after having shown that the notion of telepathy provides no path to the problem's solution, to draw a distinction between two discursive levels: an epistemological or ontological level, on the one hand, and a semantic or logical level, on the other. I maintain that it is at the second level that the deepest and most intractable difficulties relating to the “powers of the mind” arise. These difficulties occupy a blind spot in discussions involving the notion of telepathy (Alan Turing will provide a striking illustration of this). Finally, I suggest that this pseudo‐solution (telepathy) is at root a response to a pseudo‐problem—the inaccessibility of other minds—since the difficulties with the intelligibility of telepathy are parallel to those with which the problem of “other minds” is freighted.

AbstractAccording to Kant, both finite (human) and non‐finite (divine) wills are subject to the moral law, though the manner of their subjection differs. The fact that the law expresses an ‘ought’ for the human will is a function of our imperfection. On this picture, a non‐finite will thus enjoys a certain explanatory priority vis‐à‐vis its finite counterpart: we can understand the practical constraint that binds the latter by seeing how contingent limitations differentiate it from the former. However, a reading of Kant's principle of autonomy that inextricably ties the achievement of willing to the adoption of a practical standpoint, gives us reasons for doubting this order of explanation. It suggests instead that we might best understand the practical ‘ought’ by taking the human will as explanatorily primitive. And if we do so, we can question the coherence of taking a will for which the law is not normative to furnish a paradigmatic exemplification of the relation that lies at the heart of Kant's notion of autonomy: namely, the relation between free volition and moral necessity.

AbstractThis article brings two outstanding figures into conversation about the problem of fictional entities and their indeterminacies: Roman Ingarden and David Lewis. Lewis's account of fiction lacks an adequate ontology of ficta‐qua‐objects. Relying on his modal realism does not help, for it would make ficta “concrete” entities that merely indexically differ from our world's entities. In this regard, I refer to Ingarden's “purely intentional entities.” I read Lewis's possible worlds in terms of Ingarden's ontology; hence establishing what I term “Purely Intentional Modal Fictionalism.” In so doing, the demarcation between fiction and actuality is preserved. In return, Lewis's “Analyses” adequately account for Ingarden's “spots of indeterminacy.” Therefore, my proposal reconciles Ingarden's ficta with Lewis's possibilist approach to truth in fiction. This approach grounds Lewis's account in a less problematic ontology with a distinct sui generis status for ficta and provides Ingarden's ficta with better determination principles.