Ahead-of-Publication / Just-Accepted

Leibniz’s definition of justice as the charity of the wise suggests obligations to future generations, but Leibniz seldom discusses intergenerational ethics directly. This paper examines what Leibniz’s theory of justice entails for intergenerational ethics by addressing both why we have obligations to the future and what those obligations require. Drawing on Leibniz’s Dialogue entre Theophile et Polidore (1679) and related writings, I reconstruct two arguments Leibniz uses to ground obligations to the common good and to posterity: (1) “the temporal horizon argument” focused on divine recompense and (2) “the perpetual citizenship argument” focused on the commonwealth of minds. I argue that while the first argument implicitly includes care for posterity, the second makes such obligations clearer and more compelling by establishing a transgenerational moral community. The paper concludes by outlining a Leibnizian framework for intergenerational justice, showing how Leibniz balances his commitment to the present with his commitment to progress.

Throughout the Transcendental Aesthetic as well as elsewhere in the first Critique , Kant characterizes things in themselves in terms of abstraction: to consider things as they are in themselves is to consider them in abstraction from the conditions of our sensibility. Despite Kant’s frequent appeal to the notion of abstraction, the view that our talk of ‘things in themselves’ should be understood in terms of abstraction (‘the abstraction analysis’) has not gained much traction among non-epistemological readers of transcendental idealism. In this paper, I give a systematic account of the notion of abstraction at work in Kant’s characterizations of things in themselves, arguing that while abstraction is a logical procedure, some of Kant’s background assumptions in the Transcendental Aesthetic warrant attributing some metaphysical import to the abstraction analysis. I also defend the abstraction analysis against the longstanding objection that it trivializes the non-spatiotemporality of things in themselves.

There is a relatively overlooked problem with Kant’s claim that in inquiry we must treat nature as if it were actually infinite in extent: he also states that the concept of an actually infinite world is self-contradictory. This threatens to make the command to treat the world as infinite incoherent; the problem also affects his error theory for traditional metaphysics and his account of the sublime. After laying out this worry in greater detail than has been done so far, I consider and reject readings on which Kant either does not consider this case a violation of ought-implies-can or allows that in this case, following an incoherent demand is epistemically acceptable on consequentialist grounds. Then I turn to my preferred solution, which takes the relevant regulative principle to concern Kant’s noumena (understood as intensionally distinct from things in themselves), whereas the contradiction is provoked only by representations of phenomena.

In the Critique of Practical Reason , Kant argues that rejection of the ideality of space and time leads, via some additional assumptions, to Spinozism. Understanding this ambitious argument requires understanding, inter alia, what Kant means by ‘Spinozism,’ what assumptions figure in the argument, and how these assumptions are supposed to be connected to the ideality of space and time. While my interpretation differs from others on numerous points, one crucial difference lies in my account of the key assumptions. As I argue, Kant takes them to arise naturally from human reason itself. The most crucial and substantive among them concern reason’s naturally formed Ideas of, respectively, absolute space, absolute time, and God. More precisely, Kant takes these claims to be products of a natural transcendental illusion, and he holds that human reason under the spell of transcendental realism is unable to expose them as illusory and unwarranted.

This article challenges Adorno’s characterization of Fichte’s idealism as an extreme form of identity thinking that entails complete human domination of nature. Its argument consists of two main stages. First, Fichte’s idealism will be shown to explain the possibility of the type of critical subject that Adorno presupposes in such a way that a certain primacy must be accorded to the subject in its relation to the object. Second, a distinction between two levels of inquiry and presentation – the transcendental level and the historical empirical level – will be drawn. This distinction is applied to the concept of a relation between the subject or ‘I’ and the object or ‘not-I’ in such a way as to (1) relate this concept to the type of ‘historico-practical’ concept already introduced with reference to the concept of enlightenment and (2) avoid a too literal interpretation of those passages in Fichte’s writings concerning the relationship between the human mind and nature that appear to justify Adorno’s characterization of his idealism.

I compare a 1689 ballad by the Mexican Hieronymite nun Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, “Let Us Pretend I am Happy,” with David Hume’s 1742 essay, “The Sceptic.” I argue that each composition conveys several competing messages. At the surface layer, both compositions employ skeptical reasoning to argue against the usefulness of learning for attaining happiness. They also invite ironic readings on which learning is a primary source of joy – a point also emphasized by Sor Juana’s defenses of women’s right to study. Ultimately, I argue, both Sor Juana and Hume hold an intermediary position between the surface-layer pessimism and ironic optimism. They express this middle position using a literary device I call ‘layered irony.’ Comparing the two compositions reveals that layered irony is a fitting device for producing the middle position, for critiquing skepticism, and for increasing philosophy’s efficacy in its traditional function as a kind of therapy.

This paper focuses on the development of a concept that profoundly shapes the legal and moral philosophy in the early modern period: Hugo Grotius’ notion of loose obligation, which registers an ought-claim of natural law with a distinct binding force. Loose obligation differs from obligation of natural law strictly speaking insofar as it is non-actionable; but loose obligation also differs from supererogatory counsel insofar as it is non-optional. The notion of loose obligation becomes one pillar of the modern natural law school owing to Pufendorf’s popularization; but since Pufendorf’s reconstruction, its territory is so expanded that it encroaches upon the realm counsel used to occupy. Reexamining Grotius’ conceptual architectonics and its reception helps us see how the ‘jural’ outlook of modern moral philosophy takes shape.

Predominantly, previous interpretations of Hume’s discussion of the sensible knave embrace the following three claims: (1) that Hume raises the topic of the knave to respond to the ‘why be just?’ question; (2) that Hume’s discussion of the knave extends the theory of justice and moral psychology developed within the Treatise ; and (3) that Hume’s reply to the knave is unsatisfactory. In this paper, I develop an interpretation of the knave passage that draws exclusively on the second Enquiry and shows that Hume’s discussion of the knave follows consistently from the conclusions Hume draws within it. Beyond challenging the above three claims, the Enquiry interpretation highlights Hume’s views on the connection between happiness and virtue, shows that Hume is most plausibly read as a qualitative hedonist, and suggests that the differences between the accounts of justice within the Treatise and the second Enquiry are more significant than has been previously acknowledged.

In Republic book 9, Plato offers a puzzling argument suggesting that subjects can err even in their immediate self-ascriptions of pleasure. In this paper, I offer a detailed analysis and original interpretation of this argument, which I call the Deceptive Pleasure Argument. On the reading I defend here, Plato’s Socrates argues that pleasure is more than a feeling. The raw feel of the hedonic experience – the felt sense or feeling tone of our pleasure (that which enters awareness) – just partially constitutes a pleasure; in addition, it takes an underlying restorative process in which one of our physical or psychological needs is being met. In the absence of such an underlying restorative process, we are dealing with a case of deceptive pleasure or hedonic illusion akin to perceptual illusion. My reading does not just show that Plato’s views are more subtle and cogent than often appreciated, it also elucidates how the Deceptive Pleasure Argument mounts a powerful strike against the challenge posed by Socrates’s interlocutors.

The recent literature on Leibniz’s views on salvation and damnation has focused on whether Leibniz was a lifelong believer in the doctrine of eternal damnation, or whether he came to accept universalism, the doctrine that everyone will be saved. Neglected, however, has been Leibniz’s complex and surprising justification of damnation. In this paper, I examine Leibniz’s attempt to answer the ‘complaint of the damned’: the damned’s complaint that God has treated them unjustly by creating them such that damnation was inevitable. I argue that Leibniz’s ‘psychology of damnation’ is the centerpiece of his response to the complaint of the damned. I further show that the psychology of damnation is not only of theological interest, but also provides an account of the moral psychology of evil in general, and helps solve a puzzle that arises from Leibniz’s naturalized theory of punishment – the puzzle of how vice can be naturally ‘self-punishing.’

While the skeptical undercurrents of early modern thought have received sustained scholarly attention, such work has tended to be inattentive to hermeneutical or exegetical skepticism. This is a form of skepticism that threatened to stop hermeneutical theorizing in its tracks and absorbed several central hermeneutical concepts in its orbit. Hermeneutical probability was one of them. In this paper, I aim to examine whether the doctrine of hermeneutical probability as it was originally formulated by Christian Thomasius is a surrogate of exegetical skepticism. I argue that not only is the examined view incompatible with skepticism, but that it can indeed articulate a promising response to it. Since general reflection on probability shaped the philosophical landscape of the Early German Enlightenment, the viability of the Thomasian view has much broader ramifications that extend beyond hermeneutics to historics, ethics, and physics.

In the Anthropology , Kant writes that both passions and affects impede reflection. However, he also holds that passions can be paired with reflection, while affects cannot. Stating that passions can both impede reflection and be paired with it seems to imply a contradiction. I seek to solve the problem by arguing that Kant is drawing on two notions of ‘reflection.’ The one kind of reflection consists in the ability to properly assess whether one should act from one’s affect or one’s passion in light of some normative standards. The other kind of reflection consists in the ability to explicitly endorse at least some of the more general maxims that underlie one’s maxim. In view of this distinction, I argue that the former kind is impeded by both passions and affects, while the latter kind is impeded by affects alone.

Spinoza’s definition of attributes as “what the intellect perceives of a substance, as constituting its essence” ( Ethics 1D4) has led many scholars to endorse an attribute-neutral reading of his metaphysics. According to this reading, attributes like thought and extension pertain to the way substance is perceived, rather than how it is in itself. Yet Spinoza defines God as “a substance consisting of an infinity of attributes” ( Ethics 1D6). No attribute-neutral interpreter has yet explained how an attribute-neutral substance could be defined by its quantity of attributes. To resolve this problem, I propose a new reading of Spinoza’s definition of attribute, arguing that we should understand Spinoza’s attributes as model-dependent , on analogy with the model-dependent dimensions of Cartesian geometry. I use the idea of model-dependence to explain how Spinoza can maintain that having infinitely many attributes is a feature of an attribute-neutral substance.

This paper proposes a new way of understanding the thematic unity of the Timaeus . One of the major obstacles to appreciating the unity of the dialogue has been the apparent disconnect between the prologue, which prominently includes Critias’ account of ancient Athens (20d–26d), and Timaeus’ cosmological account. Past attempts to establish unity have worked on the assumption that the Timaeus as a whole is looking forward to the Critias and have sought to show that Critias’ account is in some sense complementary to Timaeus’ cosmological program. Building on recent work that calls the authenticity of the Critias into question, I argue that we can best appreciate the thematic unity of the dialogue by reading Timaeus’ account as a critical response to Critias’ account.

One of Wolff’s earliest and most distinctive ambitions was to turn philosophy into a mathematical science by integrating philosophical and mathematical cognition. This paper reconstructs the origins and development of an underinvestigated aspect of Wolff’s mathematization project and argues for its significance to Wolff’s mature system. Since, on his account, all that is finite has a quantity, Wolff thought it was possible to obtain mathematical cognition of the objects of all philosophical disciplines, including metaphysics and ethics. Inspired by John Craig’s application of mathematics to theology, Wolff soon envisaged the use of mathematical tools to reform ontology. He later justified the possibility of measuring non-extended objects by reviving the scholastic doctrine of degrees and intensive magnitudes. I argue that his groundbreaking interest in psychometry stems from this background.

In 1966, Dorothy Emmet published Rules, Roles and Relations, in which she argues that moral philosophy could stand to learn a lot by drawing on sociological research. In this paper. I will argue that Rules, Roles and Relations is deserving of much wider scholarly attention, especially in light of an explosion of scholarship focusing on contemporaries of Emmet such as Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Iris Murdoch (the ‘Wartime Quartet’). Emmet, unlike the Quartet, has received a very minimal amount of scholarly attention. Yet, like the Quartet, Emmet rejects the fact-value distinction, endorses what can be characterized as an Aristotelian approach to ethics, and defends a form of moral cognitivism. What is more, her approach to these issues is novel (in drawing on sociological research) and thus enrichens our understanding of how certain philosophers in twentieth-century Britain sought to push back against dominant analytic approaches to moral theorizing.

This article reconstructs the central doctrine of the Ḥatäta Zär’a Yaʿǝqob by analyzing the faculty of ləbbuna , a term variously translated as ‘reason,’ ‘understanding,’ ‘conscience,’ or ‘heart.’ I first reconstruct the Ḥatäta’s core problem: perspective-relative justification in religious disagreement, against the seventeenth-century backdrop of interconfessional conflict in the Ethiopian highlands. I then offer a systematic account of ləbbuna as an anti-relativistic solution to this problem. I show how ləbbuna functions as a universal, divinely-endowed capacity for discerning the śərʿatä fəṭrät (the established order of creation), thereby providing an independent standard for judgement. I identify six defining features of ləbbuna : its independence from any haymanot or ‘creed’; its grounding in a metaphysical harmony between creation, the Creator and human minds; its divine origin; its ethical-epistemic unity; its immediacy and conditional infallibility; and its arduousness. I conclude by clarifying what is (and is not) at stake in describing Zär’a Yaʿǝqob as a rationalist.