Volume 94, Issue 2

: Some scholars have suggested that Peter Abelard has a solution to Allan Gibbard’s famous puzzle concerning a lump of clay and the statue that the clay composes. Although Abelard does not explicitly address an analogue of this puzzle, I claim that an Abelardian solution can be constructed based on principles drawn from his discussions of sameness and difference in his later theological writings. In this study, I first summarize the puzzle and several standard solutions to it. I then present and analyze Abelard’s account of sameness and difference, with special emphasis on his description of the ways in which the matter of a statue is both the same as and different from the statue. I then show how we can reconstruct an Abelardian solution to the problem from these remarks. Finally, I consider whether this Abelardian solution is coherent and plausible. In doing so, I show how the Abelardian solution reveals an underlying tension in Abelard’s later ontology.

: To many critics, Kant’s refutation of Descartes’s problematic idealism seems like an explicit adoption of Berkeley’s dogmatic idealism. My exposition intends to show that this is not the case. The discussion of externality, reality and objectivity is intended to demonstrate that the question regarding the status of external objects can only be considered within the realm of appearances. The discussion of actuality is intended to show how we can indeed distinguish the genuine from the illusive within this realm (and only within it). I intend to show that Kant’s refutation of idealism succeeds specifically because it does not assign any role to the thing-in-itself within this refutation and focuses entirely on the inherent features of phenomenal objects.

: Fichte’s ethical theory (as presented in his 1798 System der Sittenlehre ) has often been characterized as an unsound and extreme expression of moral rigorism, even “moral fanaticism”. It has long been simultaneously criticized both as too formal and abstract and as too subjective and arbitrary. After considering these criticisms as they were first formulated by, among others, Schelling and Hegel, a more recent version of a similar criticism is also considered: namely, the charge that Fichte is unable to provide a successful account of moral deliberation and substantive self-determination that preserves both the autonomy of the moral agent and the universality and objectivity of the moral law. In order to respond to these criticisms one must explain how Fichte’s ethics is grounded in the larger account of agency contained within the entire Jena Wissenschaftslehre , and, more specifically how that “determinate pure willing”, which was posited in the Wissenschaftslehre nova methodo as the “highest synthesis” necessary for the very possibility of empirical self-consciousness, becomes the moral law when it is related, as it must be, to finite, natural consciousness. There follows an interpretation of Fichtean moral deliberation as a distinctive form of reflective judgment, the “product” of which is the deliberative agent’s recognition, not of the moral law per se, but rather of precisely what one ought to do in any and every situation. Taken together, these considerations would appear to absolve Fichte’s ethics of at least some of the more serious charges that have been made against it.

: At Euthydemus 278c–282d, Socrates defends strong claims about the relative value of wisdom, fortune, and other goods in relation to happiness. He concludes that wisdom guarantees all of the good fortune a person needs, and that wisdom alone is good and ignorance alone is bad. However, Socrates’ arguments prove insufficient to establish his strong conclusions. I argue that Socrates does not aim to support his strongest conclusions with adequate arguments. Instead, the context indicates that Socrates’ arguments – with their evocative examples and strong but unsupported conclusions – are designed primarily to draw Clinias into the activity of philosophy.