Volume 96, Issue 1

: This paper offers a new interpretation of the first chapter of Aristotle’s Rhetoric and of Aristotle’s understanding of rhetoric throughout the treatise. I defend the view that, for Aristotle, rhetoric was a skill in offering the listener ‘proofs’ ( pisteis ), that is, proper grounds for conviction. His arguments in the opening chapters of the treatise state and defend this controversial, epistemically normative view against the rival views of Gorgias, Thrasymachus and the rhetorical handbook writers, on the one hand, and against those of Plato, on the other. Aristotle defends his view on the basis that rhetoric is a skill in discharging an important role in the state – the role of helping citizens to good publicly-deliberated judgements.

: Descartes has standardly been read as holding that bodies achieve actual physical individuality through motion. He seems to say as much in Principles of Philosophy II, § 25: “By ‘one body’ or ‘one piece of matter’ I mean whatever is transferred at a given time”. I contend, however, that this interpretation is quite wrong. Such a view would lead to an utterly untenable – and un-Cartesian – position whereby nothing could ever move, but nothing could be at rest either. Having noted this, I then examine § 25 and related texts in some detail, and I argue that, as a matter of fact, they do not support this interpretation anyway. My conclusion is that physical individuality, for Descartes, has nothing to do with motion. Parts of matter at rest must be just as truly corporeal individuals as those that are moving, for Descartes treats the former as being just as physically efficacious as the latter. I contend that Descartes was happy to regard any conceivable region of extension as an actual body, regardless of whether it should happen to be moving or not.

: Hegel is commonly thought to affirm Leibniz’s principle of the identity of indiscernibles (PII), which states that no two things are exactly alike. I argue that this interpretation is mistaken: it cannot accommodate passages in which Hegel rejects PII, and the texts cited in favor of this interpretation admit of another reading, which I provide. On my view, Hegel distinguishes between different senses of PII, and the sense of PII he accepts only entails that determinacy is immanent to individuals qua concrete particulars.

: In “Le possible et le réel” Henri Bergson offers an influential critique of the modal category of possibility: traditional ideas that possibility precedes actuality invert the real relation of priority, and express an inability to apprehend the continual creation of unforeseeable novelty in experience. This article shows how Bergson’s ideas concerning possibility and novelty are involved in his inheritance of a modern concept of genius as a principle of fine art production. Only in grasping the nature of Bergson’s philosophy as a ‘metaphysics of genius’, I contend, is it possible to understand adequately not only his critique of prior possibility and conceptions of novelty but also the positive conception of modality that he advances in the essay according to an idea of the retroactivity of the possible. In conclusion, I argue that this reflection on retroactivity represents a new development in Bergson’s thought that he is unable to develop fully precisely because he is tied to an idea of genius interpreted as a function of the will.

: This paper explores the alleged role of a conception of human nature for Kant’s justification of the duty to leave the state of nature and the related right to coerce others to enter the civil condition in the Doctrine of Right (1797). I criticise the interpretation put forward by Byrd and Hruschka, according to which Kant’s postulate of public right is a preventive measure based on a “presumption of badness” of human beings. Although this reading seems to be supported by § 42 of the Doctrine of Right , I shall argue that the paragraph neither offers a justification of why we have a duty to leave the state of nature, nor explains why individuals are allowed to coerce others to do so. I offer an alternative interpretation of § 42 by focusing on the difference between formal and material violations of right and argue that the rationale behind the postulate of public right is the idea that remaining in the state of nature is a formal violation of the concept of right. It is therefore not prudential reason that authorizes us to coerce others to enter the lawful condition.