Volume 99, Issue 4

Abstract: Although the second book of Aristotle’s Politics distinguishes between proposed and existing constitutions, careful examination of the criteria which Aristotle uses to judge Plato’s Republic and the Spartan constitution blurs the relevance of such a division. Aristotle uses the same four criteria to evaluate both constitutions and scholars have failed to appreciate that he uses the same criteria to organize his presentation of many of the arguments in Politics 2. By contrast, Aristotle discounts the criteria of stability in Politics 2. Aristotle’s selective use of criteria calls into question the claim that his best regime can serve as a regulative ideal for judging existing constitutions.

Abstract: That Kant owed much to Rousseau has long been known. Yet some of Kant’s most significant debts to Rousseau still await appreciation. This paper offers an examination of two key understudied writings from the 1760s in order to provide a more comprehensive account of Kant’s debts to Rousseau. In focusing on these texts, it particularly aims to supplement the existing accounts of Kant’s debts to Rousseau which have largely focused on concepts of human dignity and human equality or on concepts of gender and gender relations, and to demonstrate the degree to which Kant read Rousseau as a theorist of epistemic development. In so doing it offers a reconsideration of Kant’s own philosophical development, and a reconsideration of the philosophical significance of Rousseau’s epistemology.

Abstract: Sartre’s phenomenological view of consciousness gives primacy to the thesis that all consciousness is nonthetically aware of itself, i. e. pre-reflectively aware of itself but not as an object. Few commentators, however, have explained Sartre’s grounds for holding this thesis, despite his view that the thesis’s truth underwrites the certainty of the Cartesian cogito and thereby the method of Sartre’s own phenomenological ontology. I document three lines of support for the thesis, the most promising of which consists in a proof by cases. Namely, Sartre’s texts contain the argument that the existence of nonthetic consciousness is the only satisfactory explanation of the Cartesian cogito’s certainty. The paper concludes with an examination of whether and how nonthetic consciousness can serve as a foundation for Sartre’s method of phenomenological ontology.

Abstract: This article presents a novel reading of Marx’s early, pre-1844, democratic theory, and its connection with his early views on alienation. It argues, contra established readings, that Marx had a properly developed theory of alienation prior to his famous Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 ; that this theory is not centred solely on a critique of the modern state, or Hegel’s conception thereof; that it consists in suppressing a human species-essence for participation in collective deliberation and decision-making via people’s subjection to external power and domination; that it therefore applies widely both to the modern state and the capitalist economy, as well as to feudalism; and that this sheds light on the connections between Marx’s theory of alienation on the one hand, and his early conception of non-alienated society, democracy, on the other. This will help us better to understand the relationship of Marx’s to other, especially radical enlightenment, political thought.