Volume 32, Issue 3

In this paper, I revisit Mattias Kumm's work on a `cosmopolitan conception of law'. I make two claims: First, I claim that although some criticism can be resisted by Kumm, under closer methodological scrutiny there are flaws in his theory. Second, I claim that these flaws challenge Kumm's approach when reading the Charter of the United Nations (UN Charter) as a `global constitution'. This also has pertinent practical implications for the functioning of the United Nations. This contribution does not take a stance on the nature of law but focuses on this conception in the context of politics and law. In a first section, I recount Kumm's cosmopolitan conception of law. In a second section, I claim that implicit monism in the relationship between national and international law and theoretical idealization pose serious dificulties to the cosmopolitan approach. In a third section, I claim that these flaws pose a challenge to the United Nations when considering the UN Charter as a `global constitution'. I sum up my findings in a final section and reflect on a future outlook for research on global constitutionalism in political philosophy.

According to the theory of intrinsic value and moral standing known as the \substance view," all human beings have intrinsic value, full moral standing and, with these, a right to life. The substance view has been defended by numerous contemporary philosophers who use the theory to argue that the standard human fetus has a right to life and, ultimately, that abortion is prima facie seriously wrong. In this paper, I identify three important errors committed by some of these philosophers in their defense of the theory|what I refer to as the \extratheoretical-proposition error," \quantitative-differences error," and \non-normative-answer error"|and conclude that these errors render their defense inadequate.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss Stanley and Williamson's take on Ryle's argument against know-how being know-that. For this, I provide an initial consideration of the possibility of isolating Ryle's argument from his overall philosophical outlook and Stanley and Williamson's purpose in their discussion of Ryle. I then examine in detail Stanley and Williamson's reconstruction of Ryle's argument with the specific aim of showing where they have introduced extraneous elements: I examine what they take to best additional assumptions needed for the argument to be valid and how they construct the premises in order to attempt to show that Ryle's argument is not sound. I end the paper showing the limits of Stanley and Williamson's attack, suggesting how the extraneous elements Stanley and Williamson introduce already bias the discussion against Ryle. The main aim is not to defend a form of Ryle's regress but rather advocate the need for a deeper discussion of Ryle's views of mind and action when discussing his views on know-how.

Fictional ersatz realism is the metaphysical stance that abstract fictional entities exist and are dependent on fiction and literary practices. Everett [4] tackled the position of ersatz realism by claiming that the ersatz realist cannot provide an identity criterion for fictional entities that does not imply a contradiction. Al- though Woodward [20] proposed a defense to Everett's argument, I will argue that ersatz realism is no tenable position, as it still cannot provide an adequate identity criterion. To establish this result, I will provide a base frame for identity criteria available to the ersatz realist. Afterwords, I will show that to any identity criterion the ersatz realist may propose there is a story such that a fictional entity corresponding to this story is not self-identical, imposing a contradiction to the metaphysical account of ersatz realism.