Volume 13, Issue 2

Philosophical interests in knowledge tend to focus exclusively on knowledge of things or facts in the world and our knowledge of that knowledge. I will argue that knowledge of what we are doing should be an integral part of those interests. It is too rarely discussed to which extent an account of knowledge of our own non-epistemic activities might be necessary in order to get the full picture of how we relate to facts in trying to know them. (2.) Hegel’s epistemology in the philosophy of subjective spirit is an interesting exception to this rule: A certain type of knowledge of what we are doing serves as a partial justification for his entire philosophical project, although in Hegel it rests obscure in what sense we can actually have that type of knowledge.

Although it is commonly denied that the semantic principles of rigid designation and direct reference have essentialist implications it is still common to assume that the principles imply the necessity of identity. Previous attempts to combine rigidity and contingent identity have, accordingly, involved several controversial semantic or metaphysical claims. In this article, however, it is argued that rigidity and the necessity of identity are logically independent principles. Both are needed to derive the data usually claimed to be evidence for the idea that names are rigid designators; thus, there may be little motivation for combining rigidity with contingent identity. The fact that rigidity can consistently be combined with contingent identity shows, importantly, that no nontrivial metaphysical implications can be derived from the semantic principles of rigidity and direct reference alone.

The first part of Schelling’s Freedom Essay offers an extensive discussion of pantheism and its compatibility with human freedom. Schelling defends pantheism in general and Spinoza in particular against charges, raised by critics like Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi, who maintains that any rational philosophical system necessarily ends up as fatalism. Schelling, on the contrary, shows that freedom and pantheism can and must combined. This article investigates into Schelling’s understanding and transformation of pantheism in his Freedom Essay. It follows the explicit and implicit traces of Spinoza’s philosophy in Schellings thought and tries to show, how Schelling, challenged by the problem of evil, moves beyond Spinoza. Nevertheless it also argues that immanence remains crucial to Schelling’s ontology and his concept of freedom.

The article traces the few but important remarks on interpersonal trust scattered in Kant’s philosophical oeuvre. Through the reconstruction of a Kantian conception of trust an alternative to contemporary philosophical theories of trust is put forward. Interpersonal trust, according to my systematic reconstruction of Kant, makes up a continuum ranging from passive, habitual trust embedded in the social environment to active, reflective placement of trust in others. The active placement of trust is closely related to the reflective ability of human reason and, as such, it involves a leap into the supersensible. However, the phenomenon of trust also highlights a pragmatic background of Kant’s otherwise pure ethical theory: Prudential considerations of reasons to trust and distrust heterogeneous agents make up a core element of interpersonal trust. The prudential and reflexive placement of trust or distrust in another agent is a decisive step in the gradual development of moral character. Thus, trust together with the related phenomena of enlightenment and education point to a process of development in individual human lives as well as in human history that may enable us to approach the ethical ideal of a kingdom of ends.

‘The multitude’ is a popular notion in recent leftist political philosophy, with two of its most prominent proponents, Antonio Negri and Paolo Virno, claiming its origin in Hobbes’ De cive (DC) and Spinoza’s Tractatus politicus (TP). Approaching the notion as a mode of collective identity typically contrasted with the concept of a people, this paper pursues the intellectual history of the multitude to stage the scene for a contextualized and differentiated assessment of its meaning in 17th century political discourses on social order. It gives a semantic mapping of the term ‘multitude’, followed by a comparative analysis of ‘multitudo’ in DC and TP. Conclusively, it is argued the multitude was a common concept with various connotations of the time and it plays a pivotal role in DC and TP in the guise of two distinct conceptualizations, which suggets that it is historically misleading to assert an unequivocal concept of multitude.

How to make interpersonal comparisons is one of the most important questions to address in the discussion of distributive justice. This paper discusses two of the most relevant dividing lines in the literature of interpersonal comparison: between a monistic and pluralistic approach to interpersonal comparison, and between a subjectivist and objectivist standard of interpersonal comparison. The paper provides a normative argument for pluralism and objectivism with regard to interpersonal comparison, and it suggests that the Capability Approach as developed by Amartya Sen and Martha Nussbaum fits these criteria.

Thomas Pogge’s ingenious and influential Rawlsian theory of global justice asserts that principles of justice such as the difference principle or, alternatively, a universal criterion of human rights consisting of a subset of the principles of social justice apply to the global basic structure or economic order. Individuals that contribute to upholding the latter and benefit from it are, Pogge emphasizes, jointly responsible for its unjust features, not least for the fact that it, foreseeably and avoidably, affects up to 18 million people per year in such a way that they die. The paper mounts an immanent criticism against Pogge revolving around his notion of collective responsibility. Especially, it argues that people cannot plausibly be held responsible for the distribution of benefits and burdens between individuals at the global level addressed by the kind of principles Pogge invokes. They, and their governments, can, and should, however, be held responsible for the unjust features of the existing law of peoples or states.