Volume 18, Issue 1 -

German idealism stems in large part from Fichte’s response to a dilemma involving the concepts of pantheism, freedom, and time: time is the form of the determination of modes of substance, as held by a pantheistic or “dogmatic” person, or the form of acts generated by human freedom, as held by an idealistic person. Fichte solves the dilemma by refuting dogmatism and deducing time from idealism’s first principle. But his diagnosis is more portentous: by casting the lemmas in terms of person-types, he unintentionally invites Schelling’s philosophical rethinking of personality. In his middle period, Schelling argues for the consistency of the concepts of pantheism, freedom, and time, claiming that it depends on a “good” as opposed to “evil’ personality. However, since on his view personality is an absolute or originally undecided capacity for good and evil, the trio’s consistency is entirely contingent. In §1, I trace Fichte’s resolution of the dilemma. In §§2–3, I reconstruct Schelling’s arguments for consistency from the Freiheitsschrift and Weltalter , texts written just a few years apart. In §4, I allay a Kantian worry that this consistency relies problematically on the liberty of indifference or Willkür .

The aim of this paper is to develop an account of semantic reference initially put forward by Philip Kitcher that should be of interest to scientific realists. I discuss the motivations behind Kitcher’s proposal and especially how it faces a retrospection problem viz. the beliefs used to fix reference are selected retrospectively but not by the historical actors at the time. In order to sidestep this problem, I look at the idea of partial reference as put forward by Hartry Field and further advanced by Christina McLeish. I discuss the merits of these proposals and will argue that McLeish’s development of the idea leads to a deeply confused semantics for realism. In the last section, Kitcher’s account of heterogeneous reference potential is further developed in light of the issues raised in relation to partial reference and the retrospection problem. I think this raises the prospect of filling in a descriptivist picture of reference for theoretical terms of science.

The late G.A. Cohen is routinely considered a founding father of luck egalitarianism, a prominent responsibility-sensitive theory of distributive justice. David Miller argues that Cohen’s considered beliefs on distributive justice are not best understood as luck egalitarian. While the relationship between distributive justice and personal responsibility plays an important part in Cohen’s work, Miller maintains that it should be considered an isolated theme confined to Cohen’s exchange with Dworkin. We should not understand the view Cohen defends in this exchange as Cohen’s considered view. Accepting this thesis would change both our understanding of Cohen’s political philosophy and many recent luck egalitarian contributions. Miller’s argument offers an opportunity to reassess Cohen’s writings as a whole. Ultimately, however, the textual evidence against Miller’s argument is overwhelming. Cohen clearly considers the exchange with Dworkin to be about egalitarianism as such rather than about the best responsibility-sensitive version of egalitarianism. Furthermore, Cohen often offers luck egalitarian formulations of his own view outside of the exchange with Dworkin and uses luck egalitarianism as an independent yardstick for evaluating principles and distributions.

Contemporary debate on the nature of meaning centres on whether meaning is normative. Agreement is widespread that meaning implies correctness, but disagreement on whether correctness is normative remains. Normativists argue that correctness implies obligations or permissions. Anti-normativists disagree and hold that correctness is a descriptive term. This paper argues that, fundamentally, meaning presupposes norms, but not in the generic normativist sense: a vocabulary is recognisable as part of a language if and only if it is part of a practice of committing and entitling to ask for and provide reasons for what is said. To commit and entitle is not obliged or permitted. It is a presupposition for speaking about obligations and permissions.