Argumenta – Journal of Analytic Philosophy

The paper advances a broadly Wittgensteinian conception of the nature and limits of philosophy. It differs from Wittgenstein over the claims that (i) philosophical problems arise only when language is idling; (ii) that philosophy does not result in new knowledge: it does. But the new knowledge does not concern the nature of the world, but the character of our forms of description of the world, and its form is not discovery but realisation. (iii) in the domain of practical philosophy further considerations come into play that are not budgeted for…

The paper reexamines Moore’s early (1890s-1903) metaphysics and critically examines some recent discussion (Bell, MacBride) of both Moore’s metaphysics and the significance of the latter for his more well-known works of the early 20th century. In doing so it focuses on (1) the distinction between natural and non-natural properties, (2) problems regarding universals, relations, particulars, “tropes” and predication, and (3) the matter of “intentionality”—both as issues and as they arise in Moore’s early writings.

In the present article, I will concentrate sustainedly on a central strand of Jonathan Quong’s critique of Joseph Raz’s autonomy-centered liberal perfectionism. Rightly taking Raz to have offered the most elaborate and prominent version of autonomy-centered perfectionism in the contemporary debates over such matters, Quong devotes much of the first half of his book to contesting a number of Raz’s positions. This article will defend Raz against one of Quong’s chief objections, an allegation of internal inconsistency.

A traditional conception of ontology takes existence to be its proprietary subject matter—ontology is the study of what exists (§ 1). Recently, Jonathan Schaffer has argued that ontology is better thought of rather as the study of what is basic or fundamental in reality (§ 2). My goal here is twofold. First, I want to argue that while Schaffer’s characterization is quite plausible for some ontological questions, for others it is not (§ 3). More importantly, I want to offer a unified characterization of ontology that covers both existence and…

Empty names present Millianism with a well-known problem: it implies that sentences containing such names fail to express (fully determinate) propositions. The present paper argues that empty descriptions present Millianism with another problem. The paper describes this problem, shows why Millians should be worried, and provides a Millian-friendly solution. The concluding section draws some lessons about how all this affects Millianism and the problem of empty names.

In some of its many forms, happiness is no emotion. But there is also an emotion of happiness which, like other emotions, has correctness conditions. The correctness conditions of happiness differ in several respects, formal and non-formal, from those of emotions such as admiration, fear and indignation. The account given here of the correctness conditions of happiness suggests an account of happiness as a species of satisfaction and an account of the relation between happiness and affective rationality or reason.

Democracy means popular control, by almost all accounts. And by almost all accounts democracy entails legitimacy. But popular control, at least as that is understood in many discussions, does not entail  legitimacy. So something has got to give. Democratic theories divide on what this is, so that the question prompts a taxonomy of approaches. The most appealing answer, so the paper suggests, involves a reinterpretation of the notion of popular control.

In this article the author addresses the issues that Franz Rosenzweig raises in his Büchlein as they affect the former’s own very personal manifestation of Judaism. The article therefore covers not only the contents of the “little book”, but aims more generally to say something about aspects of Rosenzweig’s thought that the author finds problematic. The article begins by looking at three notions that are often used in connection with the sorts of issues Rosenzweig raises (atheism, religion, and spirituality), goes on to stress the importance of Rosenzweig’s “religious existentialism”,…

This article argues that Quong’s Liberalism without Perfection errs in claiming that the grounds for enforceably prohibiting unreasonable conduct are that it is unreasonable. What grounds that prohibition is, rather, that such conduct violates independently determined distributively just rights. Political liberalism presupposes a theory of distributive justice.

The seven papers included in this special issue of Argumenta might be ideally divided into two parts. On the one hand, this issue collects four contributions dealing with some important topics in Philosophy of Mind and Philosophy of language: the modularity of mind (the connections between the “pragmatic” module and epistemic vigilance mechanisms), the problem of perception and its link with action (the alleged anti-representational character of enactivism), the nature of phenomenal content (the plausibility of naïve realism in explaining the phenomenology of veridical visual experience), and the alleged irreducibility…