A currently popular view among legal positivists is that law is a social construction. Many of the same legal philosophers also argue that before one can study law empirically, one needs to know what it is. At the heart of this paper is the claim that these two propositions are inconsistent. It presents the following dilemma: if law is a social construction like all other social constructions, then legal philosophers have to explain what philosophers have to contribute to understanding it. (...) Studies of social constructions are typically conducted by historians, sociologists, and others, who explain them on the basis of empirical data. If, as legal philosophers claim, conceptual clarification must precede empirical work, then it follows that the lack of conceptual work on the nature of other social constructions renders suspect all empirical work on them. To avoid such a radical conclusion, legal philosophers may argue instead that law is a social construction of a special kind. But to say that is to undermine the premise with which the argument began. Moreover, this response to the dilemma collapses what is now taken to be what separates legal positivism from natural law theory, thus undermining the motivation for this view. I conclude the essay by offering a different solution to the dilemma by suggesting that it shows that the fundamental debates of legal philosophy are not conceptual but political. (shrink)

Many legal theorists have argued that analogical reasoning is merely rule-following in which the general rule is not stated. Lloyd Weinreb's tries to defend the practice of analogical reasoning on its own terms. He does so by giving examples of the way people use analogical reasoning, both in legal and non-legal contexts, as a means for deciding how to act in particular circumstances. By itself such evidence does not support Weinreb's case, because to justify analogy he must show that analogical (...) reasoning can somehow lead us to correct answers. Moreover, his evidence does nothing to challenge the claim that analogical reasoning is simply following suppressed rules.I try to give Weinreb a helping hand. I use the data he mentions that people actually reason by analogy as a starting point for a novel justificatory account of analogical reasoning based on the notion of reliable results: a process of reasoning is reliable, and therefore reliance on it justified, if it tends to generate correct results. This requires explaining what counts as correct results in law, which is a question of political philosophy. I show that the most fundamental condition for the acceptability of analogical reasoning is that the standard of legal correctness is not determined by principles derived by Reason (as is the approach in the civil law tradition) but rather by a standard of acceptance (more prevalent in the common law tradition). Nonetheless, I argue that there two other conditions - shared social values and skepticism about the possibility of discovering the right normative foundations to legal questions - that together have to obtain in order to justify reliance on analogical reasoning. Since that in a modern society it is unlikely that these two conditions are not likely to obtain, I conclude that even this sympathetic reconstruction of Weinreb's argument ultimately fails. (shrink)

In the last three decades or so a prominent view among legal philosophers has been that while legal theory is evaluative because it requires making judgments of importance, it can remain morally neutral. This view, which I call the ‘orthodox view’, was first articulated by Joseph Raz and has since been supported by many other prominent legal philosophers. In this essay I examine it, and argue that it is indefensible. I begin by examining the terms ‘description’ and ‘evaluation’, and show (...) that they are ambiguous in a way that most current discussion does not realize. I then rely on this analysis to develop several arguments against the orthodox view. I argue that defenders of the orthodox view have considered only one such argument, and that even with regard to this one their response is unsuccessful. (shrink)

Matthew Kramer has recently proposed a distinction between norms that are free-floating and those that are not. The distinction, he argued, enables us to distinguish between norms that can be incorporated into the law and those that cannot. In this essay I argue that his distinction is based on several theoretical errors, and that even if it were successful, it is unclear why his distinction is relevant for the question of the boundaries between law and morality. I also provide many (...) examples from actual legal systems of legal norms that do not correspond to Kramer’s distinction. I conclude the essay by suggesting that Kramer’s argument exemplifies a prevalent problem in contemporary legal philosophy, in which much work is often based on simplistic models of law and uses them to develop ‘conceptual’ arguments for what closer attention to the facts shows are empirical questions. As a result many current jurisprudential debates are not helpful for understanding legal phenomena. Recognizing this point is important for reorienting legal philosophy towards other questions which would be more helpful for illuminating its subject-matter. (shrink)

Volume 10, Issue 3, September 2019, Page 396-407.

A standard view about criminal law distinguishes between two kinds of offenses, “mala in se” and “mala prohibita.” This view also corresponds to a distinction between two bases for criminalization: certain acts should be criminalized because they are moral wrongs; other acts may be criminalized for the sake of promoting overall welfare. This paper aims to show two things: first, that allowing for criminalization for the sake of promoting welfare renders the category of wrongfulness crimes largely redundant. Second, and more (...) importantly, accepting welfare as a legitimate ground for criminalization implies a certain view about legitimate state action, which makes criminalization for wrongfulness more difficult to justify. If I am right, the view that keeps the two categories of criminalization as largely separate is untenable. I conclude with some remarks about the advantages of welfare as the basis for criminalization. (shrink)

One of the ways by which Gerald Postema’s Bentham and the Common Law Tradition revolutionized the study of Bentham’s jurisprudence was by challenging the idea, made popular by Hart (both in his jurisprudential work and his interpretation of Bentham), that the study of law in general is normatively neutral. Against this view, Postema argued that one must understand Bentham’s views on law and jurisprudence in relation to his utilitarianism. At the time of publishing the book, Bentham went very much against (...) the grain, but this view has since gained considerable support. In my paper I seek to refine it. As I see it, Bentham did not think of utilitarianism as a moral theory. Rather, he is best understood as advancing utilitarianism as a public philosophy—an end for the legislator, and only indirectly applicable for individuals in their everyday lives. This makes Bentham’s utilitarianism tied to his legal philosophy in an even deeper sense than Postema suggested. Law is not there to imitate and help enforce an already existing utilitarian morality that tells people (independently of the law) what they should do. Instead, we should think of law as a mechanism (or a technology) for generating normative guidelines (where those do not otherwise exist). The effect of this is to reverse the familiar way of understanding the relationship between law and morality. (shrink)

It is natural to think of legal positivism and jurisprudential naturalism as intellectually allied ideas. Legal positivism is associated with the idea that law is a matter of social fact; naturalism is a philosophical tenet that, among other things suggests the importance of scientific findings and methods to philosophy. At the very least, there seems to be a close family resemblance between the two views. In this essay, I challenge this view from a naturalistic perspective. I show that the best-known (...) proponents of legal positivism in the twentieth century all rejected naturalism. I dedicate most of my discussion to H.L.A. Hart’s version of legal positivism, as it appears superficially friendly to naturalism. I show that throughout his career and in writings on a wide range of topics, Hart consistently argued against the applicability of the methods of science to the explanation of social phenomena. This is not a small matter: I argue that it is this anti-naturalistic stance that contributed to his descriptively faulty account of adjudication. After reviewing more briefly the work of other leading legal positivists, I argue in my conclusion that those seeking to advance a naturalistic approach to law should turn their backs of much of twentieth-century legal positivism, which in various guises has been hostile to naturalism. (shrink)

The purpose of this essay is to offer a reconstruction of Lon Fuller’s critique of Hart’s legal positivism. I show that contrary to the claims of Fuller’s many critics, one can derive from his work a clear and powerful argument against legal positivism, at least in the guise found in the work of H.L.A. Hart. The essence of the argument is that Fuller’s principles of legality posit that the same considerations that count for law’s excellence are relevant also for the (...) determining what counts as law. I contrast this view with Hart’s legal positivism, which acknowledged that the principles of legality are relevant for law’s excellence, but considered them irrelevant for determining the question what counts as law. I argue that the positivist position is arbitrary, and - a point on which I focus - completely undefended. I draw from this point a more general challenge to Hart’s theory of law (as well as that of many of his followers), namely that though claimed to be a true theory of law, it has no resources to explain why this is so. I argue that Fuller’s theory does not suffer from this problem, because Fuller rejected a staple of contemporary jurisprudence - the separation of conceptual and normative jurisprudence. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that in some sense legal philosophy, at least as the term is now understood among analytic jurisprudents in the Anglophone world, is to a large extent a creation of H. L. A. Hart’s work. It is with him that the search for the concept or the nature of law was one established as an independent object of inquiry, that consciously tried to avoid moral or political questions. In framing the province of jurisprudence in this way (...) Hart not only departed from the work of Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham, whose political commitments are clear, but also from the seemingly much closer enterprise of John Austin. After demonstrating this difference between Austin’s enterprise and Hart’s, I criticize the direction legal philosophy has taken following Hart’s lead.Resumen:En este ensayo se plantea la idea de que en cierto modo la filosofía del derecho —al menos en la forma en que es entendida entre los filósofos analíticos del mundo angloparlante— es en gran medida una invención de H. L. A. Hart. Con la obra de Hart, en efecto, la búsqueda del concepto o naturaleza del derecho, se ha consolidado como un objeto de investigación independiente, que conscientemente pretende deslindarse de las cuestiones políticas o morales. Al definir el campo de estudio de la filosofía del derecho en este sentido, Hart no sólo se aparta del trabajo de Thomas Hobbes y de Jeremy Bentham, cuyos compromisos políticos son evidentes, sino también del proyecto aparentemente más cercano de John Austin. Después de señalar la diferencia entre los proyectos de Austin y de Hart, el autor pone en cuestión la dirección que ha tomado la filosofía del derecho al ser encabezada por Hart. (shrink)

Contemporary legal philosophy is predominantly anti-naturalistic. This is true of natural law theory, but also, more surprisingly, of legal positivism. Several prominent legal philosophers have in fact argued that the kind of questions that legal philosophers are interested in cannot be naturalized, such that a naturalistic legal philosophy is something of a contradiction in terms. Against the dominant view I argue that there are arguable naturalistic versions of both legal positivism and natural law. Much of the essay is dedicated to (...) showing that such views are possible: I identify naturalistic versions of a “natural law” view, a “positivist” view, as well as a “semi positivist” view, all of which are variants of the familiar views defended under these labels. I also offer a tentative argument in support of a naturalistic positivist view, one that has more in common with the views of Thomas Hobbes and Jeremy Bentham than with the anti-naturalistic positivist views popular these days. (shrink)

Dan Zahavi engages with classical phenomenology, philosophy of mind, and a range of empirical disciplines to explore the nature of selfhood. He argues that the most fundamental level of selfhood is not socially constructed or dependent upon others, but accepts that certain dimensions of the self and types of self-experience are other-mediated.

Recent years have seen an upsurge of interest in the second-person perspective, not only in philosophy of mind, language, law and ethics, but also in various empirical disciplines such as cognitive neuroscience and developmental psychology. A distinctive and perhaps also slightly puzzling feature of this ongoing discussion is that whereas many contributors insist that a proper consideration of the second-person perspective will have an impact on our understanding of social cognition, joint action, communication, self-consciousness, morality, and so on, there remains (...) considerable disagreement about what exactly a second-person perspective amounts to (see Eilan 2014; Conant and Rödl 2014). What is the difference between adopting a second-person and a third-person perspective on another? How does one relate to another as a you and how does that differ from relating to another as a he, she or they? In the following, I will consider three different proposals and argue that a promising but somewhat overlooked account can be found in the work of Husserl. (shrink)

Recently, a number of neuroscientists and philosophers have taken the so-called predictive coding approach to support a form of radical neuro-representationalism, according to which the content of our conscious experiences is a neural construct, a brain-generated simulation. There is remarkable similarity between this account and ideas found in and developed by German neo-Kantians in the mid-nineteenth century. Some of the neo-Kantians eventually came to have doubts about the cogency and internal consistency of the representationalist framework they were operating within. In (...) this paper, I will first argue that some of these concerns ought to be taken seriously by contemporary proponents of predictive coding. After having done so, I will turn to phenomenology. As we shall see, Husserl’s endorsement of transcendental idealism was partially motivated by his rejection of representationalism and phenomenalism and by his attempt to safeguard the objectivity of the world of experience. This confronts us with an intriguing question. Which position is best able to accommodate our natural inclination for realism: Contemporary neuro-representationalism or Husserl’s transcendental idealism? (shrink)

In a number of papers, Hubert Dreyfus and Ronald McIntyre have claimed that Husserl is an internalist. In this paper, it is argued that their interpretation is based on two questionable assumptions: (1) that Husserl's noema should be interpreted along Fregean lines, and (2) that Husserl's transcendental methodology commits him to some form of methodological solipsism. Both of these assumptions are criticized on the basis of the most recent Husserl-research. It is shown that Husserl's concept of noema can be interpreted (...) in a manner that makes his theory far more congenial to a certain type of externalism, but ultimately it is argued that his phenomenological analysis of intentionality entails such a fundamental rethinking of the very relation between subjectivity and world that it hardly makes sense to designate it as being either internalist or externalist. (shrink)

This chapter provides an explanation of precedent as a kind of artefact, in keeping with broader accounts of law that do so, specifically the author’s account of law as a genre of institutionalized abstract artefact. The chapter develops its explanation by responding to an argument by Dan Priel against seeing the common law as an artefact when understood to be a form of custom. The chapter shows that customs can themselves be artefacts but also that the precedential elements of (...) common law are not necessarily quite as customary as sometimes considered, showing that the common law built from precedents fits within a distributed design model of artefacts and that stare decisis has a wider systemic function of upholding certain rule of law principles. It ends with some considerations about the institutional nature of precedents, specifically that judicial decisions are most often both applications and developments of legal norms, but also determinations of legal validity. (shrink)

Many accounts of collective intentionality target rather sophisticated types of cooperative activities, i.e., activities with complex goals that require prior planning and various coordinating and organizing roles. But although joint action is of obvious importance, an investigation of collective intentionality should not merely focus on the question of how we can share agentive intentions. We can act and do things together, but it is not obvious that the awe felt and shared by a group of Egyptologists when they gain entry (...) to a newly discovered pharaonic tomb can or should be analyzed in the same way as, say, a heist that a group of criminals carefully plan and execute together. The aim of the article is to better understand the kind of emotional sharing that can occur between two individuals who are perceptually co-present. Does the sharing involve a kind of phenomenal fusion? Is it a matter of sharing one and the same token experience? It will be argued that both of these recent suggestions must be rejected as misleading in favor of an account that sees emotional sharing as a form of emotional integration that involves constitutively interdependent processes of empathy, second-personal address, and identification. (shrink)

In the recent debate about the semantics of perspectival expressions, disagreement has played a crucial role. In a nutshell, what I call “the challenge from disagreement” is the objection that certain views on the market cannot account for the intuition of disagreement present in ordinary exchanges involving perspectival expressions like “Licorice is tasty./no, it’s not.” Various contextualist answers to this challenge have been proposed, and this has led to a proliferation of notions of disagreement. It is now accepted in the (...) debate that there are many notions of disagreement and that the search for a common, basic notion is misguided. In this paper I attempt to find such a basic notion underneath this diversity. The main aim of the paper is to motivate, forge and defend a notion of “minimal disagreement” that has beneficial effects for the debate over the semantics of perspectival expressions. (shrink)

If one interprets transcendental subjectivity as an isolated ego and in the spirit of the Kantian tradition ignores the whole task of establishing a transcendental community of subjects, then every chance of reaching a transcendental self- and world-knowledge is lost. Krisis (Ergänzung), 120.

Through an investigation of Husserl's concept of horizontal intentionality, the article basically argues that the horizon is intrinsically intersubjective, and that it entails an implicit reference to the intentions of possible Others. Against this background it is argued that our perceptual experience of an embodied Other, our factual encounter with the Other, is not the most basic and fundamental type of intersubjectivity. On the contrary, it presupposes a type of intersubjectivity which belongs a priori to the structure of constituting subjectivity.

Do carbon-offsetting schemes morally offset emissions? The moral equivalence thesis is the claim that the combination of emitting greenhouse gasses and offsetting those emissions is morally equivalent to not emitting at all. This thesis implies that in response to climate change, we need not make any lifestyle changes to reduce our emissions as long as we offset them. An influential argument in favor of this thesis is premised on two claims, one empirical and the other normative: (1) When you emit (...) + offset, the net result is the same as that of not emitting. (2) With emissions, the net result is what matters morally. I argue against both premises. The net result of emitting + offsetting is never equivalent to that of not emitting, and even if it were equivalent, the net result is not the only thing that matters morally. My conclusion is that although we should offset our emissions, avoiding emissions is morally preferable. This conclusion supports a stronger claim: that carbon offsets cannot relieve us of our duty to make significant lifestyle changes so as to reduce emissions and thus lesson our contribution to the harms of climate change. (shrink)

Even a cursory glance in Die Bernauer Manuskripte über das Zeitbewusstsein makes it evident that one of Husserl’s major concerns in his 1917-18 reflections on time-consciousness was how to account for the constitution of time without giving rise to an infinite regress. Not only does Husserl constantly refer to this problem in Husserliana XXXIII – as he characteristically writes at one point “Überall drohen, scheint es, unendliche Regresse” – but he also takes care to distinguish between several different regresses. One (...) of the more troubling ones is the one that might be called the regress of foundation. It concerns the problem of how to avoid always having to presuppose yet another underlying constituting consciousness. As we will soon see, the attempt to avoid this specific regress is closely linked to the problem of how to come up with a satisfactory account of self-awareness. That Husserl himself was well aware of this link can be inferred from some of his reflections in the beginning of Husserliana XXXIII. As he writes at one point, consciousness exists, it exists as a stream, and it appears to itself as a stream. But how the stream of consciousness is capable of being conscious of itself, how it is possible and comprehensible that the very being of the stream is a form of self-consciousness, is the enduring problem of the entire treatise. In this article, I wish to take a closer look at some of Husserl’s attempts in the Bernau Manuscripts to account for time-consciousness without giving rise to an infinite regress. (shrink)

In the semantic debate about perspectival expressions – predicates of taste, aesthetic and moral terms, epistemic modals, etc. – intuitions about armchair scenarios (e.g., disagreement, retraction) have played a crucial role. More recently, various experimental studies have been conducted, both in relation to disagreement (e.g., Cova, 2012; Foushee and Srinivasan, 2017; Solt, 2018) and retraction (e.g., Knobe and Yalcin, 2014; Khoo, 2018; Beddor and Egan, 2018; Dinges and Zakkou, 2020; Kneer 2021; 2022; Almagro, Bordonaba Plou and Villanueva, 2023; Marques, 2024), (...) with the aim of establishing a more solid foundation for semantic theorizing. Both these types of data have been used to argue for or against certain views (e.g., contextualism, relativism). In this paper, I discern a common thread in the use of these data and argue for two claims: i) which perspective is adopted by those judging the armchair scenarios put forward and by the participants in experimental studies crucially matters for the viability of the intended results; ii) failure to properly attend to this puts recent experimental work at risk. Finally, I consider the case of cross-linguistic disagreement and retraction and assess their importance for the semantic debate about perspectival expressions, as well as for the claim that perspective matters in putting forward the data on which decisions about the right semantic view are made. (shrink)

A point made repeatedly over the last few years is that the Locked-in Syndrome offers unique real-life material for revisiting and challenging certain ingrained philosophical assumptions about the nature of personhood and personal identity. Indeed, the claim has been made that a closer study of LIS will call into question some of the traditional conceptions of personhood that primarily highlight the significance of consciousness, self-consciousness and autonomy and suggest the need for a more interpersonal account of the person. I am (...) skeptical about these claims and will in the following argue that the theoretical relevance of LIS for an understanding of selfhood and personhood has been exaggerated. (shrink)

Manfred Frank has in recent publications criticized a number of prevailing views concerning the nature of self-awareness,1 and it is the so-called reflection theory of self-awareness which has been particularly under fire. That is, the theory which claims that self-awareness only comes about when consciousness directs its 'gaze' at itself, thereby taking itself as its own object. But in his elaboration of a position originally developed by Dieter Henrich (and, to a lesser extent, by Cramer and Pothast) Frank has also (...) more generally criticized every attempt to conceive original self-awareness as a relation, be it a relation between two acts or a relation between the act and itself.2 Every relation entails a distinction between two (or more) relata and, according to Frank, it would be impossible to account for the immediacy and infallibility of selfawareness (particularly its so-called immunity to the error of misidentification), if it were in any way a mediated process. Thus, self-awareness cannot come about as the result of a self-identification, a reflection, an inner vision or introspection, nor should it be conceived as a type of intentionality or as a conceptually mediated propositional attitude, all of which entails the distinction between two or more relata. The pre-reflective self-awareness of an experience is not mediated by foreign elements such as concepts and classificatory criteria, nor by any internal difference or distance. It is an immediate and direct self- acquaintance which is characterized by being completely and absolutely irrelational (and consequently best described as a purely immanent self-presence).3 Frank's approach is unusually broad, since he draws on the resources of several different philosophical traditions, including German Idealism, analytical philosophy of mind, and phenomenology. When it comes to the latter, it is particularly in Sartre that Frank has found important insights, whereas he has criticized Husserl's position persistently in most of his writings on self-awareness.. (shrink)

Richard Nisbett and Dov Cohen’s (1996) influential account of “cultures of honor” speculates that honor norms are a socially-adaptive deterrence strategy. This theory has been appealed to by multiple empirically-minded philosophers, and plays an important role in John Doris and Alexandra Plakias’ (2008) antirealist argument from disagreement. In this essay, I raise four objections to the Nisbett-Cohen deterrence thesis, and offer another theory of honor in its place that sees honor as an agonistic normative system regulating prestige competitions. Since my (...) account portrays honor norms as radically different from liberal ones, it actually strengthens Doris and Plakias’ case in some respects: cultures of honor are not merely superficially different from Western liberal ones. Nonetheless, the persistent appeal of honor’s principles, and their moral plausibility in certain contexts, suggests not antirealism, but pluralism—a reply on behalf of realism that itself has considerable empirical support. (shrink)

There has emerged in recent years the recognition that the characteristically Buddhist doctrine of svasa vitti 2 (‘apperception’, as I will render it for reasons to become clear presently) was vari...

While much ink has been spilt over the political importance of speech, much less has been dedicated to the political importance of silence. This article seeks to fill that gap. We propose the need for a robust, democratic right to silence in public life and argue that there are politically salient epistemic reasons for recognising that right. We begin by defining what silence is and what a robust right to silence entails. We then argue that the right to silence offers (...) two politically salient epistemic benefits. The first is that, if the right to silence is maintained, we can avoid the epistemic harm that may be caused when an individual is compelled to lie in public. The second is that the right to silence can protect marginalised individuals against the epistemic injustices that may arise when others are likely to misconstrue their speech. (shrink)

It is widely recognized that prioritizing health care resources by their relative cost-effectiveness can result in lower priority for the treatment of disabled persons than otherwise similar non-disabled persons. I distinguish six different ways in which this discrimination against the disabled can occur. I then spell out and evaluate the following moral objections to this discrimination, most of which capture an aspect of its unethical character: it implies that disabled persons' lives are of lesser value than those of non-disabled persons; (...) it constitutes “double jeopardy” or violates Frances Kamm's non-linkage principle; it conflicts with equality of opportunity; it conflicts with fairness, which requires ignoring (some/most) differential impacts of treatment; it wrongly gives lower priority to disabled persons for equally effective treatment; it conflicts with giving all persons an equal chance to reach their full potential; and, it is in conflict with giving priority to the worse off. (shrink)

This article challenges the consensus that silences about mental disorders are there to be broken. While silence in mental disorders can be painful, even deadly, the consensus rests on an oversimplified understanding of silence. Drawing upon accounts from depression and bipolar memoirs, this article names and analyses some salient experiences of silence in mood disorders. It does so with two goals in mind. The first is to show that mood disorders may involve several different kinds of lived experiences of silence. (...) This is important because even though silence is considered a promising objective symptom of depression, little has been written about lived experiences of silence in disorders that involve depression. The second is to argue against the fetishisation of breaking silence and the concomitant understandings of silence as an externally imposed and inherently negative phenomenon. This is important because some silences are not experienced as external and are even felt to be valuable, meaning that efforts to break them may be counterproductive. (shrink)

I distinguish between two kinds of sensorimotor expectations: agent- and object-active ones. Alva Noë's answer to the problem of how perception acquires volumetric content illicitly privileges agent-active expectations over object-active expectations, though the two are explanatorily on a par. Considerations which Noë draws upon concerning how organisms may ‘off-load’ internal processes onto the environment do not support his view that volumetric content depends on our embodiment; rather, they support a view of experience which is restrictive of the body's role in (...) perception. My objections undercut central arguments which Noë gives for his brand of enactivism. (shrink)

This paper examines the notion of tolerance in education. In general, tolerance is perceived as a means to resist hostility, raise awareness of cultural differences, mitigate violence, and maintain liberal and democratic values. In education, there are various initiatives, such as the International Day for Tolerance (UNESCO in Declaration of principles on tolerance, 1995), that aim to build resilience against different forms of hate and cultivate openness and acceptance of the other. Yet the idea of tolerance includes different understandings and (...) interpretations. This paper argues that cultivating an embodied sense of tolerance among students, in particular in divisive communities, requires us to move beyond deliberative interpretations of tolerance and to advance a pragmatic understanding of tolerance through an agonistic lens. This paper starts with a review of several dominant interpretations of tolerance. The heart of the paper focuses on interpreting Dewey’s pragmatism as a theoretical basis for advancing tolerance. The final part of the paper explores how pragmatism through an agonistic lens can support a more flexible and humane approach to dealing with political conflicts. (shrink)

The paper proposes and defends the following characterization of response dependent property: a property is response-dependent iff there is a response-dependence biconditional for a concept signifying it which holds in virtue of the nature of the property. Finding out whether a property is such is to a large extent a posteriori matter. Finally, colors are response dependent: they are essentially tied to issuing the relevant experiences, so that having those experiences does give access to their, dispositional, nature. Finally, some important (...) contrary views are critically discussed in the paper. (shrink)

The past decade has witnessed a notable turn in philosophical orientation in the Nordic countries. For the first time, the North has a generation of philosophers who are oriented to phenomenology. This means a vital rediscovery of the phenomenological tradition as a partly hidden conceptual and methodological resource for taking on contemporary philosophical problems. The essays collected in the present volume introduce the reader to the phenomenological work done in the Nordic countries today. The material is organized under three general (...) headings: metaphysics, facticity, and interpretation. The first part, "Metaphysics", asks if phenomenology is, or could be taken as, a metaphysical inquiry. It studies this possibility in a systematic as well as in a historical perspective. The second part, "Facticity", focuses on the double character of the philosophizing subject, on the one hand, as a worldly being bound by a cultural and historical situation, and on the other hand, as the one who thinks this condition and gives it an interpretation. It studies four aspects of facticity in particular: language, dwelling, alterity, and generation. The third part, "Interpretation", clarifies the different notions of interpretation central to phenomenology, understood as hermeneutics. (shrink)