Buried within Fyodor Dostoevsky's works are glimpses of corrupt individuals who rise to the fore every now and then. Without these occasional revelations, not many would notice how diabolical an ordinary person really is. Although Dostoevsky does generalize that human nature can be quite vile, a character like the mysterious visitor from The Brothers Karamazov displays that nature without striving to be extraordinary as Dostoevsky's other prolific characters. Something troubling still lurks within this mundane type. Relying on moral dilemmas presented (...) by ancient thinkers will help this project expose and elaborate on the unsavouriness behind the activities and dispositions of Dostoevsky's minute character. With the mysterious visitor as the prime focus, we discover how an individual distorts one's personal development and decent relations with other humane beings. (shrink)

Contemporary pragmatists frequently claim to be pluralists, but infrequently say what this commitment means. The authors argue that pragmatism is inconsistent with any commitment that can plausibly be called pluralism.

In this essay I describe two of the accounts that Peirce provides of personhood: the semiotic account, on which a person is a sequence of thought-signs, and the naturalistic account, on which a person is an animal. I then argue that these disparate accounts can be reconciled into a plausible view on which persons are numerically distinct entities that are nevertheless continuous with each other in an important way. This view would be agreeable to Peirce in some respects, as it (...) is modeled on his theory of perception, incorporates his categories of Firstness, Secondness and Thirdness, and is in harmony with his objective idealism. But it diverges from Peirce in one important respect, viz. its rejection of the idea that some groups of human beings count as persons. (shrink)

... I was many years ago led to define "real" as meaning being such as it is, no matter how you, or, I, or any man or definite collection of men may think it to be; where I use the long and awkward phrase in order to avoid all appearance of meaning independently of human thought. For obviously, nothing that I or anybody ever can mean can be independent of human thought. That is real which men would eventually and finally (...) come to think to be absolutely necessary to be thought in order to understand the truth, supposing the existence and advance in knowledge of the human race to be continued without any limitation, though I cannot pretend that I have as distinct an idea of exactly what that means as I could wish.... (shrink)

Contemporary republicanism is characterized by three main ideas: free persons, who are not subject to the arbitrary power of others; free states, which try to protect their citizens from such power without exercising it themselves; and vigilant citizenship, as a means to limit states to their protective role. This book advances an economic model of such republicanism that is ideologically centre-left. It demands an exit-oriented state interventionism, one that would require an activist government to enhance competition and resource exit from (...) dominating relationships within markets of all types, be they marital, labour, or residential. The substantial intervention and redistribution necessitated by such an approach make it leftist, while its tendency to work with rather than against the grain of markets makes it centrist. It is, in short, a contribution to progressive republican political thought, but one that is less social-democratic than market-democratic in character. (shrink)

This edition of the Handbookfollows the first edition by 10 years.

An exploration of shunning reactions to psychobiographical accounts of theoretical ideas, this article delves into the question of why this particular reaction is the most widespread, as well as the reactions one of the authors experienced to his own work on Heidegger.

For over a decade I have been arguing that Deweyan democracy fails an intuitive test for political legitimacy.1 According to this test, a political order can be legitimate only if the principles underlying its most fundamental institutions are insusceptible to reasonable rejection. Crucially, reasonable functions here as a technical term; a principle is reasonably rejectable when its rejection is consistent with embracing the ideal of a constitutional democracy as a fair system of social cooperation among free and equal moral persons. (...) From this emerges the corollary that a person is reasonable to the extent she seeks a political order whose basis is beyond reasonable rejection. The challenge for democratic theory... (shrink)