In Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, Kripke presented an argument to the effect that there can be no facts as to what someone means by a linguistic expression. In this argument, a central role is played by the contention that meaning is a normative notion. Some of the most popular accounts of what meaning facts consist in are rejected on the grounds that they fail to accommodate the normative character of meaning. This aspect of Kripke's dialectic plays a crucial role in his rejection of dispositional accounts of meaning, and it is rightly perceived as undermining, if successful, currently fashionable information theoretic accounts of semantic notions. Assessments of its success vary widely. Whereas for some writers the normative character of meaning constitutes an insurmountable obstacle for dispositional accounts, advocates of the information theoretic program have generally failed to acknowledge that their proposals are invalidated by this aspect of the notion.

Despite the vast literature on Rawls's work, few have discussed his arguments for the value of democracy. When his arguments have been discussed, they have received staunch criticism. Some critics have charged that Rawls's arguments are not deeply democratic. Others have gone further, claiming that Rawls's arguments denigrate democracy. These criticisms are unsurprising, since Rawls's arguments, as arguments that the principle of equal basic liberty needs to include democratic liberties, are incomplete. In contrast to his trenchant remarks about core civil liberties, Rawls does not say much about the inclusion of political liberties of a democratic sort – such as the right to vote – among the basic liberties.

In this paper, I complete some of Rawls's arguments and show that he has grounds for including political liberties, particularly those of a democratic nature, in the principle of equal basic liberty. In doing so, I make some beginning steps toward illustrating the genuinely democratic nature of Rawls's arguments. Rawls believes that a few different arguments can be given for democratic institutions and that these arguments work together to support the value of democracy. In this paper, I focus on Rawls's arguments relating to self-respect. I focus on this set of arguments because they are among the strongest of Rawls's arguments for equal political liberty and its fair value.

I examine the claim, made by some authors, that we sometimes acquire knowledge from falsehood. I focus on two representative cases in which a subject S infers a proposition q from a false proposition p. If S knows that q, I argue, S’s false belief that p is not essential to S’s cognition. S’s knowledge is instead due to S’s belief that p′, a proposition in the neighbourhood of p that S (dispositionally) believes (and knows). S thus knows despite her false belief. The widely accepted and plausible principle that inferential knowledge requires known premises is unscathed.

Philosophers’ intuitions about what constitutes autonomy are largely driven by the exemplars or paradigms that we recognize. There are indefinitely many exemplars, inasmuch as there are relatively private personae that serve as autonomy exemplars such as our parents, third grade teacher, or, for the megalomaniac, oneself. But among Western philosophers there are doubtless some exemplars that are widely shared and broadly influential. Philosophical exemplars include Socrates, Aristotle’s magnanimous man, Kant’s noumenal self that is perfectly attuned to the moral law, Mill’s anti-authoritarian non-conformist, Marx’s manin-society (after the higher form of communism is achieved), Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, and Sartre’s authentic youth who must decide whether to join the French resistance or stay at home for the sake of his mother. Exemplars from outside of philosophy include Antigone, Christ, Faust, Ibsen’s Enemy of the People, Winston Churchill, and even figures from popular culture such as the baseball player Ted Williams, the free spirited flower children of the 1960s, and practically any character that John Wayne ever played.

The aim of this paper is to display an alternative to the familiar decompositional approach in action theory, one that resists the demand for an explanation of action in non-agential terms, while not simply treating the notion of intentional agency as an unexplained primitive. On this Anscombean alternative, action is not a worldly event with certain psychological causes, but a distinctive form of material process, one that is not simply caused by an exercise of reason but is itself a productive exercise of reason. I argue that to comprehend the proposed alternative requires an account of the temporality of events in general. An event does not simply have a position in time, but is itself temporally structured. With the inner temporality of events in view, the Anscombean conception of action as a specifically self-conscious form of temporal unity is made available for critical reflection.

Anscombe thought that practical knowledge – a person’s knowledge of what she is intentionally doing – displays formal differences to ordinary empirical, or ‘speculative’, knowledge. I suggest these differences rest on the fact that practical knowledge involves intention analogously to how speculative knowledge involves belief. But this claim conflicts with the standard conception of knowledge, according to which knowledge is an inherently belief-involving phenomenon. Building on John Hyman’s account of knowledge as the ability to use a fact as a reason, I develop an alternative, two-tier, epistemology which allows that knowledge might really come in a belief-involving and an intention-involving form.

John Christman, in ‘Autonomy and Personal History,’ advances a novel genetic or historical account of individual autonomy. He formulates ‘the conditions of the [i.e., his] new model of autonomy’ as follows:

• (i) A person P is autonomous relative to some desire D if it is the case that P did not resist the development of D when attending to this process of development, or P would not have resisted that development had P attended to the process;

• (ii) The lack of resistance to the development of D did not take place (or would not have) under the influence of factors that inhibit self-reflection;

and

• (iii) The self-reflection involved in condition (i) [sic] is (minimally) rational and involves no self-deception. (11)

At a conference on ‘Leisure in Canada,’ held more than a decade ago at Montmorency in Quebec, a participant observed that ‘practically all writers on the subject take Aristotle as the point of departure in discussing leisure but seldom seem to move from that point.’ At first sight this statement may seem surprising. How is it to be understood? Certainly recent writers on leisure do in fact list Aristotle's conception as one of the significant positions on it.

‘There is no such thing as a language,’ Donald Davidson tells us (‘A Nice Derangement of Epitaphs,’ in Ernest LePore, ed., Truth and Interpretation [Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1986] 433-46, 446). Though this is a startling claim in its own right, it seems especially puzzling coming from a leading theorizer about language. Over the years, Davidson’s important essays have sparked the hope that there is a route to a positive, nonskeptical theory of meaning for natural languages. This hope would seem to be dashed if there are no natural languages. Unless Davidson’s radical claim is a departure from his developed views, the Davidsonian program appears to have undermined itself.

In a recent book, Donald Davidson’s Philosophy of Language: An Introduction (which Davidson has enthusiastically endorsed), Bjorn Ramberg promises to establish that Davidson's startling claim is not an aberration. Rather, it 'emerges as a natural development of his theory of meaning' (2). He reads the claim that there is no such thing as a language as the claim that the concept of a language has no useful theoretical role. Like the concepts of meaning and reference, it is a 'ghost of reification' which Davidson attempts to 'exorcise' from our philosophical thinking about linguistic communication. All three concepts can be seen as mere ladders to be kicked away once the edifice of a Davidsonian theory of linguistic communication is properly erected on the sole foundation of the concept of truth. The result, he assures us, ‘is not a theory which undercuts itself, but a comprehensive, coherent account of the phenomenon of linguistic communication’ (3).

In recent years, a renascent form of pragmatism has developed which argues that a satisfactory pragmatic position must integrate into itself the concepts of truth and objectivity. This New Pragmatism, as Cheryl Misak calls it, is directed primarily against Rorty's neo-pragmatic dismissal of these concepts. For Rorty, the goal of our epistemic practices should not be to achieve an objective view, one that tries to represent things as they are ‘in themselves,’ but rather to attain a view of things that can gain as much inter-subjective agreement as possible. In Rorty's language, we need to replace the aim of objectivity with that of solidarity. While the New Pragmatists agree with Rorty's ‘humanist’ and ‘anti-authoritarian’ notion that the world by itself cannot dictate to us what we should think about it, they demur from his suggestion that this requires us to give up the notions of truth and objectivity.

In common-sense morality, certain special obligations loom large. These are duties which are laid upon agents, be they individuals or groups, in virtue of their distinctive identities, relationships or histories: because of who they are, how they are linked to others or what they have done in the past. The particularistic basis of these obligations means that no one but the agent in question is engaged by such a duty. It is that agent's alone.

These special obligations include duties towards oneself, towards one's dependants and towards those to whom one has made certain commitments. In each case they prescribe partisan treatment. The beneficiary is to enjoy a benefit which may not be especially important in the global scheme of things, and which may even be obtained at the cost of others’ being deprived of benefits that are equally or more important in some cosmic sense.

This paper gives a contextualized reading of Kant’s theory of real definitions in geometry. Though Leibniz, Wolff, Lambert and Kant all believe that definitions in geometry must be ‘real’, they disagree about what a real definition is. These disagreements are made vivid by looking at two of Euclid’s definitions. I argue that Kant accepted Euclid’s definition of circle and rejected his definition of parallel lines because his conception of mathematics placed uniquely stringent requirements on real definitions in geometry. Leibniz, Wolff and Lambert thus accept definitions that Kant rejects because they assign weaker roles to real definitions.

There has been much recent debate about Presentism among those who believe the doctrine to be nontrivial and true, those who believe it to be nontrivial and false, and those who believe it to be trivial — either trivially true or trivially false. Formulating Presentism precisely is problematic, which accounts for some of the controversy.

Contemporary debate over public welfare policy is often cast in Kantian terms. It is argued, for example, that respect for the dignity of the poor requires public aid, or that respect for their autonomy forbids it. In some recent political discourse, the views of Kant himself have been invoked in defense of public welfare provision. Some have argued that his moral theory mandates welfare as an expression of our duty to be beneficent, or that Kant's commitments to freedom require public provision of aid to those in need. These implications are thought to be reflected in his political theory in a variety of ways.

However, at no point in his political works does Kant explicitly argue for the public provision of welfare on the basis of either beneficence or freedom. These omissions are the more striking because he does explicitly endorse the public provision of welfare. But the rationale for welfare he offers is that it is instrumentally necessary for the security and the stability of the state. This approach is very different from one grounded in moral duties of beneficence or respect for freedom, and may perhaps be disappointing to those who would like to establish some more hortatory moral rationale for welfare. But if Kant is to be enlisted in the cause of public welfare provision for the sake of beneficence or freedom, then an explanation is required why he offers no argument to that effect.

In a recent article (1972) I gave reasons for attributing to Mill a restricted view of the demands of morality, according to which no conduct would be prima facie wrong unless it was harmful to others. This interpretation of Mill raises the problem of reconciling such a view of morality with the principle which Mill calls the Principle of Utility. I tried to show that a reconciliation was possible by invoking the reminder, for which we are indebted to Alan Ryan (1965, 1970) and D. P. Dryer (1969), that Mill conceived of the Principle of Utility as a very abstract principle, and said that it governed not just morality but the whole of the Art of Life. I concluded that, whatever the subject matter of Mill's Principle of Utility might be, it was not the rightness and wrongness of actions.

This is a contribution to the symposium on Herman Cappelen’s book Fixing Language. Cappelen proposes a metasemantic framework—the “Austerity Framework”—within which to understand the general phenomenon of conceptual engineering. The proposed framework is austere in the sense that it makes no reference to concepts. Conceptual engineering is then given a “worldly” construal according to which conceptual engineering is a process that operates on the world. I argue, contra Cappelen, that an adequate theory of conceptual engineering must make reference to concepts. This is because concepts are required to account for topic continuity, a phenomenon which lies at the heart of projects in conceptual engineering. I argue that Cappelen’s own account of topic continuity is inadequate as a result of the austerity of his metasemantic framework, and that his worldly construal of conceptual engineering is untenable.

Machine learning algorithms are increasingly used to shape high-stake allocations, sparking research efforts to orient algorithm design towards ideals of justice and fairness. In this research on algorithmic fairness, normative theorizing has primarily focused on identification of “ideally fair” target states. In this paper, we argue that this preoccupation with target states in abstraction from the situated dynamics of deployment is misguided. We propose a framework that takes dynamic trajectories as direct objects of moral appraisal, highlighting three respects in which such trajectories can be subject to evaluation in relation to their (i) temporal dynamics, (ii) robustness, and (iii) representation.

Utilitarians must think collectively about the future because many contemporary moral issues require collective responses to avoid possible future harms. But current rule utilitarianism does not accommodate the distant future. Drawing on my recent books Future People and Ethics for a Broken World, I defend a new utilitarianism whose central ethical question is: What moral code should we teach the next generation? This new theory honours utilitarianism’s past and provides the flexibility to adapt to the full range of credible futures – from futures broken by climate change to the digital, virtual and predictable futures produced by various possible technologies.