According to a representational theory of phenomenal consciousness (RTPC), the phenomenal character of a conscious experience is completely exhausted by its representational content. Some considerations suggested by Christopher Peacocke raise an important problem for the RTPC. In his recent book Consciousness, where he defends a version of the RTPC, Christopher Hill argues that to solve Peacocke’s problem, visual qualia must be identified with “visual appearances” understood as relational properties of external objects. I raise two problems for Hill’s solution and I suggest an alternative way of understanding visual qualia as visual appearances.

In two recent papers, Jaegwon Kim offers an account of action explanation that is agent-centered and reasons-based. I argue that, despite his claims to the contrary, Kim’s proposal points the way to a pluralist view of explanation that might resolve the problem of explanatory exclusion and provide a way for nonreductive physicalists to escape the supervenience/exclusion argument.

This note considers the conceptual part of Sen’s «Internal Consistency of Choice». Amongst the various claims this paper features, two are singled out. A first, negative, claim is that no formal condition of choice consistency is normatively compelling without exception. A second, positive, claim, is that a formal condition of choice consistency is normatively compelling only under some assumptions involving preference. Here, the puzzling choices Sen puts forward are scrutinized and it is argued that such a scrutiny leads to question the negative claim, but in a subtle way, so that the positive claim is comforted, even strengthened.

The concept of human wisdom is fundamental for an understanding of the Apology. But it has not been properly understood. The received interpretations offer insufficient resources for explaining how Socrates could have been humanly wise before Apollo’s oracle, when he falsely believed that he was not wise at all. I argue that a satisfactory interpretation of human wisdom can be given in terms of “philosophia”. Socrates was humanly wise before the oracle because he loved wisdom—even though he did not know that he did. The analysis is confirmed by its resolution of some enduring difficulties in the interpretation of Apology, in particular, the question of why Socrates continued to search for knowledge he thought impossible to attain.

The central aim of this article is to set out the essential elements of Hegel’s conception of evil. I demonstrate that Hegel understands evil primarily as a moral phenomenon. In particular, he identifies evil as a pernicious subjectivism and hypocrisy that undermines the social and institutional conditions for ethical action. An appropriate understanding of his conception of evil points to the centrality of trust to ethicality (die Sittlichkeit).

This article uses Fichte and Hegel to explore the argument that vulnerability is valuable because it is what we all share as embodied beings in the world, and thus contributes to our connection with others. Further, recognition of one’s own vulnerability promotes self-knowledge. Their philosophies are then contrasted to show that Fichte’s system leads him to the attempt to overcome and control vulnerability, whereas Hegel’s describes an interplay of freedom and determination that allows us to be reconciled to our vulnerable, embodied state.

Because the meaning of indexical expressions fluctuates, they have long been enigmatic for the theory of signification in phenomenology. In Husserl’s first analysis in The Logical Investigations, two problems remained unsettled: 1) how this signification, directly oriented towards an object and intuitively fulfilled, is different from the object of reference, and 2) how a “symbolic” understanding of indexical expressions, without the participation of perception, is possible. In this paper, I show how the notions of “intentional horizon” and of “proper concept” provide answers. Without the new phenomenological value of the theory of concept and intentionality, it is impossible to understand the linguistic operation of indexicality.

The aim of this paper is to argue against the widely held view that our concept of person is purely mental. Utilizing an Anscombian scenario, in which reports on one’s own actions are made on the basis of observation, I argue that such “pilots in their ships,” as it were, cannot self-ascribe bodily properties. The mere fact that we feel in our bodies unlike pilots in their ships cannot generate the intuition that we are bodily: as long as we conceive ourselves as purely mental, the fact that we are bodily beings remains an inexplicable mystery.