ABSTRACT: In this paper, I first lay out a definition of perfectionism drawing mainly upon the works of Cora Diamond and Stanley Cavell. Secondly, I introduce the notion of “expressive rationality” and show how it contributes to expanding the scope of pragmatism beyond its original boundaries. I then proceed to examine pragmatism and perfectionism as competing alternative accounts of moral experience, through a discussion of Coetzee’s novel The Lives of Animals. In so doing, I intend to show that pragmatism and perfectionism constitute two necessary and irreducible approaches to moral experience, pointing towards two diverging and yet irreducibly joined spheres of moral life.

ABSTRACT: In an article on Plato’s Symposium entitled “Sorcerer Love” Luce Irigaray attempts a retrieval of the teaching of Diotima of Mantinea on Eros. Finding a stark contrast between the two halves of Diotima’s speech in the Symposium she speculates that the doctrine of Eros contained in the first half of the speech may well represent the teaching of the historical Diotima on which the Platonic ‘metaphysics’ of the second half are super-imposed. While finding much to admire in Irigaray’s account, the author suggests that the two halves of the speech can be read as a unity and that Irigaray’s insights can be accommodated within Platonism.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I carry out an application of the debate between simulationism and theory theory to the issue of episodic memory. I first criticize the approach favored by the theory theory. Then I advance a simulationist conception of the relationship between the phenomenology of episodic memory and its specific kind of self-consciousness. On my view, subjectivity belongs to the very content of episodic memory, not as an element of its content, but as the perspective it gives to the content that makes the simulation of past experience possible. In support of that view, I provide an analysis inspired by J. Perry of the semantics of de se thought. It gives the remembering subject a non-representational presence in the mnesic content.

ABSTRACT: In this paper, I am interested in the ethics of everyday sexual agency: specifically, in moral questions about when, how, and why we identify ourselves as particular kinds of sexual agents. Given that sexual self-identifications involve a complex combination of individual and social processes, a framework which does justice to these processes would help make room for an analysis of the ethics of sexual self-identification. I introduce the concept of sexual authenticity as useful in these contexts, where such authenticity involves two main aspects: taking up sexual identifications as our ownmost and giving accounts of them to and with others.

ABSTRACT: Ever since Hume raised the problem of induction, many philosophers have tried to solve this problem; however, there still is no solution that has won wide acceptance among philosophers. According to Wilfrid Sellars, the reason is mainly that these philosophers have tried to justify induction by theoretical reasoning rather than by practical reasoning. In this paper I offer a sort of Sellarsian proposal. On the basis of the instrumental principle and the constructivist view of the concept of epistemic justification, I argue that it is reasonable to accept induction.

ABSTRACT: This paper proposes a Habermasian analysis of bullshit which diverges from the well-known account offered by Harry Frankfurt. It aims to show that Habermas’s theory of communicative action provides superior conceptual tools for such an analysis, but also that the phenomenon of bullshit ought to be deeply troubling to Habermasians. Bullshit frustrates the transition to discourse, interrupts the binding force of communicative action (the basis of Habermas’s account of social integration) and, if sufficiently widespread as to alter fundamental attitudes toward public speech, bullshit challenges the status of Habermas’s theory of communicative action as a reconstruction of the intuitive knowledge of competent speakers, which status is intended to justify its claim to provide the normative foundations for a critical theory of society in the Frankfurt School sense of an immanent critique.