I defend Edith Stein's theory of empathy as an alternative to simulation theories of empathy. Simulation theories of empathy involve using one's own cognitive resources to replicate the mental states of others by imagining being in their situation. I argue that this understanding of empathy is problematic within the context of mental healthcare because it can lead to the co-opting and assimilation of another person's experiences. In response, I maintain that Stein's theory is preferable because it involves appreciating others’ experiences as it is for them, and this alternative account of empathy avoids the assimilation of the experiences of others.

When discussing well-being, subject-relative concerns are intuitively important ones. In this article, I argue that Immanuel Kant's theory of well-being can be satisfactorily subject-relative, despite his emphasis on objective moral well-being. Because the specifics of agents’ situations affect agents’ moral endowments, duties regarding moral well-being can be altered for subject-relative reasons. When it comes to thinking about the well-being of others, the important Kantian notion of respect for rational agents ensures that this will be decidedly subject-relative, too, and, what is more, that this will be aimed specifically at natural well-being (happiness).

There is a ubiquitous claim in the grounding literature that metaphysical foundationalism violates the principle of sufficient reason (PSR) in virtue of positing a level of ungrounded facts. I argue that foundationalists can accept the PSR if they are willing to replace fundamentality as independence with completeness and deny that ground is a strict partial order. The upshot is that the PSR can be compatible with both metaphysical foundationalism and metaphysical infinitism, and so presupposing this fixed explanatory demand need not beg the question in favour of either view.

Immanuel Kant maintained throughout his life that non-human persons likely exist but he failed to specify how we could recognise them. In this article, I argue (a) that non-human organisms can be considered non-human persons if they can be judged as belonging to a species with a moral vocation, and (b) a species can be judged as having a moral vocation if at least one of its members is able to make what I will call a “moral sacrifice” in which that member sacrifices its physical life for the sake of its moral life.

A legal fiction is a knowingly false assumption that is given effect in a legal proceeding and that participants are not permitted to disprove. I offer a semantic pretence theory that shows how fiction-involving legal reasoning works.

L'on considère, selon une interprétation largement soutenue, que nous assistons dans la Méditation première à une montée en puissance du doute reposant sur une efficacité croissante des raisons de douter. Nous suggérons ici que nous pouvons défendre une lecture déflationniste du doute des Méditations en ce que la succession des arguments sceptiques utilisés par Descartes accuse une courbe d'efficacité décroissante. Cette lecture n'est bien évidemment pas sans conséquences, évoquées en conclusion, sur l'interprétation de l'exercice même du doute et, plus fondamentalement, de la doctrine cartésienne de la connaissance.

Kant's critique of rational psychology is a thought experiment that targets no individual or school, but rather the natural tendency of human reason to “hypostatize” the highest intellectual condition of all cognition (the pure ‘I think’) as though it were itself a cognition of the ‘I.’ To do so is to violate the very anti-circularity stricture also at work in Kant's better-known transcendental critiques of Locke and Hume. Along with a new type of circularity (level circularity), this article proposes a conception of transcendental arguments different from that of most contemporary debates regarding empiricism, naturalism, and Cartesian foundationalism.

Dans Naissance de la clinique, Michel Foucault développe une théorie de la socialisation de la perception sous le nom d’« archéologie du regard médical ». Selon ce modèle, le regard quotidien est conditionné par un code perceptif qui détermine à la fois les traits dignes d'attention et le sens qu'il faut leur attribuer — ce que Foucault nomme des « régimes de visibilité ». Foucault pense ainsi la structuration sociale de l'expérience perceptive comme le produit d'un a priori historique dont il tente de dessiner les contours. Le but de cet article est de décrire les intérêts et les difficultés d'un tel projet. Nous montrerons notamment que Foucault ne développe aucune réelle théorie de la perception, ce qui fragilise son modèle de deux manières : au niveau théorique, d'abord, celui-ci laisse de côté la question de la transformation du code perceptif mis en évidence ; au niveau empirique, ensuite, il n'est pas en mesure de rendre compte des ethnographies contemporaines de la pratique médicale.

This article examines Wilhelm Dilthey's project of a critique of historical reason and the reproach of historicism addressed by Heinrich Rickert. Through a comparative analysis of their respective attempts to establish a philosophical grounding for the human sciences, this article demonstrates that Dilthey and Rickert, despite their disagreement, converge toward a productive reinterpretation of the crisis of historicism and pave the way for a reconfiguration of the relationship between philosophy and history. The article focuses on three aspects of the historicist view: the importance of the particular, the historically situated character of the knowing subject, and the primacy of historical consciousness.

In this article, I discuss two approaches to the phenomenon of gesture, constituted by the existential dimension of embodiment, intersubjectivity, affectivity, and language: while Martin Heidegger states that human bodily movement as a whole should be understood as gesture in contrast to the spatial movement of things, Vilém Flusser integrates under this notion a multitude of human practices and activities that common sense hesitates to call gestures. The dilemma of the phenomenology of gesture consists in this tension between the plural concreteness of gestural appearances and the irrepressible temptation to identify a unitary layer that would allow them to hold together.