Geoffrey Sayre-McCord

As a general approach to moral and political thought, contractarianism has had a long and distinguished history – its roots are easily traced as far back as Plato's Republic, where Glaucon advanced it as a view of justice, and its influential representatives include Grotius, Pufendorf, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Hume, and Kant. In various ways, to various purposes, and against the background of various assumptions, each of these philosophers offered contractarian arguments for the views they defended. What binds the tradition together, in the face of this variety, is the conviction that moral norms or political institutions find legitimacy, when they do, in their ability to secure (under the appropriate conditions) the agreement of those to whom they apply.

From Plato to G. E. Moore, moral theorists commonly and confidently embraced moral realism: they simply assumed that at least some moral claims were true. Until this century, their shared assumption was relatively unproblematic. Recently, however, moral realism has come under severe attack, and along the way moral theory itself has become suspect. Against moral realism anti-realists have maintained that all moral claims are cognitively empty , or that all moral claims are false . These positions are bolstered by arguments grounded in epistemology--some charging moral theory with untestability, others charging it with explanatory impotence. I defend moral realism against these epistemological attacks. Both attacks underestimate realism's resources, and both may be successfully met. Despite the historical enmity between scientific and moral realism, considerations marshalled in defense of scientific realism have surprising and powerful applications in moral theory. I use these arguments in developing a model for moral theorizing and a version of moral realism that each fits comfortably within a naturalistic world view without robbing moral theory of its claim to significance

Leibniz' Verteidigung einer relationalen Auffassung von Raum und Zeit im Briefwechsel mit Clarke nimmt in keiner Weise Bezug auf Monaden. Infolgedessen haben einige Leibniz-Interpreten angenommen, Leibniz' relationale Auffassung von Raum und Zeit könne -wenn man sie hinreichend abstrakt versteht -von seiner außerordentlich mentalistischen Ontologie losgelöst werde. In der Tat hat der Gedanke einer Trennung der beiden Lehren etwas Bestechendes, da die relationale Auffassung plausibler erscheint als Leibniz' Metaphysik der Monaden. Vor allem haben Materialisten sich Leibniz' relationale Auffassung zu eigen gemacht und seine mentalistische Ontologie verschmäht. Wie bestechend diese Trennung auch sein mag, die Kohärenz von Leibniz' relationaler Auffassung von Raum und Zeit hängt in entscheidendem Maße von seiner Monadologie ab. Wie Leibniz erkannte, glückt eine relationale Auffassung von Raum und Zeit nur dann, wenn einige grundlegende Bestandteile der Welt nicht grundsätzlich räumlich-zeitlich sind