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467I raise the question of whether there is a hidden source of doubt in Descartes’ first meditation, if one adopts the perspective of some people he describes as insane.
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691I respond to Nuno Palma’s suggestion, made in 2008, that we are approaching the day in which nothing new can be said about Adam Smith. I think that is unlikely. The paper presents a model to support the suggestion. To illustrate my counterargument, I focus on the problem of Adam Smith’s apparently contradictory claims about the effects of the division of labour on character.
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718The preface to A Theory of Justice includes the interesting suggestion that John Rawls’s system is consistent with W.V. Quine’s system. I raise a problem for achieving fair equality of opportunity granting Quine’s system: that one does not have to respond to apparent evidence that two candidates are equally suitable for a job in the desired way. There does not appear to be a logical inconsistency between the systems at this point, but in practice regular positive discrimination schemes are proba…Read more
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687I propose a solution to a problem raised by E.G. West’s paper “Adam Smith’s Two Views on the Division of Labour.” Smith seems committed to the views that the division of labour makes people more and less intelligent.
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593I present an answer to the title question which relates Russell’s writings to a remark by C.D. Broad. Russell shared the same concerns as Broad about the new postgraduate students at the University of Cambridge but instead of voicing them, his writings left a problem.
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600Jonathan Quong classifies varieties of liberalism based on two yes-or-no questions. I show that there is a kind of perfectionist liberalism that cannot be located on his map. I call it backdoor liberal perfectionism.
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633In this paper, I respond to an essay by Tatyana Tolstaya, which describes a contrast between the Russian and the Western perspective on words. Her contrast may generally be true, but I know of a counterexample: a tale about a Western philosopher and his followers and what happened to them.
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608How old is the distinction between the genetic and the gestational parent? Anca Gheaus “suggests” it is quite new, but I believe people have made a distinction along these lines for centuries in their imaginations. I present a problem related to the distinction and to the Scottish enlightenment.
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490The most well-known kinds of liberalism are based on the doctrine of the atomism of the individual, sometimes called "the separateness of persons." Each person is a separate being and this separateness ought to be respected. But these doctrines do not seem to allow a country to restrict immigration for the purpose of protecting a national way of life, except for protecting liberalism itself. One cannot restrict immigration to protect customs, a dominant religion, etc. This can lead to considerab…Read more
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617In his review of Chris Daly’s book Philosophical Methods, Jonathan Jenkins Ichikawa debates with Daly over the value of using the word “tension,” which Daly describes as a weasel word. Ichikawa disagrees. I raise a worry that Ichikawa’s response will not convince Daly and try to help Ichikawa out. Then I outline a traditional empiricist objection to Daly.
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484This paper responds to a European novel presenting the development of a poet. The novelist depicts a stage in which the poet seeks to escape from his mother, but I show that there are textual resources for an alternative interpretation of why.
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693Should one read T.H. Irwin’s three volume history of Western ethics, or parts of it? Here one might turn to reviews. The journal The Philosophical Forum uses the sensible strategy of getting different specialists to review different parts of the book. There are two chapters on Rawls, each one reviewed by a Rawlsian. I wish to register discontent with Steven Ross’s review.
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743Euthanasia and well-being: did Joseph Raz change his mind?IOSR Journal of HumanitieS and Social Science 30 (7): 15-16. 2025.I identify what appears to be a "glaring" inconsistency between what Joseph Raz says on euthanasia in a 2012 lecture and what he says on well-being within his most celebrated book, The Morality of Freedom. There also appears to be a subtler inconsistency between what he says and his endorsement of H.L.A. Hart’s opposition to a definitional project.
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846This is a two page handout specifying approaches, or methods, used in interpreting Judith Butler. The methods of various analytic philosophers are identified.
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506I observe that the aim and method of a Victorian text within Shakespeare criticism overlaps significantly with Derridean deconstruction, which aims to overcome dualisms by attending to marginalized material, which must be ignored to justify the dualism. The Victorian author Charles Cowden Clarke defends examining minor characters from Shakespeare plays, in his 1863 book Shakespeare-Characters; Chiefly Those Subordinate. He suggests to me the aim of deconstructing the dichotomy between orderly cl…Read more
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776In this paper, I identify an argument derived from the commitments of John Rawls’s liberalism for restricting the consumption of recreational drugs in a liberal society, but not because of a great passion for restriction at present. The argument can also be used to respond to Jonathan Quong’s example of an unresolvable disagreement between liberal citizens.
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753I argue that Joseph Raz’s paper on euthanasia faces a problem of coherence with Joseph Raz’s paper addressing the question of “Why should I be moral?”
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755Kenneth Arrow presents Rawls as making a controversial assumption, which he terms “asset egalitarianism”: that all the assets of society, including personal skills, are available for distribution. I distinguish two versions of the assumption and draw attention to difficulties in determining what Arrow’s concern over the assumption is.
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787This paper presents an explanation for why the mayor of Hamelin did not pay, by means of a fiction. It is probably influenced by films or children’s television that I have forgotten.
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612In a book contribution responding to H.L.A. Hart and Tony Honoré, Judith Jarvis Thomson casts a certain analysis of causation in an attractive light, but says that it unfortunately faces two objections. I draw attention to another objection.
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685Donald Davidson denies that there are incommensurable scientific languages: languages which cannot be translated into our contemporary language. What about Derrida? What is his perspective on this matter? This paper presents a broadly Derridean objection to Susan Carey’s argument for incommensurability.
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725I distinguish two senses of the word “deconstruction.” Then I quote a passage by a critic from the 1860s which, together with trends of that time, gives rise to the question of whether deconstructive interpretation existed in the nineteenth century.
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500Charles Larmore presents the central part of Descartes’ first meditation as a brief dialogue between a skeptic and a sensible empiricist. I point out a source of discontent about this innovative transformation.
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509In this paper, I raise and respond to the question of why females are underrepresented in parts of philosophy which one might classify as feminine.
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646Joseph Raz claims that there can be reason to do the impossible; but partial compliance with reason is better than non-compliance and the closer one gets to complying with reason, the better. I propose some exceptions.
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565The French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan describes the right-wing intellectual as “no more than your Mr. Everyman, but your Mr. Everyman with greater strength of character.” It is tempting to apply the description to sensible English essayists, though they take up positions across the political spectrum. I shall raise two worries about this application, one of which is a puzzle for Lacan.
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554This paper presents a problem for a prisoner’s dilemma model according to which the state of nature would be a war of all against all, which I call “the close up problem.”
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631In this paper, I begin with Joseph Raz’s remarks on H.L.A. Hart’s contribution to general philosophy, before proposing a counterexample to the is-ought gap.
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602This paper is about W. Somerset Maugham’s short story The Taipan. I identify two ideas that the story seems to be based on, some related strengths, but also a slight weakness.
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705Joseph Raz’s obituary of H.L.A. Hart for Utilitas raises certain puzzles, especially for readers coming from the research area analytic political philosophy. I present three puzzles.
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