John J. Davenport

I have argued that like Harry Frankfurt, Augustine implicitly distinguishes between first-order desires and higher-order volitions; yet unlike Frankfurt, Augustineheld that the liberty to form different possible volitional identifications is essential to responsibility for our character. Like Frankfurt, Augustine recognizes that we can sometimes be responsible for the desires on which we act without being able to do or desire otherwise; but for Augustine, this is true only because such responsibility for inevitable desires and actions traces (at least in part) to responsibility for our volitional identifications, which in turn has leeway-libertarianconditions. However, David Hunt has interpreted Augustine’s account of divine foreknowledge as implying a type of source-incompatibilism that does not require alternative possible actions or intentions. Moreover, while Eleonore Stump’s account of Augustine on sanctification supports my interpretation, Augustine’s position on predestination in his latest writings may be incompatible with liberty of the higher-order will. I will argue against Hunt’s interpretation but admit that the leeway-libertarian has to reject the ‘no autonomy’ model in some of Augustine’s late writings.

Tradition must rank as one of the ten most important works within the hermeneutic tradition to be published in the 1990s, alongside recent books by Jean-Luc Nancy, Drucilla Cornell, Simon Critchley, John Caputo, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Derrida. In Tradition, Stephen Watson, who is influenced by Heidegger, Gadamer, Merleau-Ponty, Derrida, and Alasdair MacIntyre, works out a historical hermeneutics with obvious connections to their views, but that also stakes out a different position "between" their respective accounts of reason, interpretation, and tradition. This work builds on themes introduced in Watson's earlier collection of essays, such as his paper on "Between Truth and Method: Gadamer, Traditionality, and the Problem of Justification in Interpretative Practices." In the process, Watson also develops his innovative approaches to many particular figures in the history of modern philosophy, to their influence on and significance for one another, and most importantly, to an array of fundamental questions concerning the canons of reason, the status of personal subjects, and basic ethical concepts like friendship, character, and the good. It is in his treatment of these themes especially—and his general suspicion of transcendental methodology and universal principles—that we perhaps see the Aristotelian influences most clearly in this text. At the same time, Watson's is always a deconstructive version of Aristotelianism, refracted through his reading of Heidegger, whose notion of Erwiderung, or "reciprocal rejoinder" with past thinkers in the formation of new ideas is introduced on the first page and becomes the schema both for his analysis of tradition and his treatment of individual authors.

This essay argues that Mark C. Murphy's original contribution to natural law ethics succeeds in finding a way between older metaphysical and newer purely practical approaches in this genre. Murphy's reconstruction of the function argument, critique of subjectivist theories of well-being, and rigorous formulation of a flexible welfarist theory of value deserve careful attention. I defend Kant against Murphy's critique and argue that Murphy faces the problem of showing that all his basic goods are morally inviolable. Although I endorse Murphy's critique of radical virtue ethics, I raise objections to the basic moral norms he derives from his list of goods, and to the analysis of peace of mind and happiness as basic goods