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38Class-struggle in the rational state: proto-marxist ideas in Hegel’s account of povertyBritish Journal for the History of Philosophy 31 (3): 491-512. 2023.For Hegel, poverty is not simply a misfortune, but, rather, a kind of injury inflicted on one class by another. Though Hegel rejects Marx’s theory of class, he nevertheless anticipates Marx’s idea of the exploitation of one class by another. How, though, do we align this proto-marxist dichotomy between rich and poor with Hegel’s official theory of class; his tripartite theory of estates? I argue that Hegel’s wealthy are chiefly found in the ‘mercantile’ estate, and that they are those intellectu…Read more
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26Justice as the constitutive norm of shared agency in Rousseau’s Social ContractInquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.Kantian constitutivists, like Velleman and Korsgaard, argue that there are norms internal to individual agency. Yet as Gilbert and others have argued there may be norms internal to shared agency as well. Might political principles of justice be norms of this second kind? I turn to the history of philosophy for an answer, focusing on Rousseau’s classic work the Social Contract. Rousseau is much better known as a social contract theorist – but I argue that he is also a constitutivist about group a…Read more
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82Frankfurt School Critical Theory as Transcendental Philosophy: Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s Synthesis of Kant and MarxJournal of the History of Philosophy 60 (3): 475-501. 2022.ARRAY
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87Hegel's Ontological Argument: A ReconstructionHegel Bulletin 44 (2): 275-296. 2023.This essay takes up a challenge recently posed by Graham Oppy: to clearly express, in premise-conclusion form, Hegel's version of the ontological argument. In addition to employing this format, it seeks to supplement existing treatments by locating a core component of Hegel's argument in a slightly different place than is common. Whereas some prominent recent treatments (Williams, Bubbio, Melechar) focus on Hegel's definition of the Absolute as the Concept, from the third part of his Science of …Read more
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64Hegel's Logic and MetaphysicsCambridge University Press. 2022.Kant said that logic had not had to take a single step forward since Aristotle, but German Idealists in the following generation made concerted efforts to re-think the logical foundations of philosophy. In this book, Jacob McNulty offers a new interpretation of Hegel's Logic, the key work of his philosophical system. McNulty shows that Hegel is responding to a perennial problem in the history and philosophy of logic: the logocentric predicament. In Hegel, we find an answer to a question so basic…Read more
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118From analytic pragmatism to historical materialism: Frankfurt school critical theory and the Quine‐Duhem thesisEuropean Journal of Philosophy 31 (3): 576-599. 2023.My aim in this paper is to explore an affinity between early critical theory and analytical philosophy. The affinity is in a fairly unexpected area: philosophy of science. I argue that early critical theory embraces a view of science which is a natural if somewhat unfamiliar extension of the pragmatist one defended by Quine. In particular, I argue that Horkheimer has a version of the Quine-Duhem thesis (“underdetermination of theory choice by the evidence”). How do the Frankfurt and analytical v…Read more
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103Transcendental Philosophy and Intersubjectivity: Mutual Recognition as a Condition for the Possibility of Self‐Consciousness in Sections 1–3 of Fichte's Foundations of Natural RightEuropean Journal of Philosophy 24 (4): 788-810. 2016.In the opening sections of his Foundations of Natural Right, Fichte argues that mutual recognition is a condition for the possibility of self-consciousness. However, the argument turns on the apparently unconvincing claim that, in the context of transcendental philosophy, conceptions of the subject as an isolated individual give rise to a vicious circle the resolution of which requires the introduction of a second rational being to ‘summon’ the first. In this essay, my aim is to present a revise…Read more
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Yale UniversityAssistant Professor
New Haven, Connecticut, United States of America
Areas of Interest
19th Century Philosophy |
17th/18th Century Philosophy |
Continental Philosophy |