James Edwards

According to the motivational thesis (MT), we are justified in performing an action if and only if we perform that action for the right reason(s). Proponents of MT disagree about how it is best interpreted—about what count as reasons of the right kind. In _Fundamentals of Criminal Law_, Andrew Simester criticises an interpretation offered by John Gardner. Here, I explore some of Simester's reasons for objecting to that interpretation, and I argue—partly on the basis of those same reasons—that Simester's own interpretation of MT should be revised. I conclude with a preliminary defence of an alternative interpretation, which I call the tripartite view of justification.

According to the motivational thesis (MT), we are justified in performing an action if and only if we perform that action for the right reason(s). Proponents of MT disagree about how it is best interpreted—about what count as reasons of the right kind. In Fundamentals of Criminal Law, Andrew Simester criticises an interpretation offered by John Gardner. Here, I explore some of Simester's reasons for objecting to that interpretation, and I argue—partly on the basis of those same reasons—that Simester's own interpretation of MT should be revised. I conclude with a preliminary defence of an alternative interpretation, which I call the tripartite view of justification.

According to Crispin Wright’s neo-logicist reconstruction of Frege’s philosophy of arithmetic, the truths of arithmetic are logical consequences, in the semantic sense, of second-order logic, augmented with an analytic axiom (Hume’s Principle). Neo-logicism thus views arithmetic truths as analytic, being the logical consequences of an analytic axiom. This chapter argues that the semantic relation of second-order logical consequence that is most naturally suited to the practice of arithmetic is proof-theoretically complete, and that given this, Gödel’s incompleteness result shows that there are arithmetical truths which are not derivable in Wright’s proof theory augmented by Hume’s Principle. The chapter thus challenges Wright’s programme of neo-Fregean logicism.