Jean Caiaffo Caldas

A very influential idea on the nature of normative reasons is that the existence of normative reasons for action depends on the motivational capacity of the agents whose reasons they are: there are reasons for an agent to act only if she has the capacity to be moved to act for those reasons. Many theories of reasons developed in recent years imply at least some version of that idea, and many find it attractive since it incorporates some widespread assumptions about the role of reasons. In this paper, I argue that that idea, understood in any of its prominent readings, is ultimately false. First, I endorse the claim that there is at least one case that shows the possibility of the so-called ‘elusive reasons', that is, roughly, reasons whose existence depends on the agent’s ignorance of the facts that constitute them. Then, I argue that all the crucial objections recently elaborated to the possibility of elusive reasons ultimately fail. The upshot is that we should not aim to explain the nature of normative reasons in terms of motivational capacities of the agents whose reasons they are.

In this paper, I argue that knowledge of philosophical propositions can and should perform a role as regulative ideal in high school philosophy classes. Roughly speaking, I think that there are two kinds of knowledge assumed in high school philosophy classes: the first, which, for convenience, I shall call philosophical dispositional knowledge, and the philosophical propositional knowledge. The first one consists in the knowledge that takes into account only certain philosophical skills such as thesis identification, argument identification etc. The second one involves the guarantee of the truth of a philosophical proposition through justification. I argue that the philosophical dispositional knowledge, although it is a sufficient epistemological presupposition to be assumed for the preparation of high school philosophy classes, it is not necessary. This is because this kind of knowledge does not sufficiently plays a role as the ultimate goal in philosophy classes, if we consider that Philosophy itself, by its authors, has the philosophical propositional knowledge as an ultimate goal. Further, I argue that the first kind of knowledge is properly understood only if it is regulated by the second kind of knowledge ideal. Thus considered, besides the fact that, in this way, we in fact make Philosophy present itself in high school classes, we will have considerable gains for the students’ posture in face of the fundamental philosophical problems.