• Why study logic?
    In Cornelis De Waal (ed.), The Oxford handbook of Charles S. Peirce, Oxford University Press. 2024.
  •  2
    Crime and punishment; drama and meaning: lessons from On the Genealogy of Morals II
    Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy. forthcoming.
    This paper takes up Nietzsche’s contrast between a relatively enduring ‘drama’ of punishment, which consists in sequences of procedures, and a congeries of often discrepant meanings and purposes of the drama and contrasts it favorably with the distinction between a definition of punishment and a justification for it which received a good deal of attention in the middle of the twentieth century in anglophone philosophical circles. My chief thesis is that the philosophical lesson to be drawn from …Read more
  •  64
    Jesse Prinz compares Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals to its utilitarian and materialist counterparts and gives two cheers for the Nietzschean approach.1 The project is well conceived; and—readers of this journal will not need to be convinced of this—the recognition of Nietzsche’s achievement is deserved and welcome. But when we get to “the particular go of it,”2 Prinz’s account of what Nietzsche’s achievement is, I have reservations. Though we have much to learn from his juxtaposing Nietzschean …Read more
  •  52
    Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 34 (2): 287-310. 2004.
    Truth, Rationality and Pragmatism [TRP] presents the fruits of Christopher Hookway’s thinking about the philosophy of Charles Sanders Peirce since the publication of Peirce in 1985. Unlike the earlier work, this ‘does not pretend to be a general introduction to Peirce’s philosophy [but]... deals [instead] with a range of important and central issues in more detail than was possible in that volume’. As his title indicates, Hookway’s chief aim is to articulate pragmatism’s most promising ideas abo…Read more
  •  36
    On the Very Idea of Sex with Robots
    In John Danaher & Neil McArthur (eds.), Robot Sex: Social Implications and Ethical, Mit. pp. 15-27. 2018.
    In this chapter, we focus on the simple sounding question: What is it to have sex? On the assumption that having sex is what you do with all and only your sexual part-ners, this offers a way of focusing the question: What would it take for a sex robot to be a sex partner? In order to understand the significance of the development of robots with whom (or which) we can have sex, we need to know what it is to have sex with a robot. And in order to know this, we have to know what it is to have sex, …Read more
  •  1
    The Early Nietzsche and the Question of Redemption
    Dissertation, Yale University. 1991.
    This dissertation attempts to establish that Nietzsche's philosophical development from 1864 to 1870 is directed towards finding a satisfactory way to redeem the sufferings of life immanently, that is, without appeal to a state of perfect being beyond the grave. I argue that this stage of his thinking culminates in the belief that the project of self-expressive self-determination was a satisfactory source of immanent redemption, and I therefore label this enterprise the project of redemptive sel…Read more
  •  16
    In this paper I show that penalties are not prices, and explain why the difference matters. In section one, I set up the problem which the following two sections will solve: namely, that it is easy enough to make certain kinds of penalties look just like prices. In section two, I lay out and dismantle an argument for reducing the former to the latter; and in section three I dismantle an argument for taking penalties and prices to be pragmatically equivalent, on the grounds that the essential fun…Read more
  •  16
    It is commonplace to observe that the history of thought reveals certain recurring patterns whose mode of expression changes according to context. It is equally apparent that to chart the salient characteristics of an influential way of thinking – to give concrete, clearly defined shape to the usually tangled fundamental impulses informing a cast of mind – is a complex, difficult task which calls for attention from the historian, the psychologist, the philosopher and, in the case of religious fi…Read more
  • Categorical Principles of Law: A Counterpoint to Modernity (edited book)
    Pennsylvania State University Press. 2002.
    In Germany, Otfried Höffe has been a leading contributor to debates in moral, legal, political, and social philosophy for close to three decades. Höffe's work, brings into relief the relevance of these German discussions to their counterparts in English-language circles. In this book, originally published in Germany in 1990 and expanded since, Höffe proposes an extended and original interpretation of Kant‚ philosophy of law, and social morality. Höffe articulates his reading of Kant in the conte…Read more
  •  90
    Schopenhauer's pessimism and the unconditioned good
    Journal of the History of Philosophy 33 (4): 643. 1995.
    In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Schopenhauer's Pessimism and the Unconditioned Good MARK MIGOTTI SCHOPENHAUERTOOK PESSIMISMtO be a profound doctrine that had long been accepted by the majority of humanity, albeit usually in the allegorical form given to it by one or another religious creed. Accordingly, he credited himself, not with the discovery of pessimism, but with the provision of a satisfactory philosophical exposition and defense of its claims. It was, he co…Read more
  •  41
    Nietzsche’s Task (review)
    Dialogue 44 (1): 179-182. 2005.
  •  6
    Friedrich Nietzsche (review)
    International Studies in Philosophy 30 (4): 122-123. 1998.
  •  39
    Unmodern Observations
    International Philosophical Quarterly 31 (3): 367-369. 1991.
  •  27
    History of Philosophy
    Philosophical Books 45 (3): 228-238. 2004.
  •  41
    ABSTRACT In this article I show how to integrate nietzsche's apparently conflicting views on the relationship of philosophers to the ascetic ideal of the ascetic priest. in sections 7 and 8 of GM iii, Nietzsche makes philosophers seem fundamentally different from priests; but in sections 9 and 10, he argues that philosophers early on succumb to the ascetic ideal of the priest. the key to understanding how these two aspects of GM iii fit together lies in nietzsche's ideas about the origins of con…Read more
  •  38
    Peirce's Double-Aspect Theory of Truth
    Canadian Journal of Philosophy 28 (sup1): 75-108. 1998.
    The idea of a double-aspect approach to a philosophical conundrum is familiar in metaphysics and the philosophy of mind and has been recently introduced as well into epistemology. As a class, double-aspect theories attempt, as it might be put, reconciliation by reorientation. Matter and mind, for double-aspect theorists, are not independent substances, whose co-presence in a single entity such as a human person might be deeply mysterious; they are different aspects of a single substance — a pers…Read more
  •  1
    Michael Hymers, Philosophy and its Epistemic Neuroses Reviewed by
    Philosophy in Review 21 (3): 182-184. 2001.
  •  40
    Self-Determination, Self-Expression, and Self-Knowledge
    The Personalist Forum 8 (Supplement): 233-242. 1992.
  •  34
    Rorty and His Critics (review)
    Dialogue 41 (1): 208-213. 2002.
    In the 1960s, Richard Rorty's public image was that of a rising officer in the advancing army of analytic philosophy. Then, in 1979, he published Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, in the wake of which all hell broke loose. Since that time, he has become a renowned neopragmatist enfant terrible, been called the most interesting philosopher in the world by Harold Bloom, dismissed as beneath discussion by most of the rank and file among his erstwhile analytic brethren, and now selected as the su…Read more
  •  60
    All kinds of promises
    Ethics 114 (1): 60-87. 2003.
  •  218
    Slave morality, socrates, and the bushmen: A reading of the first essay of on the genealogy of morals
    Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 58 (4): 745-779. 1998.
    This paper raises three questions: (1) Can Nietzsche provide a satisfactory account of how the slave revolt could have begun to "poison the consciences" of masters? (2) Does Nietzsche's affinity for "master values" preclude him from acknowledging claims of justice that rest upon a sense of equality among human beings? and (3) How does Nietzsche's story fare when looked on as (at least in part) an empirical hypothesis? The first question is answered in the affirmative, the second in the negative,…Read more
  •  22
    Peirce's First Rule of Reason and the Bad Faith of Rortian Post-Philosophy
    Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 31 (1). 1995.