Xiangdong Xu

The paper argues that it is a mistake to interpret Thomas Reid as holding a libertarian notion of freedom, and to make use of Reid to argue in support of a libertarian position. More precisely, this paper shows that Reid’s theory of agent-causation may not be what these philosophers take it to be, once such crucial notions as agent-causation and active power in Reid’s theory of free agency have been fully explicated. Reid is more committed to accepting the view of freedom as rational self-control over the determination of the will than a contracausal view of freedom

Insofar as the present debate over ethics and practical reason is concerned, Kantians have typically argued that the Kantian conception of practical reason is the only game in the town. This dissertation is aimed to establish a critical reaction to the Kantian challenge, which I interpret as based on two essential claims. First, it asserts that the Humean approach is not sufficiently powerful to account for normativity. Second, it claims that the approach will necessarily lead to skepticism about practical reason since Hume himself is such a skeptic. The central agenda of the dissertation is to show that both of the claims are false. ;My answer to the Kantian challenge rests on two things. Firstly, it rests on construing the debate between the Kantian and the Humean as not just concerned with whether or not reason can alone motivate, but also related to such deeper issues as the nature of practical reason, human agency, and the self. In fact, it is only against the wide background, I argue, that the Humean approach is preferred to the Kantian one. Secondly, it depends on an interpretation of Hume's philosophy. By elaborating on Hume's naturalism and revealing its relations to his skepticism, I show that Hume is no skeptic about the fact that we can and should be motivated by certain norms of practical necessity. Throughout the dissertation, then, I establish and develop a naturalistic account of normativity in particular and practical reason in general.

Even if cognitive science has made some important progress in its approach to human mental activities, consciousness and subjective experience still strike us as highly puzzling from a 'scientific' point of view. This may not be surprising, since the Cartesian distinction between res cogitans and res extensa seems to have a priori ruled out the very possibility of understanding the human mind as an object of physical science. However, in this paper, I argue that some Cartesian intuitions about the nature of consciousness may still deserve sustaining by showing that it is a mistake to seek some physicalist reduction of the phenomena of consciousness. At the same time, I also try to show in what sense Colin McGinn's transcendental naturalism may be intelligible