Yunlong Cao

Existentialists such as Martin Heidegger and Jean-Paul Sar- tre have offered some interesting responses to the skeptical problem of other minds. However, their contributions are sometimes overlooked in the analytic study of this problem. A traditional view may think the existentialists focus on the ethical issues among conscious minds and take for granted that individuals’ experiences are within a world with others. This paper aims to identify and reconstruct two transcendental arguments on other minds from Heidegger’s and Sartre’s philosophy. I argue that their arguments are strong enough to ward off skeptics and suggest that their existential starting points and methodologies might be our best way out of the puzzle.

Philosophers before Friedrich Nietzsche are more interested in reality than in appearance; they tend to believe that we can access the ultimate truth through hard work, which will set us free. However, in his book, The Gay Science, Nietzsche criticizes this aim of science, or metaphysics. While it has been argued that Nietzsche denies the distinction between perceivable appearances and a concealed, underlying reality, in this paper, I will argue that such a distinction is consistent with Nietzsche’s project and contributes to his perspectivism.

Readers of Stoic ethics may find ‘benefit’ (ōpheleia) an essential but enigmatic concept. It directly connects to some critical terms of Stoic ethics, such as ‘good’ and ‘virtue,’ but there is no extant discussion of a definition. Beyond the superficial connections, what makes ‘benefit’ beneficial? Why is benefit a good thing? I argue that these essential questions remain unanswerable for a good reason: Stobaeus committed to a specious claim about benefit in his Anthology, which has misguided later commentaries. Either the Stoics themselves made a stronger contrast between sages and inferior people at the cost of coherence, or Stobaeus simply mischaracterized the Stoics’ ideas in his descriptions. This paper aims to clarify Stobaeus’s inaccurate description and reconstruct a coherent and comprehensible interpretation of benefit in the Stoic spirit, with the help of Stoic cosmology. To benefit is to further nature’s agreement. Given the available evidence, I argue that Stoics seem to, or should, be committed to my interpretation. This paper is structured as follows. Section 1 offers a quick background of Stoic ethics. Section 2 discusses two important characteristics of benefit. Section 3 discusses Stobaeus’s description of benefit and inferior people. Section 4 attempts an interpretation of benefit. Finally, Section 5 discusses Inwood and Gerson’s interpretation and argues that it is inadequate.

In his book, The Bounds of Sense, P. F. Strawson commented that Immanuel Kant’s argument in the second analogy “proceeds by a non sequitur of numbing grossness,” causing a fair amount of debates. Kant’s task in the second analogy is to argue that every event has a cause. Strawson criticizes Kant by claiming that in his argument, Kant not only changes the content of necessity but also shifts a conceptual necessity to a causal one. In this paper, I defend Kant’s second analogy against Strawson’s objection by arguing that Strawson misinterprets Kant’s strategy.