EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

There is widespread agreement that we are living in an age of “democratic backsliding,” in which a growing number of formally democratic countries are falling behind previously achieved levels of democratization. But on what grounds can we claim that one level of democratic development is “higher” or “lower” than another? This question has rarely been systematically addressed in recent scholarship, despite the popularity of the language of “backsliding.” Reacting to this, this article aims to retrieve a philosophically sophisticated account of democratic progress and regression from the work of Jürgen Habermas, a major figure of Frankfurt School Critical Theory. The article derives from Habermas's thought a distinctive conception of democratic progress, as well as three different meanings of “democratic regression.” It also discusses some implications for social science research on democratization.

The project of Being and Time was premised on the idea that being could be grasped in its truth. Heidegger maintained that “being can be something unconceptualized, but it never completely fails to be understood” (SZ 183). “Even if being may perhaps be hidden in its primordial grounds,” he maintained, nonetheless “there is a necessary connection between being and understanding” (SZ 183). Thus Heidegger pursued ontology through an inquiry into the conditions under which being could be manifest or disclosed to the understanding (SZ 183).

But if Heidegger was confident that being could be grasped or made intelligible through a phenomenological ontology (see SZ §44), the uncompleted second part of Being and Time was premised on the idea that it might be quite difficult to bring being to manifestness – that a historical deconstruction was required to expose the concealments and confusions behind which the meaning of being has lain hidden throughout the history of metaphysics.

In Being and Time, and for several years after its publication, Heidegger focused on temporality as the primary horizon within which being could be made manifest. And so Heidegger took his project to involve making “temporality visible as the transcendental original structure,” thereby illuminating the “concealed projection of being on time as the innermost event in the understanding of being in ancient and subsequent metaphysics” (GA3: 241–2).

In the subsequent decade or so, Heidegger developed in his lecture courses and unpublished manuscripts a conception of ontological concealment as something more pervasive and essential than he had previously supposed. For instance, in his 1931 lecture On the Essence of Truth, Heidegger writes that “the entity in its being” has an “authentic, inner drive to remain concealed and, even if it has become unconcealed, a drive to go back into concealment again” (GA34: 14). And in 1942, with the publication of his essay “Plato's Doctrine of Truth,” Heidegger declares publicly that concealment “permeates the essence of being” (GA9: 223). He argues that the pre-Platonic philosophers were the first to have an inkling of the essentially concealed nature of being, and he saw this insight as implicit in the Greek word for truth itself – alētheia. The alpha in a-lētheia, Heidegger emphasizes, is an alpha privative, so that truth is literally a privation of concealment. Consequently, Heidegger argues that for the Greek thinkers, it was concealment (lēthe), not truth (a-lētheia), that was the prior and most fundamental condition of being. Heidegger concludes the essay on Plato by insisting on the necessity of returning to the early Greek “appreciation of the ‘positive’ in the ‘privative’ essence of alētheia. The positive [i.e., concealment] must first be experienced as the basic characteristic of being itself” (GA9: 144). This is a striking claim: to understand

This review article makes some critical points about Boyle's Transparency and Reflection. These focus on (1) ‘pre-reflective awareness’ of mental states, and (2) the existence and nature of ‘the subject’ of experience.

Contemporary republican political theory, with its general commitment to freedom from domination, offers a powerful critique of social subordination. Here, I develop a novel republican critique of social subordination within the framework of a Kantian theory of right. The foundation of Kantian political philosophy is the right to freedom, which includes a general right not to be subordinated to others under law. Within this Kantian framework, wrongful social subordination is injustice that we have the right to be free of rather than something we should seek to minimize. Further, freedom from subordination is not an absolute right, nor is it the only right: not all social subordination is unjust, and there are forms of injustice beyond social subordination. Given these distinctive features, I argue that Kantian republicanism can enrich contemporary republicanism more broadly, as it enables nuanced and principled distinctions between different forms of social subordination while also making it possible to argue that particular forms of social subordination are unjust and categorically impermissible.

Recent approaches are unable to make full sense of Nietzsche's distinction between weak and strong skepticism (BGE 208–209; A54). In this paper, I propose an alternative interpretation. My suggestion is that this distinction is best understood in the context of his virtue epistemology. My approach follows and extends Alfano's proposal to interpret Nietzsche as an inquiry responsibilist virtue epistemologist. However, I part ways with Alfano about the normative framework for Nietzsche's virtue epistemology. My contention is that Alfano's framework for Nietzschean virtue is unable to satisfactorily frame the distinction between strong and weak skepticism. In contrast, I offer an alternative framework that is better suited to interpreting Nietzsche's distinction and to articulating his conception of skepticism in terms of intellectual virtue and vice. I provide an account of Nietzsche's virtue/vice conception of skepticism that is currently lacking in the literature, and that is worthy of the attention of virtue epistemologists.

In this article, I discuss how Fichte treats the idea of the non-state society in several of his works over the course of his philosophical career. In particular, I examine why such an idea is necessary in his ethical system as well as for his theory of the state, and what kind of hope of realisation in the empirical world it admits. Furthermore, I show that the idea of a non-state society, as the final development of human progress, can only be understood as necessary in conjunction with the human drive to achieve moral perfection through actions beyond individuality. Only by uniting these two poles can the law of perfectibility operate.

I argue that Fichte’s account of the type of subject presupposed by idealism entails that certain individuals engaged in mechanical tasks within a social division of labour would be alienated from their own activity even while fulfilling their vocation as human beings, despite how this vocation is incompatible with the reduction of human beings to parts of a machine. Avoiding or overcoming this alienation would require a strong form of moral identification with one’s own activity within a social division of labour. Although this solution is compatible with Fichte’s theory of duty, it is shown to be difficult to reconcile with his commitment to the moral equality of human beings, because some individuals will be required to make a greater sacrifice in relation to the human vocation than others. Another assumption is that certain individuals, the scholar among them, make a greater contribution that offsets the advantage of not having to engage in forms of activity whose alienating character requires a stronger form of moral identification than is demanded of them.