EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY最新文献

Political epistemology has become a popular field of research in recent years. It sets itself the ambitious task to intertwine epistemology with social and political theory in order to do justice to the relationships between truth and politics, or reason and power. Yet many contributions either expand arguments and concepts from traditional epistemology to political phenomena or use existing theories and frameworks from social and political theory to address the politics of epistemological questions. The former approach (prominent, e.g., in the epistemic injustice debate) leads to an epistemisation of political phenomena and concepts coupled with their de-politicization, the latter approach (prominent, e.g., in Frankfurt School critical theory) leads to a politicization of epistemic phenomena and concepts coupled with their de-epistemisation. Instead, it is argued that political epistemology requires reworking even basic concepts, due to its three foundational commitments: It is committed to the claim that socio-material conditions of existence matter epistemically (minimal materialism), to the self-reflection of the socio-material conditions of political epistemology's own arguments and theories (radical self-reflexivity), and to a specific form of epistemic humility (epistemic non-sovereignty). Using the notion of normativity as an exemplary problem, the article closes by highlighting the difficulty of maintaining these three commitments.

Duties to oneself are central to Kant's moral thought. Indeed, in his Lectures on Ethics, he claims that they “take first place, and are the most important of all” (LE: 27:341). Despite this, Kant is not clear about what they are or why they are ‘the most important.’ What is it for a duty to be owed to oneself? And in what sense do such duties ‘take first place’? I answer these questions: a duty to oneself is a self-legislated duty, and they ‘take first place’ in that all ethical duties are, fundamentally, duties to oneself. Based on a close reading of Kant's “Apparent Antinomy” regarding duties to oneself in The Doctrine of Virtue §§1–3, I argue that Kant holds that (1) a duty is owed to its legislator, and (2) all duties are self-legislated. I then argue that this interpretation is further supported by Kant's understanding of the Categorical Imperative as a “principle of autonomy” in the Groundwork (G: 4:433). I conclude by offering an interpretation of the Categorical Imperative on which even though all duties are ultimately owed to oneself, there remains an important sense in which some duties are owed to others as well.

Engaging with the literature on transformative conceptions of rationality, I argue for the following position on the way reason transforms human cognition: when the capacity for knowing that one ought to do something is directed at one's own speech acts, an initially domain-specific and practical grasp of genus/species relations – manifest in the ability to select among the various permitted ways to do as one judges one ought – becomes a mechanism through which the reflective study of genus/species relations hones the domain-general classificatory abilities that accompany adult human language use. In this fashion, our instinctive behaviors may be transformed: we might cease to respond to events simply as (e.g.) fearful or enraging, recognize these motivations as cases of cowardice and recklessness, and begin to treat them as opportunities for courage and restraint.

Anscombe famously said, “It is an insult and it may be an injury not to be believed.” But what is it to believe someone? My aim is to show that understanding what it is to believe someone requires a conception of a distinctive kind of interpersonal reasoning. To do so, I develop an analogy between interpersonal reasoning and an Anscombean conception of practical reasoning. I suggest that the distinctive ‘form’ of interpersonal reasoning is recognition. I furthermore argue that this is to be understood as a primarily logical, rather than epistemological point. In concluding, I explain why a notion of interpersonal reasoning makes available an ethics of thought and, specifically, an account of testimonial injustice.

This article offers a new argument that there must be something rather than nothing, grounded in the PSR. Inspired by the rationalist tradition running from Parmenides to Spinoza and Leibniz, I argue that there must be something rather than nothing because the contrary would constitute a violation of the PSR. In particular, I argue that, if there was nothing, there could be no sufficient reason for it, since nothing at all would exist to serve as a sufficient reason. Therefore, given the PSR, something must exist after all. After presenting and explaining this new argument, I consider a series of objections and replies, and develop some of its broader philosophical implications.

In his ‘Letter on “Humanism”’, Martin Heidegger advances a critique of humanism while insisting that this critique does not imply that he ‘advocates the inhuman’. There are two reasons why Heidegger might be concerned to rebut this accusation. First, one might worry that any rejection of humanism commits one to rejecting its central values, such as the idea that human beings have an essential worth. Second, Heidegger might be concerned to distance his critique from the inhuman policies of National Socialism, with which he was associated in the early 1930s.

In this paper, I offer an interpretation of Heidegger's conception of ‘the inhuman’ to shed light on his critique's normative implications. Through this examination of Heidegger's views, I raise concerns about the political prospects of his anti-humanism, and, more tentatively, of anti-humanistic thought in general. First, I reconstruct Heidegger's critique of humanism, his positive conception of the human essence, and his cryptic account of evil in the Letter. I argue that the view that emerges involves a problematic displacement of human responsibility for evil, which Heidegger interprets as symptomatic of the modern epoch in the ‘history of Being’. Moreover, while his account opposes ‘the inhuman’ in a ‘Being-historical’ sense, I argue that it disavows crucial normative resources for resisting ‘the inhuman’ in the ordinary moral sense.