In recent discussions of moral responsibility, two claims have generated considerable attention: 1) a complete account of responsibility cannot ignore the agent’s personal history prior to the time of action; and 2) an agent’s responsibility is not determined solely by whether certain objective facts about the agent obtain (e.g., whether he/she was free of physical coercion) but also by whether, subjectively, the agent views him/herself in a particular way. John Martin Fischer and Mark Ravizza defend these claims and combine them (...) in a novel manner. They argue that responsibility for an action requires that the agent—at some prior time—have taken responsibility for the kind of mechanism, or process, which produced the action (e.g., practical reason). The notion of taking responsibility is then understood subjectively, requiring that the agent believe it appropriate for others to hold him/her responsible for actions produced by that kind of mechanism. I explore how best to understand the role(s) played by the notion of taking responsibility in Fischer and Ravizza’s account and then argue that being responsible for an action does not require that one have taken responsibility in the subjective sense. That is, being responsible is not a matter of believing oneself to be so. This Article does not have an abstract. (shrink)

Some have proposed that it is reasonable for an atheist to pursue a form of life shaped by engagement with theistic religious language and practice, once language and belief in God are interpreted in the appropriate non-realist manner. My aim is to defend this proposal in the face of several objections that have been raised against it. First, I engage in some conceptual spadework to distinguish more clearly some varieties of religious non-realism. Then, in response to two central objections, I (...) seek to articulate the most promising version of the view. I conclude by discussing some practical and moral objections to a non-realist form of religious life. (shrink)

Much recent work on moral responsibility has focused on responsibility as accountability—a type of responsibility associated with the blame-oriented reactive attitudes of resentment, indignation, and guilt. The preoccupation with this admittedly important form of responsibility fosters a truncated portrait of our moral lives by largely ignoring responsibility for actions that merit praise and emulation. Through an examination of what is presupposed in the attitudes of gratitude and esteem, this essay argues that praiseworthiness is not best understood as the mirror image (...) of blameworthiness in the accountability sense. To make sense of praiseworthiness one must raise the profile of another type of responsibility —what Gary Watson has identified as its attributability, or aretaic face. Doing so also helps reveal some important features of virtuous agency, including a sense in which such agency may exhibit oft-overlooked and distinctive enhancements of an agent’s freedom. (shrink)

Na longa disputa sobre o tipo de liberdade requerida para a responsabilidade, os participantes tenderam a assumir que estavam concernidos com um conceito de responsabilidade moral compartilhado. Esta assunção foi questionada recentemente. Uma visível divisão entre ‘Lumpers’ e ‘Splitters’ surgiu. Os Lumpers defendem a suposição tradicional que há um conceito unificado de responsabilidade, enquanto os Splitters sustentam que há dois ou mais conceitos de responsabilidade moral. Aqui, eu ofereço um argumento em nome dos Splitters que conecta um tipo de pluralismo (...) de valor na ética normativa, teorizando com a contenda dos Splitters de que há múltiplas formas de responsabilidade moral. Minha tese é condicional. Na medida em que alguém crê plausível um quadro fragmentado da paisagem na teorização normativa – que eu referirei como ‘bricolagem moral’ – então alguém tem razão em juntar-se aos Splitters pensando que o conceito de responsabilidade moral é igualmente fragmentado. (shrink)

The three articles and commentary that follow began as talks for a book symposium dedicated to Jon Webber's monograph Rethinking Existentialism. The talks were given for a plenary session at the United Kingdom Sartre Society meeting, held at the Maison Française d'Oxford on 3 July 2023. Organised to honour the excellence of Webber's work on Sartre, the Symposium aimed to call attention to the importance of his monograph. Since Rethinking Existentialism centrally addresses Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon, (...) the division of labour was straightforward. Matt Eshleman addresses Webber's treatment of Sartre, Kate Kirkpatrick his treatment of Beauvoir and Komarine Romdenh-Romluc his treatment of Fanon. For those who have not read Rethinking Existentialism a brief synopsis follows. (shrink)

When a person performs or fails to perform a morally significant action, we sometimes think that a particular kind of response is warranted. Praise and blame are perhaps the most obvious forms this reaction might take. For example, one who encounters a car accident may be regarded as worthy of praise for having saved a child from inside the burning car, or alternatively, one may be regarded as worthy of blame for not having used one's mobile phone to call for (...) help. To regard such agents as worthy of one of these reactions is to ascribe moral responsibility to them on the basis of what they have done or left undone. (These are examples of other-directed ascriptions of responsibility. The reaction might also be self-directed, e.g., one can recognize oneself to be blameworthy). Thus, to be morally responsible for something, say an action, is to be worthy of a particular kind of reaction —praise, blame, or something akin to these—for having performed it.[1.. (shrink)

This article surveys most of the recent reviews of Sarah Richmond’s excellent new translation of L’Être et le néant. It offers some close textual comparisons between Richmond’s translation, Hazel Barnes’ translation, and the Checklist of Errors of Hazel Barnes’ Translation of L’Être et le néant. This article concludes that Richmond delivers a higher semantic resolution translation that overcomes nearly all the liabilities found in Barnes and does so without sacrificing much by way of readability.

Jean-Paul Sartre was one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century. His influence extends beyond academic philosophy to areas as diverse as anti-colonial movements, youth culture, literary criticism, and artistic developments around the world. Beginning with an introduction and biography of Jean-Paul Sartre by Matthew Eshleman, 42 chapters by a team of international contributors cover all the major aspects of Sartre's thought in the following key areas: Sartre's philosophical and historical context Sartre and phenomenology Sartre, existentialism and (...) ontology Sartre and ethics Sartre and political theory Aesthetics, literature and biography Sartre's engagements with other thinkers. The Sartrean Mind is the most comprehensive collection on Sartre published to date. It is essential reading for students and researchers in philosophy, as well as for those in related disciplines where Sartre's work has continuing importance such as literature, French studies, and politics. (shrink)

When a Christian refers to the future full realization of the kingdom of God in an afterlife, it is typically assumed that she is expressing beliefs about the existence and activity of God in conjunction with supernatural beliefs about an otherworldly realm and the possibility of one’s personal survival after bodily death. In other words, the religious language is interpreted in a realist fashion and the religious person here is construed as a religious believer. A corollary of this widely-held realist (...) view is the assumption that if one were to conclude that there is no good reason to believe the asserted claims—for example, no reason to believe that we may survive our bodily deaths in a heavenly realm—then there is no reason to engage in the use of such religious language and the practices which accompany it. I argue that this assumption is false—that there is a meaningful way to use such language in a religious context that does not rest on believing supernatural claims. Against the backdrop of Kant’s discussion of a kingdom of ends understood as a regulative ideal, I argue that religious discourse about the kingdom of God being brought to fruition may be reinterpreted as a useful fiction to draw our attention to and engage our emotions with a distinctive ideal of restorative justice. Though I and others have previously offered fictionalist accounts of language about God, I extend the view here to some religious language about the afterlife. (shrink)

The free will defence attempts to show that belief in an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God may be rational, despite the existence of evil. At the heart of the free will defence is the claim that it may be impossible, even for an omnibenevolent, omnipotent, and omniscient God, to bring about certain goods without the accompanying inevitability, or at least overwhelming probability, of evil. The good in question is the existence of free agents, in particular, agents who are sometimes free (...) with respect to morally significant actions and who are thereby responsible, at least in part, for those actions and the personal character which is a function of and exhibited in those actions. The free will defender contends that if an agent is to be truly responsible for her actions, then she must be free to bring about both good and evil, and God cannot be blamed if such agents choose to bring about the latter rather than the former. A number of years ago, Antony Flew objected that God was not forced to choose between creating free agents who might act wrongly and not creating a world with free agents. Instead, God could have created free agents who were wholly good, i.e. who always acted rightly." Freedom and responsibility, Flew argued, are compatible with one’s actions being causally determined by God, thus it was within God’s power to create agents who were both free and responsible yet causally determined to always act rightly. In response, proponents of the free will defence criticized Flew’s conditional analysis of freedom – if S had chosen to do otherwise, she would have been able to do otherwise – maintaining instead that an agent’s freedom consists in her ability at the time in question to both perform the action and refrain from performing the action. Acting freely, on this libertarian view, is incompatible with one’s actions being determined by God, for an agent.. (shrink)

This essay argues that an adequate account of bad faith cannot be given without taking the second half of Being and Nothingness into consideration. There are two separate but related reasons for this. First, the objectifying gaze of Others provides a necessary condition for the possibility of bad faith. Sartre, however, does not formally introduce analysis of Others until Parts III and IV. Second, upon the introduction of Others, Sartre revises his view of absolute freedom. Sartre's considered view of freedom (...) helps to make sense out of bad faith in a way that does not seem possible were freedom absolute. (shrink)

In this work I argue that an agent assumes responsibility for her traits of character by making them her own during the process of their formation. One makes a character trait one's own by identifying oneself with its constitutive desires, or in the case of a particular kind of vice, by failing to identify oneself with desires to act in the corresponding virtuous manner. Unlike the view traditionally attributed to Aristotle, this view does not require that an agent be the (...) original knowing author of her character; and unlike some other recent accounts employing the notion of identification, it does not impose the implausible requirement that an agent's conception of the good be autonomous in any robust sense. ;Chapters 1-3 address three preliminary tasks. I first propose that "character" be understood to refer to those dispositional aspects of a person's personality which are open to moral assessment . I next argue that providing an account of responsibility for character is important because: we hold agents responsible for their character traits, as well as their actions; and it is prima facie plausible to suppose that an agent is responsible for those actions expressing her character only if she is responsible for her character. Thirdly, I examine the Aristotelian account of responsibility for character and diagnose its flaw. ;Chapters 4-6 develop the suggestion that an agent assumes responsibility for a character disposition by identifying herself with its constitutive desires. In chapter 4, I argue that one identifies with a desire in the relevant sense through the formation of an endorsing higher-order desire which reflects the agent's judgment that it would be good to be moved to action by the lower-order desire. Secondly, I contend that such judgments themselves need not be subject to critical scrutiny. That one's identification with a trait must be causally effective in its development is defended in the 5th chapter. Finally, I argue in chapter 6 that being responsible for a trait of character requires that the process of making a trait one's own be grounded appropriately in one's experience and that this experience be sufficiently rich. (shrink)

This essay addresses ‘the God‐haunted Atheist paradox’ in Sartre's early philosophy and argues against a series of efforts to show that Sartre maintains a ‘secular theology’. It shows that if Sartre's ontology is correct, the God of ‘classic theism’ cannot possibly exist. It argues against two sophisticated efforts to show that theological influences infiltrate Sartre's early ontology and permeate his moral psychology. It also rejects the claim that Sartre's (Existentialism is a Humanism, 1946/2007, Yale University Press) distinction between secular and (...) religious existentialism ‘has no basis in fact’. It shows that Sartre appropriates religious language in order to give debunking secular explanations for religious phenomena and that he inverts traditional Christian values. It concludes that Sartre is an anti‐theologian. (shrink)

Motivated by Jonathan Webber's recent work, this article addresses what I call ‘the normative bridge problem’ in the early work of Jean-Paul Sartre: What justifies the move from an agent explicitly recognising and affirming her freedom to an obligation to respect the freedom of others? Many sympathetic Sartre commentators have argued that Sartre lacks resources to justify this obligation (Anderson, Heter, Webber) and, hence, that Sartre fails to traverse the normative bridge. This article hypothesizes that Sartre does not need to (...) explicitly justify the bridge obligation. In correctly grasping one's metaphysical nature, a Sartrean agent cannot fail to realise that the affirmation of the freedom of others cannot but follow from the affirmation of one's own freedom. I test the hypothesis by sketching two competing interpretations of authenticity and try to show that only under one interpretation can one see why the normative bridge amounts to a theoretical illusion. (shrink)

The aesthetic experience, In husserl's language, Brackets or suspends the natural standpoint. Consciousness perceives the work of art not as an object of the factual world, But as a man-Made artifact to be enjoyed just for certain immediately experienced qualities. The work of art is neither a real physical entity nor a real psychical entity, But a purely intentional object, For which the physical object serves as a substratum. The critic must recreate the purely intentional object by completing the schema (...) of the work and by actualizing its merely potential elements. He must experience the ensemble of axiologically neutral qualities, Aesthetic qualities, And aesthetic values as an harmonious whole. A full concretion of the work is the aesthetic object-The object the critic describes and judges. By metaphorical or partly metaphorical language-Never completely adequate-He tries to convey to his readers the experience of its qualities and values. (shrink)

Although most of the contemporary debates around subjectivity are framed by a rejection of the metaphysical subject, more time needs to be spent developing the implications of abandoning the meta-physics of constraint. Doing so provides the key to approaching our pressing problem that concerns freedom, and only once invisible, ideal "constraints" have been adequately understood will all of the contemporary puzzlement that concerns intentional resistance to power be assuaged. While Sartre does not solve the problem of freedom bequeathed to us (...) by Foucault, it is clear that he struggled with similar issues, and that his work sheds important light on the issue of ideal constraint. Once more, on Sartre's second view, power and freedom are not mutually exclusive, and in this he advances over much contemporary liberal thought. Thus, on the approach of what would be Sartre's hundredth birthday, I invite others to take this opportune moment to reevaluate the early work of this once shining philosophical star, only recently and perhaps prematurely eclipsed by anti-humanism, and recognize that now, more than ever, Sartre's thought is relevant to our very pressing concerns. (shrink)

Andrew Eshleman has argued that atheists can believe in God by being fully engaged members of religious communities and using religious discourse in a non-realist way. He calls this position 'fictionalism' because the atheist takes up religion as a useful fiction. In this paper I critique fictionalism along two lines: that it is problematic to successfully be a fictionalist and that fictionalism is unjustified. Reflection on fictionalism will point to some wider problems with religious anti-realism.

Ubuntu has been defined as a moral quality of human beings, as a philosophy or an ethic, as African humanism, and as a worldview. This paper explores these definitions as conceptual tools for understanding the cultural, educational, and philosophical landscape of post-apartheid South Africa. Key to this understanding is the Althusserian concept of state apparatus. Louis Althusser divides the state apparatus into two forces: the repressive state apparatus (RSA); and the ideological state apparatus (ISA). RSAs curtail the working classes, predominately (...) through direct violence or the threat of violence, whereas ISAs function primarily by ideology, including forms of organised religion, the education system, family units, legal systems, trade unions, political parties, and media. This paper discusses the link between increasing inequality in post-apartheid South Africa and education, with specific reference to Althusser’s ISAs and the abuse of Ubuntu as a subterfuge for socio-economic inequality. (shrink)

The paper explores the logical structure of Rawlsian justice principles in order to see whether their justificatory or explanatory conditions are unproblematic. To facilitate this purpose, drawing on readers of Rawls, the author shows that the Aristotelian principle is used to explain the principles of rational choice, particularly the principle of inclusiveness. Then, on the basis of the Aristotelian principle, Rawls justifies his conclusion, via the principles of rational choice and the theory of primary goods. After figuring out the logical (...) structure of justice as fairness, the author deals with the central objective of the paper, where he exposes some problems suffered by the motivational basis of the principles of justice. The foundation on which Rawls grounds his principles of justice is problematic, and consequently, they remain as matters of contention as of today. (shrink)

I am so grateful to Matthew Eshleman and Adrian van den Hoven for their generous, insightful comments. Translating can be a lonely activity, especially when the text is as lengthy as BN. At the end of hours of involvement with Sartre’s French – perched, as it were, on the edge of his mind – I often felt in need of other, auxiliary minds to re-centre me, to save me from toppling over completely into Sartre’s consciousness and drowning. In these (...) moments, I usually turned to dictionaries and other internet resources to bolster my critical distance; more rarely, I would email fellow translators or philosophers for help. But I have had very little of the attentive, fine-grained dialogue offered here, and I have immensely enjoyed, and benefited from, this exchange. Hopefully, SSI readers will also find it of interest. (shrink)

The present volume is intended as an all-round introduction to constructivism. Here constructivism is to be understood in the wide sense, and covers in particular Brouwer's intuitionism, Bishop's constructivism and A.A. Markov's constructive recursive mathematics. The ending "-ism" has ideological overtones: "constructive mathematics is the (only) right mathematics"; we hasten, however, to declare that we do not subscribe to this ideology, and that we do not intend to present our material on such a basis.

The similes of the Sun, Line, and Cave in the Republic remain a reproach to Platonic scholarship because there is no agreement about them, though they are meant to illustrate. I propose to analyse the form of the argument, a clue that has never been properly weighed. The Greek theory and practice of analogia and diairesis give good evidence about the method that Plato adopted; if this usage were respected, the analogical argument would not be so loosely interpreted, and the (...) double diairesis and proportion that the Line actually is could not be mistaken for a classification. I hope also to show that Plato's terminology is definite and consistent; here too ancient usage helps to establish his meaning. (shrink)

The first part of this paper argued that the traditional application of the Cave to the Line was not intended by Plato, and led to a misunderstanding of both similes. The Cave, it was said, is attached to the simile of the Sun and the Line by the visible region outside the cave, which is a reintegration of the symbolism of sun, originals and images in the sunlight, and the new system of objects inside the cave is compared and contrasted (...) with the natural objects in the visible outside. As we know that the natural symbolism illustrates the Platonic education, our main task in this paper will be to find the meaning of the cave, untrammelled by the associations of the lower line. (shrink)

I would like to begin with the role of philosophy in solving ecological problems, emphasizing two aspects of its role: the struggle against hostile ideology and the organizing and guiding of activity in the sphere of the development of science and the shaping of its problems. This role of Marxist-Leninist philosophy clearly appears in the complex interdisciplinary problem of the interaction between nature and society.

Decisions by industry sponsors to end clinical trials early for commercial reasons have been the subject of controversy. I argue that the principal consideration in assessing these decisions ought to be the way in which the termination would affect the trial’s risk–benefit relationship. If there is not yet sufficient benefit to be gained from the study to offset the risks to which participants were exposed and it is expected that important scientific information would be obtained if the trial were continued, (...) early termination constitutes an unethical alteration of the risk−benefit relationship. This violates the grounds on which permission is given to conduct human research, patients consent to participate, and investigators agree to conduct studies. These knowable and avoidable changes in risk–benefit relationship should generally be seen as impermissible. (shrink)

This paper studies, by way of an example, the intuitionistic propositional connective * defined in the language of second order propositional logic by. In full topological models * is not generally definable, but over Cantor-space and the reals it can be classically shown that; on the other hand, this is false constructively, i.e. a contradiction with Church's thesis is obtained. This is comparable with some well-known results on the completeness of intuitionistic first-order predicate logic.Over [0, 1], the operator * is (...) (constructively and classically) undefinable. We show how to recast this argument in terms of intuitive intuitionistic validity in some parameter. The undefinability argument essentially uses the connectedness of [0, 1]; most of the work of recasting consists in the choice of a suitable intuitionistically meaningful parameter, so as to imitate the effect of connectedness. (shrink)

Research collaboration beyond national jurisdiction is one aspect of the globalisation of health research. It has potential to complement researchers in terms of research skills, equipment and lack of adequate numbers of potential research subjects. Collaboration at an equal level of partnership though desirable, may not be practicable. Sometimes, human research specimens must be transported from one country to other. Where this occurs, there should be clear understanding between the collaborating research institutions regarding issues of access and control of the (...) specimens as well as the duration of storage of specimens. The researchers have the duty to inform the research participants about specimen storage and transport across national boundaries. While obtaining informed consent from study subjects if specimens are to be stored beyond the life of the present study could be the ideal, there still remains significant challenges in a multi-cultural world. (shrink)