I defend the novel thesis that structural rationality just is applied rational understanding. Applied rational understanding involves our grasping, appreciating, or being sensitive to the basic structure or “logic” of our attitudes, where such sensitivity leads us to properly maintain or revise our attitudes so as to achieve coherence among them. This approach addresses two main issues. First, it explains why there exists a puzzling dualism in our rational psychology: namely, that clear-eyed structural irrationality is unintelligible to us and resists first-personal accounts of behavior in ways that substantive irrationality doesn’t. Second, this approach shows (i) that, given plausible reliabilist intuitions, there’s no necessary connection between the first-person and structural rationality; and (ii) that there is a necessary connection between the first-person and what Tyler Burge calls “fully realized rational agency.” In this paper, I provide a new way of defending this important Burgean claim.

In this paper, we aim to contribute to the growing literature on historical approaches to knowability by examining how the concept of knowability can be developed in the context of Peirce’s philosophy. There has been some previous work on Peirce’s notion of knowability (Dabay 2016; Chiffi and Pietarinen 2020), but our analysis differs from these attempts. We argue that Peirce is committed to a version of the knowability thesis and thus liable to validate Fitch’s paradoxical argument, but that his overall epistemology offers a nuanced picture of the limits of knowledge.

Despite their differences, responsibility theories of all types (skeptics, forward-looking, backward-looking) concur on the following conditional: If someone deserved to suffer for an act, then they would be blameworthy for that act. Here I sketch a way of rejecting that conditional. In particular, using some of Śāntideva’s distinctions, I offer a new way of thinking about desert: Wrongdoers deserve to, and do, suffer for their wrongdoings, but they do not deserve our blame. It may be that vice is (part of) its own deserved punishment, whether or not anyone can have the free will required for blameworthiness. More generally, wrongdoers may not deserve negative responses of any kind from anyone else, yet they may still deservedly suffer in proportion to their wrongdoings.

This article explores how people can come to experience constitutional conversations as meaningful. To this end, I reinterpret Habermas’s account of deliberative constitutionalism. For Habermas, constitutional discourses are not only rational procedures of opinion- and will-formation, but also sites at which a “world” gets generated. Deliberative politics, therefore, involves unruly and uncontrollable efforts to solicit others into the roles, orientations, and principles of constitutional practices. The result is a novel account of the relationship between constitutional procedures and the “anarchistic” politics that radical democrats celebrate. Ungovernable inventions of and affective identifications with roles, images, and peoples occur within articulate forms, including constitutional procedures. These aspects of Habermas’s thought push past binary oppositions between legitimate constitutional procedure and radical democratic uprisings. Habermas provides a framework for examining the forms of attentiveness by which actors can come to experience constitutional rules, roles, principles, and procedures as part of their world.

In Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie (Also a History of Philosophy), Jürgen Habermas weaves together various themes such as faith and knowledge, history and theology, naturalism and epistemic justification, learning processes and moral development as well as multiculturalism and deliberative democracy in a transnational public sphere. This article argues that to articulate these multiple elements, Habermas adopts a robust framework built upon four conceptual pillars that can be clearly identified: postmetaphysical, postconventional, postnational, and postsecular. This “conceptual plurality” underlies his genealogy of the centuries-long tension and mutual learning between religious faith and scientific knowledge in the Western philosophical tradition. By considering the interplay of these concepts, it is possible to understand the several ways in which religion emerges in contemporary society and the equally multiple strategies Habermas uses to interpret religion throughout his career, which are masterfully reconsidered and articulated in his opus magnum on religion.

On the dominant interpretation of Being and Time, Heidegger’s investigation of being (Sein) is really an investigation of meaning (Sinn). On a competing interpretation, Being and Time is a work of realist metaphysics. I argue that existing interpretations of both types oversimply the relationship between phenomenology and metaphysics in Being and Time. I show how a Husserlian framework for mapping the relations between formal ontology, regional ontology, and phenomenology illuminates the structure and ambitions of Being and Time. What results is a version of the metaphysical realist reading that combines the virtues, while correcting the oversights, of existing accounts in both camps. On this reading, phenomenology for both Husserl and Heidegger aims to vindicate claims to a priori knowledge, including ontological knowledge, through a regional ontology of the subject that presupposes the categories of formal ontology.

Would Habermas’s “The Entwinement of Myth and Enlightenment” pass muster as coursework in a class on Dialectic of Enlightenment? Using this polemical thought experiment setup as an estrangement device, I critically discuss Habermas’s essay that was pivotal in his repositioning of Critical Theory in the 1980s. I argue that it is philosophically and biographically unreflective; and that he is engaging in underhanded politicking. I sketch an alternative reading of Dialectic of Enlightenment: instead of viewing it as the dead end that Habermas presents it to be, we can see as a self-therapeutical exercise in destabilizing a complacent self-conception whereby modernity is the pinnacle of moral progress—an exercise which might have a certain exemplarity for others in the ongoing quest of making use of our own understanding. The contribution is rounded off with a postscript by a second assessor of Habermas’s essay, discussing both the proposed assessment and the polemical thought experiment.

In Beyond Language (Oltre il linguaggio), Emanuele Severino argues that “language reveals the meaning that man confers to the world.” Accordingly, this article infers that reflecting on the meaning of the most important words of philosophy will enable us to understand the foundation of the concrete history of our civilization. Severino offers a unique analysis of these words and their history, and consequently an original framework for interpreting the world. What follows thus presents a discursive glossary according to Emanuele Severino with the aim to open new outlooks for understanding not only Severino’s thought, but also the problems of philosophy and our relationship with existence.

In this article, I confront Jessica Flanigan’s recent attempt to show not merely that women have a right to commit prenatal injury, but also that women who act on this right are praiseworthy and should not be criticized for this injury. I show that Flanigan’s arguments do not work, and I establish presumptive grounds against any such right—namely, prenatal injury, by definition, involves intentional or negligent harm and, as such, may be subsumed under a wider class of actions that are presumptively wrong.

In this article, I critically assess Peter van Inwagen’s rejection of C. S. Lewis’s argument against Naturalism. Van Inwagen argues that Lewis (1960) errs on two fronts. First, he falsely assumes that Naturalism implies Spinozism: that the only way the world could be is the way it is. Second, the central premise of Lewis’s argument is asserted without proof. I argue that van Inwagen is mistaken on both counts.