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1. Res Philosophica: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Jamie Dreier

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The consequentializing project relies on agentcentered value (aka agent-relative value), but many philosophers find the idea incomprehensible or incoherent. Discussions of agent-centered value often model it with a theory that assigns distinct better-than rankings of states of affairs to each agent, rather than assigning a single ranking common to all. A less popular kind of model uses a single ranking, but takes the value-bearing objects to be properties (sets of centered worlds) rather than states of affairs (sets of worlds). There are rhetorical, presentational differences between these kinds of models, but are there also structural differences? Do the two kinds of models differ in their capacity to represent normative theories? Despite an initial appearance of equivalence, the two kinds of models are different. The single ranking of properties has greater representational power; its representations contain more information. The main question I address in this article is whether this extra information is useful, in the sense that it distinguishes between normative views that we think are really different, or whether it is just junk information.
2. Res Philosophica: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Dionysis Christias

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In this article, I suggest that reflection on a broadly Aristotelian-cum-Hegelian conception about the determination of the conditions of identity and individuation of objects and properties shows that it entails (what Brandom calls) the Kant–Sellars thesis about modality and identity, one consequence of which is that persons are not identical to human beings. This view is in conflict with the Aristotelian liberal naturalist view to the effect that to be a person is identical to being an individual of a specific animal kind—namely, homo sapiens—characterized by a specific and unique ‘form of life’ (and natural history) which differentiates it from all other animal kinds. I conclude that this novel and unorthodox liberal naturalist view about personhood constitutes an interesting and viable liberal naturalist alternative to more ‘orthodox’ liberal naturalist neo-Aristotelian views like Thompson’s, as it can better accommodate certain counterfactual ‘person-human being decoupling’ scenarios in our modern conception of ourselves-in-the-world.
3. Res Philosophica: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Andrew Beards

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For both G. E. Moore and Bernard Lonergan, the question of the good provides a fundamental heuristic indicating its irreducible and thus transcending nature. In Lonergan’s later work, the focus is primarily on the good as manifest in intentional responses to values. But the fundamental metaphysics of the good is never absent from this perspective, and it re-appears explicitly in some later writing. Moore’s anti-reductionist metaethics played a central role in the debates to follow in analytical philosophy in the decades after the appearance of Principia Ethica. In this article, I explore possible convergences between these two avenues of speculation, which in their way both witness to the abiding significance of the scholastic notion of the good as a transcendental. It is argued that the wider purview offered by Lonergan’s analysis of the good, sought in questions as implying metaphysical and theological dimensions, assists in rendering cogent the objectives to which Moore’s question of the good points.
4. Res Philosophica: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Andrzej Słowikowski

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This article is an attempt to both reconstruct and sort out the hermeneutics of upbuilding emerging from Kierkegaard’s discourses. This hermeneutics turns out to be a method of transferring the Christian ideal from the level of idea to the level of life within the larger Christian anthropological project that Kierkegaard’s discourses constitute. What is shown herein is that this general hermeneutics of upbuilding consists of three dialectical movements defining, respectively, the relation between: the discourse and the reader (the hermeneutic of spiritual life), Scripture and the reader (the hermeneutic of content internalization) and the reader and the temporal world (the hermeneutic of repetition). At the center of Kierkegaard’s Christian anthropological project is the relation between Scripture and the reader, a relation to whose description three hermeneutic levels (presentation—understanding—appropriation) are introduced here. These levels are in line both with three movements of the upbuilding process (the terrifying—consolation—upbuilding), which one can identify on the basis of a reading of the discourses, and with three conditions that are, in the opinion of the Danish philosopher, required in order “to look at oneself with true blessing in the mirror of the word.”
5. Res Philosophica: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Adam Harmer

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I argue that Leibniz’s well-known Argument from Unity is equally an argument from plurality. I detail two main claims about plurality that drive the argument, and I provide evidence that they structure Leibniz’s argument from the late 1670s onwards. First, there is what I call Mereological Nihilism (i.e., the claim that a plurality cannot be made into a true unity by any available means). Second, there is what I call the Plurality Thesis (i.e., the claim that matter is a plurality in need of unity in the first place). I suggest that the Plurality Thesis offers a general analysis of materiality that, in some sense, is the most important aspect of Leibniz’s argument. Finally, I connect these claims about plurality to the common seventeenth and eighteenth-century commitment known as the actual parts doctrine.

discussion

6. Res Philosophica: Volume > 97 > Issue: 3
Víctor M. Verdejo

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Can a subject who expresses a belief with ‘today’ on a given day, and subsequently loses track of time, retain and re-express that belief on a future, potentially distant day? Since Kaplan’s tentative remarks on Rip Van Winkle, it has become popular to answer this question in the positive. However, a remarkably simple variation of the Rip Van Winkle story can show that this kind of view leads to a puzzling dilemma: either subjects cannot re-express a belief with utterances of ‘today’ on the same day, or else they may rationally exhibit conflicting stances toward the same ‘today’-belief. This result may be seen as supporting the claim that retention of ‘today’-belief over time requires the tracking of days. Yet it may also spur further research into the capacities involved in belief retention and re-expression to solve the puzzle.