Title: The Democratic Soul in Plato and Whitman Abstract: In Books II-IV of the Republic, Plato famously proposes an analogy between the constitution of the Greek city-state and the constitution of the human soul. The methodological assumption that underlies the architecture of the Republic is that philosophical questions about topics that we might today group under the heading ... Read more

Title: Hypocrisy as Evasion Abstract: Hypocrites attract moral condemnation and are widely thought to lack standing to criticise others. This paper argues against attempts to explain this that appeal to moral conditions on blaming and notions of moral authority, proposing instead an account based on a conception of moral interactions as fundamentally dialogical in character. According to ... Read more

Title: Revisiting the Spinoza Controversy in an age of Environmental Crisis Abstract: Modern scientific naturalism arguably tries to ontologically describe or account for the entirety of the natural world using necessity. Scientific naturalism presents logical causal necessity as constituting how nature "makes" things exist, and it presents necessity in the more general or abstract sense ... Read more

Title: The Incomparable Value of the Individual Abstract: Kant believed that every human being should be treated as an end in itself. In the Groundwork, Kant explains many of our duties by arguing that their violation would involve treating a human being as a mere means. But we cannot explain all of our duties that way. Nor ... Read more

Title: Autonomy and control over one’s social self-consciousness Abstract: Humans have the capacity to absorb – to feel – others’ feelings. More particularly we feel others’ feelings about ourselves: at least as long as we are awake, we are subject to being self-consciously affected in our interactions with others. We are capable of social self-consciousness, and ... Read more