Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society

ABOUT Pauline Kleingeld is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Groningen. Earlier she taught at Leiden University and at Washington University in St. Louis. She is the author of Kant and Cosmopolitanism (CUP 2012), Fortschritt und Vernunft: Zur Geschichtsphilosophie Kants (Königshausen und Neumann 1995) and numerous articles. Her academic interests are in ethics and political philosophy, with a special focus on Kant and Kantian theory. ABSTRACT In the first section of his Groundwork for the Metaphysics of Morals (G1), Immanuel Kant claims to identify the supreme principle of morality. After famous discussions of the idea of a ‘good will’, ‘acting from duty’ and ‘respect’, he concludes that the highest moral principle is the following: ‘I ought never to proceed except in such a way that I could also will that my maxim should become a universal law’ (G 4:402). He claims that this principle implicitly governs ordinary moral practices and convictions. It is the ‘supreme’ moral principle in that it is a meta-principle by means of which substantive Kantian moral principles — such as ‘help others in need’ or ‘never lie’ — can be derived. Because Kant’s argument draws on moral convictions that are still widely shared, and because his conclusion articulates a paradigmatic position in moral theory, G1 has become one of the most renowned texts in the history of philosophy. The structure of Kant’s argument towards the identification of the supreme principle, however, has long been the subject of debate. Three serious difficulties stand out in the literature, and they all concern the most important steps of his argument: (1) Kant presents his argument as consisting of three propositions and a conclusion, but he labels only the second and third propositions as such. He does not make explicit what he takes the first proposition to be. In recent decades at least a dozen candidates have been put forward in the literature (see Steigleder 2022). (2) Kant claims that the third proposition follows from the first and the second, but it is widely regarded unclear how it is supposed to follow. (3) Kant’s final step to the formulation of the supreme principle is often said to be a jump over a gap, rather than a careful step that follows from the preceding argument. As a result, Kant’s reasoning towards the supreme moral principle seems more like a series of assertions and fragmentary arguments rather than a single argumentative chain. In this paper, I argue that Kant’s views on philosophical method shed new light on the structure and direction of his argument in G1. It has gone unnoticed that this argument consists of a chain of regressive inferences. I first explain the current positions in the literature regarding Kant’s method in G1 (§2). I then turn to Kant’s views on method (§3). Using his description of the so-called ‘analytic method’, I reconstruct the argument of G1 as a regressive chain. I argue that this reconstruction suggests solutions to the three main difficulties diagnosed in the literature, although several unclarities remain (§4).

ABOUT Léa Salje is an associate professor at the University of Leeds. She joined Leeds in 2015 on a postdoc, and has been there ever since. Before that she did a PhD at UCL. She works in Philosophy of Mind, mostly on issues around self-knowledge and first person thought. Her first monograph Saying What One Thinks (forthcoming with OUP), is about the special form of self-knowledge we get by putting our thoughts into words.

ABOUT Eric Schliesser is professor of Political Science, with a focus on Political Theory, at the University of Amsterdam. He was previously affiliated with Syracuse University, Leiden University, and Ghent University among others. Schliesser has published on early modern philosophy, philosophy of economics, the history of analytic philosophy, the history of feminism, and metaphilosophy. His publications include his monograph, Adam Smith: Systematic philosopher and Public Thinker (OUP, 2017). He has edited numerous volumes including (inter alia) Newton and empiricism. (OUP, with Zvi Biener, 2014); Sympathy, a History of a Concept (OUP, 2015); Ten Neglected Classics of philosophy (Oxford, 2017), Neglected Classics of Philosophy, Vol 2 (Oxford 2022), and a translation of Sophie de Grouchy’s Letters on Sympathy (together with Sandrine Berges, Oxford 2019). He keeps a daily blog Digressionsnimpressions.

ABOUT Christopher Cowie is Associate Professor at the University of Durham. He was previously Junior Research Fellow at Fitzwilliam College, Cambridge and has held visiting fellowships at Harvard and Stanford. He is originally from Belfast, Northern Ireland. He is currently working on the implications of axiological paradox, and, unrelatedly, the philosophy of the search for alien life.

Fabienne Peters, a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Warwick, dives into the intriguing world of relational moral demands. She discusses how traditional moral theories often overlook the significance of interpersonal relationships. Challenging the norm, Peters argues that moral obligations stem from our connections with others, presenting a fresh take on relational ethics. She contrasts individuals-first relationalism with radically relational accounts, emphasizing how love and moral attention shape our ethical responsibilities in intimate bonds.

ABSTRACT Many of our practices presuppose moral responsibility. Arguably, agents can only be morally responsible if they are able to act otherwise than they do. Compatibilists and incompatibilists traditionally disagree about whether determinism precludes the ability to do otherwise, often reaching an impasse because they endorse different readings of “able to do otherwise”. I argue that the correct reading of “able to do otherwise” depends on the purposes of our responsibility-entailing practices. Practices serving different purposes may warrant different readings. Consequently, there may be no single independently ascertainable definition of freedom to do otherwise that justifies our responsibility-entailing practices wholesale ABOUT Nadine Elzein is an Associate Professor at the University of Warwick. She completed her PhD at University College London, and has held posts at the University of Oxford, King’s College London, the University of Southampton, and University College London. Her research focuses predominantly on free will, moral responsibility, blame, and determinism. She has a present writing project with OUP on this theme.

ABSTRACT Christine Korsgaard famously argued that even if we accept the metaphysical theory that there are no selves or persons, the practical standpoint requires us to think of ourselves as unified over time. It is the ability to choose and deliberate, make plans and act that requires me to construct an identity for myself. This practical requirement is antithetical to the Buddhist no-self view. Buddhists argue that it is primarily ignorance about our identity that is responsible for suffering, and that this ignorance consists not just in having a false belief in a metaphysical self but also our ordinary self-conception as being unified across time: our ‘I’-sense, so to say. Buddhists claim that this ‘I’-sense is the real culprit and the source of existential suffering. The Buddhist project of eliminating, or at least reducing, suffering is concerned with arguments to show that there is no metaphysical self and that ‘I’-sense is an illusion that we must get rid of. If Korsgaard is right, it seems that the Buddhist project is in deep trouble. I shall argue that Korsgaard’s requirement is too strong. The Buddhist project is sound and Buddhists at all stages of their practice can continue to choose and deliberate, make plans and act ABOUT MONIMA Monima Chadha is Professor of Indian Philosophy at the University of Oxford and Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Lady Margaret Hall. Her research interests are in metaphysics and philosophy of mind in classical Indian and contemporary Western traditions. In recent years, she has written a book Selfless Minds (OUP, 2023) and many articles on Buddhist no-self views and their implications for our concepts of subjectivity, agency, responsibility, and ethical life.

In this podcast, Aristotelian Society officers Dr Jess Leech and Dr Ellie Robson talk to Peter Momtchiloff - commissioning editor for philosophy at Oxford University Press from 1993-2023. Following three decades in this role, we get Peter's thoughts on what he has seen and learned from his time at OUP including questions like: What are some of your most memorable encounters in the job? What are some of the biggest changes you’ve witnessed over 30 years – for good and for bad – in philosophy? Are there any common struggles for first time authors? How should you approach publishers? This podcast is an audio recording of an interview with Peter Momtchiloff - at the Aristotelian Society on 23rd July 2024.

The partiality we display, insofar as we form and sustain personal attachments, is not normatively fundamental. It is a byproduct of the deference and responsiveness that are essential to our engagement with the world. We cannot form and sustain valuable personal relationships without seeing ourselves as answerable to the other participants in those relationships. And we cannot develop and sustain valuable projects without responding to the constraints imposed on our activities by the nature and requirements of those projects themselves. More generally, we cannot engage with the world without meeting it on its terms, and we cannot meet the world on its terms without responding differentially – or displaying partiality – with respect to the objects of our engagement. Partiality is thus a byproduct of engagement. We cannot engage with the world at all without exhibiting forms of partiality. Samuel Scheffler is University Professor in the Department of Philosophy at NYU. He works primarily in the areas of moral and political philosophy and the theory of value. His writings have addressed central questions in ethical theory, and he has also written on topics as diverse as equality, nationalism and cosmopolitanism, toleration, terrorism, immigration, tradition, death, and the future of humanity. Scheffler received his A.B. from Harvard and his Ph.D. from Princeton. From 1977-2008 he taught at the University of California, Berkeley. He is the author of six books: The Rejection of Consequentialism, Human Morality, Boundaries and Allegiances, Equality and Tradition, Death and the Afterlife (Niko Kolodny ed.), and Why Worry about Future Generations? He has received fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the U.S. National Endowment for the Humanities, and he has been a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford. His first book was awarded the Matchette Prize of the American Philosophical Association. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, a member of the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences and Letters, and a foreign member of the Norwegian Academy of Science and Letters. He is currently at work on a book (tentatively) titled The Lives We Lead: Personal Attachment and the Passage of Time. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Scheffler's talk - "Partiality, Deference, and Engagement" - at the Aristotelian Society on 20th June 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.

At a climactic—and, indeed, incendiary—moment in Bernard Williams’ classic essay, “Internal and External Reasons,” Williams says that those who advance moral criticisms by appealing to so-called external reasons are engaging in “bluff”. Williams thus alleges that condemning certain actions of others as somehow not only immoral, but also irrational or contrary to reason is nothing more than a kind of pretense. To say that a favorite pastime that so many of us happily engage in is empty, well—to use an American colloquialism—“them’s fightin’ words!” Indeed, in criticizing certain moral criticisms in this way, Williams’ words are fightin’ words about fightin’ words. Why does Williams proffer these meta-fightin’ words? Readers—and indeed perhaps Williams himself—have struggled to articulate a precise argument for this claim that there are no external reasons and that those who try to invoke them in criticism of others are engaging in bluff. Thus, the force of Williams’ point has remained, at best, elusive, perhaps even to Williams himself. In this paper, I first want to defend Williams’ claim that the appeal to external reasons is illegitimate. But I will do so from a perspective that is radically different from the ones usually at work in considering Williams’ position. Indeed, this perspective is one that may or may not (probably not!) be in the spirit of Williams’ actual reasons for rejecting external reasons, so it is important to keep in mind (as I will remind you from time to time) that I am not offering an interpretation of Williams here. The distinctive aspect of my approach is that I argue that a rationalist line of thought can support Williams’ claims. To bring out this line of thought, I will examine the metaphysical commitments of those who engage in what Williams calls bluff. I will then reject those commitments on powerful and widely popular rationalist grounds. I will, in other words, endeavor to support Williams’ charge of bluff by investigating what I call the metaphysics of bluff and by offering a rationalist critique of that metaphysics. Michael Della Rocca is Andrew Downey Orrick Professor of Philosophy at Yale University. He has published widely in early modern philosophy and in contemporary metaphysics. His most recent book, The Parmenidean Ascent (Oxford 2020), defends a radical form of monism in metaphysics, philosophy of action, epistemology, and philosophy of language. This podcast is an audio recording of Dr Della Rocca's talk - "Moral Criticism and the Metaphyscis of Bluff" - at the Aristotelian Society on 6th June 2022. This recording was produced by the Backdoor Broadcasting Company.