This paper provides an account and defense of Rawls's original version, i.e., pre-Proviso, public... more This paper provides an account and defense of Rawls's original version, i.e., pre-Proviso, public reason as the measured response to the problem of reasonable pluralism. This model of public reason acts as an epistemic norm in political justification, which requires that citizens appeal to a shared fund of intersubjectively accessible reasons in justifying constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Religious reasons are paradigmatically inaccessible to those outside the faith, and are therefore epistemically illegitimate in the process of political justification. I defend this iteration of public reason from criticisms by Kevin Vallier, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Michael McConnell.
The Critique of Pure Reason inaugurated Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Commentators commonly disting... more The Critique of Pure Reason inaugurated Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Commentators commonly distinguish between Kant’s Positive Project (PP), that is, his epistemology as laid out in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic, from his Negative Project (NP), expressed in terms of the destructive implications his epistemology has on speculative metaphysics and rational theology. Against this tradition I will argue that the whole of the Critique is largely a negative-destructive enterprise. I will focus on what is commonly taken as the centerpiece of the PP, that is, the Transcendental Deduction, and demonstrate that even here the NP is given normative priority. Though, to be sure, certain passages tend to encourage an interpretation of the PP as primary, I contend that this view is myopic and fails to pay sufficient attention to Kant’s global concerns in the Critique. I will demonstrate that a clear exposition of Kant’s metaphilosophical aims, commitments, and convictions is in fact corrosive to any such reading. The objective of this thesis, then, is two-fold: (1) to provide an account of Kant’s metaphilosophy in the Critique, and (2) to argue for what I will here and elsewhere refer to as the Primacy of the Negative Thesis, that is, that Kant prioritized boundary-setting over principle- generating.
Logical Positivism (LP) arose in the early 1900s to become one of the most influential philosophi... more Logical Positivism (LP) arose in the early 1900s to become one of the most influential philosophical movements in the 20th century. The LPs articulated their system of doctrines, emphasizing in particular the relationship between philosophy and science, by means of both a positive project and a negative project. The former was pursued through the introduction and appropriation of various doctrines, such as Frege’s theory of cognitive significance, verificationism, and the analytic/synthetic distinction, allowing us to make philosophically respectable statements about experience which are amenable to scientific corroboration; the latter project applied these doctrines to the traditional problems of Western philosophy, dismissing wholesale many of them as nonsense. Motivated in part by their enthusiasm for advances made in the natural sciences, Logical Positivists (LPs) were zealous in their prosecution of disciplines which were ambivalent toward scientific progress, and whose arguments, native to those disciplines, were unconstrained by logic, linguistic analysis, or empirical experience. Naturally, then, metaphysics -- along with religious, aesthetics, and ethics -- was a prime target for their criticisms.
While LP was dismissed as internally incoherent, I will be providing it with a qualified defense and arguing that what deserves consideration is not LP itself, but rather that there are instruments and normative commitments, concerning especially the contours and scope of philosophical inquiry itself, which may sanitize theoretical philosophy of some of its less robust and more problematic endeavors.
This paper provides an account and defense of Rawls's original version, i.e., pre-Proviso, public... more This paper provides an account and defense of Rawls's original version, i.e., pre-Proviso, public reason as the measured response to the problem of reasonable pluralism. This model of public reason acts as an epistemic norm in political justification, which requires that citizens appeal to a shared fund of intersubjectively accessible reasons in justifying constitutional essentials and matters of basic justice. Religious reasons are paradigmatically inaccessible to those outside the faith, and are therefore epistemically illegitimate in the process of political justification. I defend this iteration of public reason from criticisms by Kevin Vallier, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Michael McConnell.
The Critique of Pure Reason inaugurated Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Commentators commonly disting... more The Critique of Pure Reason inaugurated Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Commentators commonly distinguish between Kant’s Positive Project (PP), that is, his epistemology as laid out in the Transcendental Aesthetic and Transcendental Analytic, from his Negative Project (NP), expressed in terms of the destructive implications his epistemology has on speculative metaphysics and rational theology. Against this tradition I will argue that the whole of the Critique is largely a negative-destructive enterprise. I will focus on what is commonly taken as the centerpiece of the PP, that is, the Transcendental Deduction, and demonstrate that even here the NP is given normative priority. Though, to be sure, certain passages tend to encourage an interpretation of the PP as primary, I contend that this view is myopic and fails to pay sufficient attention to Kant’s global concerns in the Critique. I will demonstrate that a clear exposition of Kant’s metaphilosophical aims, commitments, and convictions is in fact corrosive to any such reading. The objective of this thesis, then, is two-fold: (1) to provide an account of Kant’s metaphilosophy in the Critique, and (2) to argue for what I will here and elsewhere refer to as the Primacy of the Negative Thesis, that is, that Kant prioritized boundary-setting over principle- generating.
Logical Positivism (LP) arose in the early 1900s to become one of the most influential philosophi... more Logical Positivism (LP) arose in the early 1900s to become one of the most influential philosophical movements in the 20th century. The LPs articulated their system of doctrines, emphasizing in particular the relationship between philosophy and science, by means of both a positive project and a negative project. The former was pursued through the introduction and appropriation of various doctrines, such as Frege’s theory of cognitive significance, verificationism, and the analytic/synthetic distinction, allowing us to make philosophically respectable statements about experience which are amenable to scientific corroboration; the latter project applied these doctrines to the traditional problems of Western philosophy, dismissing wholesale many of them as nonsense. Motivated in part by their enthusiasm for advances made in the natural sciences, Logical Positivists (LPs) were zealous in their prosecution of disciplines which were ambivalent toward scientific progress, and whose arguments, native to those disciplines, were unconstrained by logic, linguistic analysis, or empirical experience. Naturally, then, metaphysics -- along with religious, aesthetics, and ethics -- was a prime target for their criticisms.
While LP was dismissed as internally incoherent, I will be providing it with a qualified defense and arguing that what deserves consideration is not LP itself, but rather that there are instruments and normative commitments, concerning especially the contours and scope of philosophical inquiry itself, which may sanitize theoretical philosophy of some of its less robust and more problematic endeavors.
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While LP was dismissed as internally incoherent, I will be providing it with a qualified defense and arguing that what deserves consideration is not LP itself, but rather that there are instruments and normative commitments, concerning especially the contours and scope of philosophical inquiry itself, which may sanitize theoretical philosophy of some of its less robust and more problematic endeavors.
While LP was dismissed as internally incoherent, I will be providing it with a qualified defense and arguing that what deserves consideration is not LP itself, but rather that there are instruments and normative commitments, concerning especially the contours and scope of philosophical inquiry itself, which may sanitize theoretical philosophy of some of its less robust and more problematic endeavors.