ABSTRACT Free will scepticism about moral responsibility denies that human agents possess the kind of control required for basic desert moral responsibility. This position is often taken to have substantive normative implications, including the rejection of retributive punishment and support for reformist approaches to criminal justice. This paper challenges that assumption. We argue that scepticism about moral responsibility, considered in isolation, is normatively inert. While it undermines backward‐looking justifications of blame and punishment grounded in basic desert, it does not itself yield positive conclusions about how offenders ought to be treated. A central source of confusion is a category mistake: The rejection of basic moral responsibility is taken to establish moral innocence, when in fact it renders the distinction between such basic guilt and innocence inapplicable. We show how this mistake operates in pessimistic responses to scepticism, such as Smilansky's appeal to a ‘practical reductio.’ By contrast, so‐called optimistic sceptics such as Pereboom and Caruso avoid this error, yet still risk overstating the normative significance of scepticism by closely linking it to reformist proposals, including quarantine‐based models of punishment and limits on penal severity. While these proposals are defended on independent normative grounds—notably, self‐defence—we argue that they are not entailed by scepticism itself. Eliminating retributive desert removes one ground for punishment, but it neither constrains penal severity nor justifies offender‐focused detention except on forward‐looking and predictive bases. Any appeal to moderation or humanitarian restraint therefore depends on normative commitments and empirical assumptions, rather than on scepticism about moral responsibility alone.
Abstract This article demonstrates that David Hume's politics should be understood as both moderate and pluralistic. Commentators often describe Hume as a ‘sceptical Whig’ who advocates moderation. Yet this interpretation insufficiently reflects both the destructive and constructive sides of his scepticism. Hume's sceptical style and dispersed political writings make it difficult to systematically characterise his political thought, resulting in an absence of a distinctively Humean tradition in contemporary political theory. This article indicates that a pluralist framework better reflects Hume's sceptical politics by illuminating structural affinities between Humean scepticism and Berlinian pluralism in their arguments against dogmatism and relativism. I argue that Humean scepticism exerts stabilising effects on society and politics by encouraging a pluralist political culture. This includes maintaining diverse opinions and judgements, facilitating intersubjective understanding through sympathy, and establishing a dynamic equilibrium of competing opinions. These measures to accommodate disagreement are essential for the stability of opinion-based government.
Thaddeus Metz, A Relational Moral Theory: African Ethics in and Beyond the Continent. Oxford University Press, 2022, 280 pp. ISBN: 9780198748960, (Hardcover) Robert T. Tally, Jr. The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse. New York: Bloomsbury, 2024, 170 pp. IBSN 9781501375842 (pbk)
Abstract This article asks how sociology has theorised the persistence of violence under democracy in post-apartheid South Africa and what the limits of those explanations reveal about the discipline itself. Focusing on Karl von Holdt's concept of violent democracy, it situates his work within a genealogy of South African sociology shaped by labour studies, transition theory, and debates on the contradictory location of White scholars within Black struggle. Through a conceptual analysis of violent democracy, the article argues that while the concept explains how violence circulates through democratic institutions, it remains constrained by sociology's commitment to the social as a domain of mediation and repair. Bringing von Holdt into dialogue with Frank Wilderson, Achille Mbembe, and Tendayi Sithole, the article reframes post-apartheid violence as a condition of democratic order and argues that sociology's attachment to the category of the Human marks the metaphysical limit of its critique.
Abstract The far right and its reactionary allies are waging a retaliatory culture war. These reactionaries are in a state of recoil, undoing the recognition gains of the marginalised in liberal societies through a structural reificatory reassertion of cisheteropatriarchy and ethnonationalism. In this article, I argue that Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit offers illuminating insights into the onto-phenomenology of reactionary culture wars, particularly regarding the subjects who wage them. I focus on Hegel's articulation of self-consciousness's desire to achieve self-certainty and actuality, the possibility of encountering semblances of the Concept's manifestation in the process of attaining actuality; and the relationship between uncertainty, failure, and sublation. I read the reactionary subject's retaliation as rooted in the breakdown of ‘actuality’ into semblance, as well as a resistance to sublation, which, in my view, explains both the intractability of culture wars and why subjects opt for self-reassertion over self-reimagination.
Abstract Current scholarship examines the normative value, character and internal commitments of solidarity groups but pays less attention to how they remain democratically answerable to those beyond their boundaries and how such encounters reshape solidarity itself. This article asks how partial solidarities can support inclusive and egalitarian relations under conditions of unequal power and profound disagreement. It develops a non-ideal theoretical account of reflexive interchange by engaging with debates on solidarity, democratic equality and intergroup responsiveness, and argues that solidaristic action can trigger social learning across group boundaries through perspective-taking, disagreement and dialogue with outsiders. Historical examples are used to illustrate how this mechanism can operate in practice. Where institutional and material conditions sustain expectations of democratic equality and support the democratic mediation of conflict, this process can revise solidaristic commitments, broaden understandings of democratic equality, and keep the boundaries of the solidaristic ‘we’ open to ongoing negotiation and contestation.
ABSTRACT On one narrative, Berkeleyan idealism arises from Cartesian theorising: Descartes's discussion of dreaming in the Meditations leads first to scepticism, and through scepticism, to Berkeley's rejection of realism. In this paper, I consider how this move from dreams to idealism is supposed to work. I trace this narrative back to Andrew Baxter, one of Berkeley's earliest critics, and reconstruct Baxter's argument that idealism is self‐defeating, a criticism that anticipates some contemporary commentators' analyses. I then turn to Berkeley's text to show that Berkeley's own attitude towards dream scepticism is dismissive at best. This raises the question of how the narrative connecting dreams to idealism took hold; I argue that one place to look may be to Berkeley's perceptual relativity arguments. I suggest that understanding Baxter's criticism helps illuminate both how we should read those arguments, and also, more generally, how we should understand idealism's relationship to scepticism and dreaming.
ABSTRACT The article argues for a system of axioms that is meant to capture the logic of normative reasons for belief. The system concerns a primitive direct‐reason relation, a defined doxastic‐reason relation, and a primitive function for the revision of rational belief by reasons. Reasons are assumed to be facts that speak for belief with numerical strength, and the aggregation of non‐overlapping direct reasons involves the intersection of sets of possible worlds and the summing up of strengths. Rational belief is reconstructed as subjective probability, and ratios of new‐to‐old odds are normatively postulated to be a function of the strengths of reason. The resulting theory avoids problems that have been ascribed to the additive aggregation of reasons; it entails that reasons exert epistemic forces that conform to a vector‐like structure and that the rational impact of a reason on rational belief corresponds to a probabilistic Jeffrey/Field‐update. And although the theory differs from existing logics of reason, it is partially continuous with two of them. Its upshot is a systematic bridge between the philosophical theory of epistemic reasons and Bayesian formal epistemology.
ABSTRACT The paper aims to bridge the history of quantum theory with its philosophical implications. The focus is not only on the scientific underpinnings of quantum mechanics (these theories emerged as ‘ad hoc’ responses to experimental anomalies) but also on the philosophical ramifications of its probabilistic nature and indeterminacy, which differ from classical realism. The paper examines Dirac's, Bell's, and modern views, focusing on how quantum mechanics (QM) challenges traditional notions of causality, objectivity, and truth while embracing epistemological and metaphysical perspectives. Debates over collapse theories and hidden variables are discussed, as well as Putnam's philosophical outlook, which includes his trenchant involvement with realism, logic, and the measurement problem. Finally, the paper proposes that QM represents a philosophical revolution that renews our understanding of reality, knowledge, and scientific explanation, rather than simply serving as a physical theory for assessing the prospects of quantum philosophy by connecting it to broader aspects such as relativity, causality, and scientific realism.
In this article, I examine the structural parallels between Thomas Kuhn's philosophy of science and Ludwig Wittgenstein's later thought, focusing on the idea of grammatical frameworks. My central claim is that Kuhn's concept of paradigm and its later, more language-centred forms in his philosophy can be read as a Wittgensteinian grammatical space. By approaching scientific revolutions as shifts within such spaces, I suggest that Kuhn's controversial idea of incommensurability is better understood not as a collapse of rational discourse but as a form of deep disagreement grounded in what Wittgenstein calls hinge commitments. This reading opens the way to a non-relativist account of scientific change that still acknowledges the historical and plural nature of scientific worldviews.
The traditional reading of saying and showing in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus has two main features. Firstly, it claims that what shows itself helps us to grasp some metaphysical insights that transcend the limits of sense, such as the existence of simple objects, the truth of solipsism and the very essence of the world. Secondly, according to the traditional reading, the method of the work is based on the capacity of showing to reveal what cannot be said. In this paper, I demythologise the traditional reading of saying and showing. What shows itself reveals not some mysterious metaphysical properties of the world but rather mundane and familiar properties of language, such as the entailment between propositions, the logical forms of propositions and the sense possessed by a proposition. Moreover, the traditional reading falsely assumes that there is a single overarching concept of showing that unifies Wittgenstein's work. The topic of the paper is important because the resolute readings have so far focused on a critique of the traditional reading of saying and showing without a positive construal of the saying-showing distinction. My paper fills this gap: It provides a positive story about saying and showing that allows us to account for the crucial importance that Ludwig Wittgenstein ascribed to them.
Abstract This is a discussion between Guido Parietti, author of On the Concept of Power: Possibility, Necessity, Politics (Oxford University Press, 2022), and four respondents, Laurence Piper, Christine Hobden, Lawrence Hamilton and Camila Vergara, focussed on the notion of power as possibility. This discussion was first held in an online seminar in late 2024, which was broadcast on Theoria 's YouTube channel, and is captured here for readers.
ABSTRACT Neo‐republican political theory has revived the classical republican ideal of freedom as non‐domination, offering a powerful alternative to liberal accounts centred on non‐interference. At the same time, feminist theories of relational autonomy have emphasised that agency and autonomy are constituted through social relations of dependence, recognition and care. Despite important affinities, sustained engagement between these two traditions remains limited. This article revisits the relationship between neo‐republican freedom and relational feminist theory. It argues that dominant neo‐republican formulations, particularly in the work of Philip Pettit, conceptualise domination primarily in interactional terms, focusing on relations of discretionary interference between agents. While this framework captures certain paradigmatic forms of domination, it struggles to account for structural and constitutive dimensions of unfreedom emphasised by feminist theory. Building on insights developed by feminist philosophers on vulnerability, the article proposes a relational reconstruction of non‐domination. This reconstruction does not displace the republican framework's core commitments—its institutional orientation, its contestability norm and its unified criterion linking freedom and democratic legitimacy—but provides them with more adequate foundations. In doing so, it operates at a different and complementary level of analysis to feminist political theories of justice, supplying the normative‐political grammar within which relational and structural critique can be institutionally articulated and contested.
According to the idea of public reason, fundamental political questions should be resolved solely on the basis of considerations that all citizens can reasonably accept. While various rationales—such as the ideal of civic friendship—have been offered in support of public reason, most arguments assume ideal, well‐ordered conditions. Yet many real‐world societies are far from ideal, often dominated by unreasonable persons—sometimes even those in power. Emil Andersson addresses the question of how familiar rationales for public reason fare under such conditions. More specifically, he argues that the political community view—which grounds public reason in the ideal of civic friendship—faces serious challenges in non‐well‐ordered, asymmetrically divided contexts characterised by large numbers of unreasonable people. In this paper, I show that, while Andersson's critique of the political community view of public reason is on target, his argument against the most plausible construal of this view—namely the inclusive political community view—is unsuccessful, because the value of inclusion can be understood as carrying sufficient weight even in non‐well‐ordered contexts. I then argue that Andersson's alternative conception—namely Rawlsian political autonomy—does not convincingly address the rationale for, or the applicability of, public reason in non‐well‐ordered societies, especially when compared to the inclusive political community view.
The conception of shame has often been implied in various ethical frameworks in African philosophy, but there has been little or no systematic engagement with the concept in ways that address its true nature and implications for African societies. society. There has been some research into when to feel guilt and resentment, but not much on when it is appropriate to feel shame, or the social implications of shame. This article engages Samantha Vice's conception of shame in the South African context and draws insights from prominent African philosophers, especially Ifeanyi Menkiti and Kwame Gyekye, to tease out an African ethics of shame. The work in this article is novel in that it does not only explore the various accounts of African philosophical positions on communal relationality, it also makes explicit the implicit and sometimes neglected or muted links between shame and morality in African societies.
Recent discussion of how to decolonise philosophy overlooks a fundamental question: can philosophy be decolonised? This paper argues that if philosophy is a self-reflexive activity of critical examination, then it cannot be, since it would be either part of decolonisation or eliminated by the process. Conceptual decolonisation is thus best seen as philosophy's attempt to realise its own emancipatory potential.
