Abstracts listed in order of paper presentation.

Christian Lotz, "Certainty of Oneself: On Fichte's Conception of Faith as Non-epistemic Consciousness"

Fichte claims that conscience is the very relation of oneself through which one understands one's own being as something that has to be realized in this world through one's being. Whereas theoretical knowledge can be doubted, knowledge of our own ability to be moral and, therefore, of our own being, cannot be doubted. Thus we are forced to change our conception of self-knowledge; for it can no longer be analyzed as (propositional) knowledge. Here another form of certainty comes into play for at this juncture Fichte introduces faith as a type of non-theoretical knowledge within his search for an alternative conception of the self and the knowledge that it has of its own being. In this paper, I shall [i] briefly introduce the Kantian concept of conscience, reveal [ii] Fichte's conception of conscience and faith, taking especial care to [iii] uncover existential dimension of this conception.

---

Eric Berg, "Hegel's Historical Appropriation of Luther and the Reformation in The Philosophy of History"

This paper will attempt to answer two questions. Given Hegel's strong ties to Lutheranism and his treatment of it in The Philosophy of History, does he have a forced reading of the Reformation to make it fit his view? And if the first question is answered in the affirmative, does that reading make Hegel's philosophical position untenable for Lutherans?
In this paper I find that in a strict sense, Hegel does have a forced reading of the Reformation that seems a bit rushed to fit his philosophical system. However, when given a sympathetic reading, Hegel's view of the Reformation is a reasonable characterization, given his philosophical disposition. An answer of both "yes" and "no" to the first question generates an interesting answer to the second. I find that in some cases Lutherans embrace Hegel with open arms and in other cases there is a clear rejection of his work. I argue that this split comes along the lines of Lutheran Christology, particularly the relationship of God to human as determined through the two natures of Christ.

---

Joseph Bien, "Merleau-Ponty- on Embodied Freedom and History"

---

Deborah Tollefsen, "Collective Epistemic Agency"

Who Knows? According to contemporary analytic epistemology only individuals do. This form of epistemic individualism, call it epistemic agent individualism, seems to be motivated by the view that epistemology is about things that go on inside the head. In this paper, I challenge epistemic agent individualism by arguing that certain groups can be epistemic agents. I develop an account of epistemic agency based on the work of Tyler Burge and extend this account of epistemic agency to groups. I also consider whether my thesis supports the view, put forth by some feminist epistemologists, that communities are the primary epistemic agents.

---

Aaron Konopasky, "Inconsistentism About Knowledge"

A long-standing puzzle in epistemology is that each of the following, mutually inconsistent claims seems obviously true: (a) I know that I have hands, (b) if I know that I have hands, then I know that I'm not a brain in a vat, and (c) I don't know that I'm not a brain in a vat. The three standard solutions to this puzzle correspond to the rejection of (a), (b), and (c) respectively. An overlooked possibility is to accept all three. This would make the concept of knowledge "inconsistent," which is to say that the conditions specifying what it takes for a belief to fall under the concept of knowledge are not consistent with one another. It is my aim to introduce this analysis of knowledge into the philosophical literature, and to explain the idea of an inconsistent concept more generally.

---

Halla Kim, "The Unity of Kant's Categorical Imperative"

---

John Elia, "Motives and Incorporation"

In this paper I explore a recent challenge to the possibility, within Kant's ethics, of attributing moral worth to actions that are done from 'natural' or 'impure' motives, inclinations not generated from pure practical reason alone. Some commentators have recently claimed that natural motives are incompatible with Kant's "Incorporation Thesis," or IT: the claim that desires and inclinations must be incorporated into maxims in order to produce intentional action. I argue here, however, that IT, properly construed, is compatible with natural or impure motives. Moreover, I contend that Kant's philosophy of action requires impure inclinations to function both as reasons for and causes of action (the dual senses of the term 'motive'). I conclude that the invocation of IT is not decisive as a response to the possibility of 'natural' moral motives in Kant's ethics.

---

Ken Rogerson, "Interpretations of Kantian Idealism"

In this paper I consider several of the possible interpretations of Kant's idealism. I consider a standard "constructivist" interpretation, and a couple of versions of the more recent "criteriological" interpretation: what I call the "filtration" and "imposition" interpretations. My aim is to critically evaluate these various interpretation in terms of how well they suit the philosophical goals Kant has for his Idealism. In the end, I want to endorse a version of the criteriological model, but a version which is shorn the metaphysics which infects other similar interpretations.

---

Eric Reitan, "Date Rape and Seduction: Towards a Defense of Pineau's Definition of Date Rape"

Lois Pineau defines date rape as "nonaggravated sexual assault, nonconsensual sex that does not involve physical injury or the explicit threat of physical injury," and maintains that date rape can occur even when there is no outward resistance to a sexual advance. This account of date rape exemplifies an approach to conceiving rape that has been widely endorsed by feminists. One common criticism, neglected in philosophical discourse, is the charge that "date rape" as conceived by Pineau and others blurs a morally significant distinction between rape and seduction. In this paper, I respond to this criticism by making two points: (1) There is an ordinary sense of "seduction" according to which Pineau's account of date rape does not blur the distinction; (2) When "seduction" is understood in this sense, and "rape" in Pineau's sense, the resultant distinction better reflects morally relevant differences than does the alternative presupposed in the criticism.

---

Hamner Hill, "Liberals and Environmentalists: Reflections on a Conflict in Political Ideology"

Conservative pundits love to lump liberals and environmentalists into one camp. And many liberals proudly proclaims themselves environmentalists (and vice versa). Despite this, there are good reasons fort believing a tension, if not an outright incompatibility, exists between the fundamental tenets of political liberalism and environmentalism. Mark Sagoff, John O'Neil, Avner de-Shalit, Gary Varner and others have made the case that political liberalism, with its emphasis on individualism, is incompatible with environmentalism, which is at root communitarian. This paper examines the conflict between liberals and environmentalists at the level of practical problems of environmental policy. Using the notions of carrying capacity and ecological footprint as starting points, I show that liberals and environmentalists are committed to very different policies. Specifically, I examine the implications of the conflict between liberalism and environmentalism on policy choices in three areas: reproductive freedom, immigration, and the empowerment of the oppressed. I show that in each area liberals and environmentalists are committed to very different policies.

---

Alastair Norcross, "Torturing Puppies and Eating Meat: It's All in Good Taste"

Suppose that in order to enjoy the taste of chocolate you had to torture puppies. Despite the undeniable significance of gustatory pleasure, you would not be morally justified in torturing puppies to pursue it. In this paper, I argue that those who purchase and consume factory-raised meat are in the same moral position as someone who tortures puppies merely for the pleasure of chocolate. I consider and reject several attempts to show that the puppy torturer's actions are morally worse than those of the meat eater.

---

May Sim, "The Divided Line and the United Psyche in Plato's Republic"

Plato presents us with a tripartite soul in Republic IV. The desiring part (to epithumêtikon), the high-spirited part (to thumoeides) and the reasoning part (to logistikon) are proven by the principle of non-contradiction to be three distinct faculties that allow us to long for bodily pleasures, to be passionate or courageous, and to use reason, respectively. However, Plato also presents the simile of the line with its four affections (pathêmata) corresponding to four types of objects in Book VI. These are, noêsis (understanding), dianoia (thought), pistis (belief or trust) and eikasia (image-thinking), corresponding to the forms, mathematicals, visible things and images like reflections and shadows, respectively. How these four affections fit in with the three parts of the soul is left unclear. I propose an interpretation of the divided line which not only clarifies the relation between the four affections, but also illuminates the tripartition and unifies the two accounts of the soul.

---

Daniel Russell, "Stoic Value Theory"

For the Stoics there are good things, which determine the happiness of one's life as a whole; bad things, which determine one's unhappiness; and indifferent things, which do neither. There is much controversy about indifferent things. People sometimes say that if something is indifferent, then it is "at best peripheral" in a person's life, and that its absence would be inconsequential.
I argue that this is a misunderstanding of Stoic indifferent things. In its place, I offer a new way of thinking about indifferent things within Stoic value theory, by looking more closely at the Stoic conception of an indifferent, and then identifying a class of indifferent things which, I argue, turn out to be conditional goods. After explaining what I mean by conditional goods, I note some rather important insights about virtue, pleasure, and happiness that emerge from the Stoic view on this way of understanding it.

---

Michael Losonsky, "Frege's 'Bedeutung' and Mill's 'Denotation'"

Frege refines his theory of content in what is his major and most influential contribution to the philosophy of language, namely his essay Über Sinn und Bedeutung (1892). There is quite a bit of discussion about how to translate this title into English, particularly Frege's use of "Bedeutung". Various English terms have been used: "denotation," "indication," "signification," "nominatum," and "meaning," but the term that has prevailed is "reference," following Black's and Geach's translation of the title as "On Sense and Reference." Although "reference" is certainly an acceptable translation, I argue that "denotation" is historically the more accurate translation because it makes explicit the textual relationship between Frege's "Bedeutung" and Mill's "denotation."

---

Art Skidmore, "On Properties"

"On Properties" makes a case for construing properties as the referents of predicates in place of the traditional employment of extensions for this purpose. Such a construal would be a sort of rehabilitation of the notion of a universal, since we should think of properties as universals rather than abstract particulars such as classes. It is urged that abstract extensions cannot do the semantic job properly.
In addition, it is proposed to identify properties with concepts, which one hopes may help to illuminate both notions, as well as to construe symbols as properties.

---

Elizabeth Cooke, "Fallibilism, Progress, and the Long Run in Peirce's Philosophy of Science"

The present discussion focuses on the problem of recovering a Peircean conception of scientific progress within the process of inquiry, maintaining the hypothesis of fallibilism, but following Quine and Rorty in rejecting Peirce's conception of the long run. Rather than conceiving the progress of present, fallible inquiry as dependent on an atemporal conception of infallibilism, we must recognize fallibilism as a rejection of just this Cartesian requirement. In its place, a more pragmatic and scientific approach to progress may be derived from the basic individual/environment relationship in which inquiry begins, and upon which inquiry continually reflects.

---

Stuart Rosenbaum, "Pragmatism's Deliberation"

One engages in deliberation when events disrupt one's instinctive or habitual patterns of behavior. The deliberation that results is imaginative rather than discursive, and it is best understood pragmatically in terms of the concepts of habit, imagination, resourcefulness, and creativity rather than in terms of the concepts of proposition, intentionality, belief, and desire. Todd Lekan's recent account of deliberation moves in the direction of this pragmatic understanding of deliberation, but Lekan does not go far enough. Fully appreciating the changes brought by changing our conceptual focus on deliberation situations makes possible constructive changes in how we think about the tasks of philosophy.

---

Benjamin Hill, "Locke's Modes: Ideas as Properties"

Concerning Locke's modes, scholars' primary focus is the justification for the claim that their nominal essences are their real essences. When the metaphysical base for Locke's category is taken to simply be the noun-adjective division, as is usually the case, discerning a non-ad hoc reason for making the claim is difficult. In this paper I argue for a different metaphysical base: Locke's modes were a special kind of property - non-inherent properties. Qualities, because of inherence, undergird naturalistic explanations but modes, because of non-inherence, can only be imposed onto nature. From this it follows that the modal properties were in fact the ideas themselves. This then dictated that the ideas of modes function as neo-Platonic archetypes (but humanized) which entailed that their nominal essences be their real essences. For Locke the creation of an idea of mode literally was the creation of the real property.

---

Arthur Morton, "Leibniz's Attractive Dilemma"

Most commentators hold that Leibniz's remarks here constitute a largely univocal criticism of Newtonian "attraction". Alexandre Koyré, for instance suggests that the issue as it is taken up in the Correspondence is over whether 'attraction' is merely an occult quality and consequently miraculous. Larry Laudan maintains that Leibniz's remarks to the effect that "Action at distance is occult, unintelligible, mysterious, and unmechanical" are "All more or less synonymous". Contrary to this general view of the structure of Liebniz's criticism I argue below that Leibniz saw the charges that "attraction" designated an occult quality, a miraculous cause, or was unintelligible as distinct claims directed at three possible rejoinders to his initial claim that Newton's "attraction" was incomprehensible. That is, I claim that rather than offering a single univocal criticism of "attraction", Leibniz was posing a tri-lemma for Newton and Clarke.

---

Robert Feleppa, "Value-Freedom and Confirmation in the Social Sciences"

Advocates of social-science value neutrality grant that moral value judgments do and should guide the applications of theory to public policy and mold theoretical output by influencing research agendas. However, they maintain that the justification of theories should be free of the influence of moral convictions. Qua scientist, the social scientist should be concerned only with careful and unbiased data-gathering, testing, and explanation. Thus they grant values a contextual influence on social inquiry, concerning the application of theories to social-political ends, but maintain that moral values should not be viewed as intrinsic to a theory or constitutive of its justificatory methods. I argue that while this distinction resists certain kinds of criticism, it fails to hold in interpretive social science where moral value judgments do play an essential role in confirmation. However, the character of these value judgments is such that no strong thesis of moral/political partisanship is implied.

---

Barry Ward, "Dretske and Armstrong pm Regularity Analyses and Explanation"

Non Humean opponents of Humean regularity analyses, notably Fred Dretske and David Armstrong, have argued that if scientific laws were mere regularities, then they could not explain. Hence, regularity analyses must be mistaken. I argue, however, that the non-Humeans' critique relies on a deficient view of the nature of explanation. Once the deficiency is addressed, the critique loses its force. However, the discussion of explanation raises an additional worry for Humean regularity analyses.

---

Zachary Manis, "The Possibility of Transworld Depravity"

In this paper, I argue that Plantinga's Free Will Defense does not demonstrate the logical compatibility of God and evil. I develop two main objections aimed at demonstrating that we should not be willing to grant even the mere possibility of transworld depravity. First, I argue that if transworld depravity is even a possibility, then it is a truth about the actual world, and if the latter, then it is an inexplicable, brute fact. Second, I argue that in granting transworld depravity as a possibility, one is implicitly granting a very strong premise that is incompatible with another, more plausible, premise. I argue that one should not be willing to grant this strong premise in the absence of some compelling, independent argument. Finally, I consider an alternate interpretation of the Free Will Defense, assessing first the likelihood that this interpretation is the one Plantinga intends, and second, its philosophical prospects.

---

Doren Recker, "Machine Metaphors and Design Arguments"

From Paley to Behe, creationists have based design arguments on machine metaphors. If organisms are machines, they, too, were intelligently designed. Some creationists have been more explicit, claiming an identity between organisms and mechanism, masking the metaphorical nature of the connection, and making the inference to design more psychologically compelling.
Here it is shown that both William Paley (in 1802) and Michael Behe (in 1996) present such an explicit identity claim. It is also claimed that this sidesteps arguments stressing the important dissimilarities between organisms and machines, which have been important for opponents of the design inference from Hume to the present. It is also shown that the explicit identification of organisms and machines is widespread in legitimate biology as well. This indicates that one of the basic problems here is a general misconstrual of the role of metaphors within science.

---

Robert Talisse, "Problems with Galston's Pluralist Liberalism"

In Liberal Pluralism, William Galston attempts to revive the Berlinian project of deriving liberal political commitments from value pluralist premises. In this way, Galston, like Berlin, offers a "comprehensive" liberal theory. The author shows that Galston's arguments fail for reasons similar to those which plagued Berlin's. The conclusion is that value pluralists cannot be comprehensive liberals and vice-versa.

---

Christopher Robertson, "The Notion of Sovereign Exclusive Dominion for Global Political Justice"

My larger project is to develop a liberal theory of global political justice that pertains to the transnational behavior of individuals. The idea of politics involves the enforcement of laws, and thus the idea of a global politics suggests global law enforcement. Yet, the extant states claim exclusive dominion over their "sovereign" territories. Thus there seems to be a conflict between these notions of transnational law enforcement and states' exclusive dominion. One argument for this exclusive dominion can be found in the Hobbesian defense of sovereignty for the sake of protecting individuals from harm. It turns out that if exclusive dominion is justified (if at all) for these specific, contingent purposes, and then transnational law enforcement does not, as a matter of principle, contravene these purposes. Moreover, as transnational law enforcement will in some cases better protect individuals from harm, it will be required under these same principles.

---

David Reidy, "Justice and the Global Economy in Rawls' The Law of Peoples"

I first set out briefly the demands justice imposes on the global or international economy on Rawls's view, and Rawls's argument for them. I then identify and defend Rawls's view against two general sorts of objection, not because there are not other objections sufficiently strong to merit a positive defense, but rather because the objections most commonly advanced in the secondary literature are of these two sorts. In the course of defending Rawls against these objections I lay the foundation for an alternative objection to which I think Rawls's position is more vulnerable. It concerns Rawls's optimism that well-ordered peoples as organized bodies politic will find themselves able to escape the gravitational force of capitalist, materialist and consumerist values in social and political life.