The jurist Carl Schmitt’s views on the total state and race need further clarification as long as the English language edition of his Concept of the Political presents an apologist commentary. The questions are to which degree Schmitt’s works written during the Weimar Republic are tainted with totalitarian and racist ideas and whether Schmitt gave up fundamental principles during Nationalist Socialism. This thesis examines writings by Schmitt between 1913 and 1940 to reconstruct a coherent anti-individualistic legal viewpoint and its arguments. The first part finds that Schmitt undermines the individual rights of the Weimar Constitution. The second part discusses Schmitt’s role as a theorist of totalitarianism. The third part considers Schmitt’s anti-Semitism as underlying motivation for his political theory and analyzes his racism in light of his anti-individualism. Schmitt frequently argues by invoking necessity of history and by justifying some political action as necessary. These arguments should be rejected.

Galen Strawson argues that we have a sense of mental selves, which are entities that have mental features but do not have bodily features. In particular, he argues that there is a form of self-consciousness that involves a conception of the mental self. His mental self view is opposed to the embodied self view, the view that the self must be conceived of as an entity that has both mental and bodily features. In this paper, I will argue against Strawson’s mental self view and for the embodied self view. I will draw on P. F. Strawson’s theory of persons and Gareth Evans’ Generality Constraint to argue that Galen Strawson fails to provide a satisfactory account of the mental self that can counter the embodied self view.

Error theory turns on a particular presupposition about the conceptual commitments of moral realism, namely that the moral facts posited by realists need to be categorical. True moral propositions are said to have an absolute authority in their prescriptions in the sense that an agent, regardless of her own ends, needs or desires, is categorically obligated and has reason to act in accordance with their prescriptions. But, nothing in the world has such a queer property as categoricity, and therefore we ought to be suspect of the enterprise of moral discourse. Some philosophers, like Stephen Finlay, have argued that this categoricity is not a necessary feature of moral language, and in so doing hope to have shown that the error theoretic critique is thus refuted. In this article I offer a survey of the literature on this topic and then contribute independent motivations for siding with those who think moral facts need not be categorical (and that a powerful argument for error theory is defused).

In this essay, I argue that Harry Frankfurt’s view of the domain of ethics is flawed. On Frankfurt’s view, what we care about falls outside the proper scope of ethics because we are bound to what we care about, not by the force of moral necessities, but by non-moral ‘volitional necessities’. I show, however, that being moved to care within the constraints of our volitional necessities requires meeting a moral obligation of self-honesty. Developing Kant’s idea of a duty to truthfulness, I show that the duty to truthfulness is a duty to self-honesty. I then contend that self-honesty is a moral duty because self-honesty is essential for self-respect. Thus, because we fulfill a moral obligation to ourselves in the course of caring about things within the constraints of our volitional necessities, what we care about is a moral matter within the domain of ethics.

Friedrich Nietzsche thought that philosophers were deeply mistaken about the nature and sources of philosophical activity. Where others took themselves to be motivated by a desire to know the truth, Nietzsche charged that his fellow philosophers, motivated by a pathological set of psychological and physiological characteristics, did little more than sublimate and rationalize their own prejudices. In this thesis, I sketch out in further detail and defend the plausibility and significance of this Nietzschean diagnosis of philosophers. I argue that since Nietzsche’s view of philosophers both offers a compelling explanation of some phenomena in contemporary philosophical practice and, were it true, would have significant upshot for how and even whether philosophy should be practiced, we philosophers ought to begin taking it seriously.

A small subsection of the literature on Nietzsche’s political philosophy focuses on a key passage that appears in the sixth section of “Schopenhauer as Educator.” In this passage, Nietzsche claims that the individual’s life attains its highest value by living for the benefit of humanity’s rarest and most valuable specimens. Some philosophers, like John Rawls and Thomas Hurka, take this passage to be sufficient evidence of a larger commitment on Nietzsche’s part to aristocracy. Others oppose Rawls’ and Hurka’s interpretations, claiming that this key passage is evidence of a commitment to democracy. However, both sides are incorrect. This particular section of “Schopenhauer as Educator” is actually evidence of Nietzsche’s commitment to divorcing cultural institutions from the influence of states in toto. I explain why Nietzsche is committed neither to aristocracy nor to democracy, and how the passage from “Schopenhauer as Educator” commits Nietzsche to a post-political position.

Many contemporary philosophers are committed – either implicitly or explicitly – to Propositionalism about thought-experimental intuitions. According to this view, thought-experimental intuitions are (1) phenomenally conscious, (2) spontaneous, (3) and non-theoretical; most importantly, Propositionalists claim that intuitions (4) bear consciously accessible propositional content. The negative project of this essay is a critique of (4), the rejection of which is tantamount to rejecting Propositionalism. In addition, I propose an alternative position – namely, Interpretationalism. According to Interpretationalism, intuitions possess the features ascribed in (1)-(3); however, they do not bear consciously accessible propositional content. Instead, intuitions acquire cognitive significance by virtue of being interpreted in light of a subject’s background beliefs.

The heart of this thesis is an examination into the relevant differences between Nietzsche’s perspectivism and standpoint theory. Briefly, both standpoint theory and perspectivism have been subjected to various charges that dissolve into two major ones, which are worthy of additional scrutiny: the charges of essentialism and incoherence. My overall argument in thesis is that standpoint theory, in spite of recent feminist defense, is still susceptible to these charges, and this proves counterproductive to its aims of combatting marginalization. Moreover, I argue that Nietzsche’s perspectivism provides a corrective to the short comings of standpoint theory.

This paper attempts to offer a group-based approach to reparations for slavery. I argue that by appealing to a group-based approach to reparations, one can avoid some of the significant problems associated with attempting to justify reparations on an individual level. I argue that, properly formulated, a group-based approach can avoid problems of identification, the non-identity problem, as well as misgivings about appealing to the notion that groups can have a moral standing that is not merely the aggregation of the moral standing of the individual group members. In order to show that a group-based approach is a viable solution to these issues, I appeal to Larry May’s account of groups.

In this paper I put forth three criticisms against McDowell account of the idea that moral requirements are categorical imperatives. I argue that McDowell’s account fails as a defense of Kant’s doctrine for at least three reasons. First, McDowell claims that agents can appeal to experience in order to formulate and recognize categorical imperatives. However, Kant strongly disagrees with this claim, explicitly claiming that moral requirements cannot be derived from experience. Second, McDowell argues that the virtuous agent will not experience inner conflict when motivating herself to act virtuously, but inner conflict plays a central role in Kant’s picture of moral motivation and virtue. Third, McDowell does not account for how the moral law serves as a necessary incentive to moral action through the a priori feeling of respect. Finally, I suggest that my criticisms cast doubt on the validity of McDowell’s account, and provide insights into some criteria that an account must meet if it is to be a proper defense of Kant’s doctrine of moral requirements as categorical imperatives.