{"title":"Kant, Constitutivism, and the Shmagency Objection","authors":"Vinicius Carvalho","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70035","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70035","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Many interpreters have recently defended constitutivist interpretations of Kant's moral theory, but they have largely overlooked the most prominent challenge to constitutivism: the shmagency objection. In this paper, I argue that Kant employs a form of constitutivism in the <i>Groundwork</i> not to vindicate the authority of morality to a sceptic, but rather with the aim of explaining how categorical imperatives can bind rational agents given the nature of practical reason. As such, his view is immune to the challenge posed by the shmagency objection. By distinguishing between normative and explanatory scepticism, this paper shows that the objection only threatens constitutivist views that address the former, thereby shedding light on a fundamental difference between Kant and contemporary constitutivists in terms of their metaethical ambitions.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 1","pages":"51-65"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.70035","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147565911","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“The Growth of Interest”. Richard Wollheim on F. H. Bradley's Moral Psychology","authors":"Paolo Babbiotti","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13073","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13073","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This paper aims to reconstruct two key stages of Richard Wollheim's engagement with the moral psychology of F. H. Bradley—first in his 1959/1969 book on Bradley, and later in his 1993 collection of essays, <i>The Mind and its Depths</i>—and to connect them to Wollheim's own account of a dynamic moral psychology, as detailed in <i>The Thread of Life</i> (1984). Bradley's notion of “the growth of interest” is here reframed as growing up through learning to love and overcoming the pull of hate-related impulses, such as envy. Finally, this paper highlights significant parallels between Wollheim's account and Iris Murdoch's concept of “the change of vision”, particularly as articulated in <i>The Sovereignty of Good</i>, thus situating both philosophers within a shared horizon of ethical transformation.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 1","pages":"218-228"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.13073","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147568275","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Range of Moral Responsibility: A Beauvoirian Model","authors":"Hannah Winckler-Olick","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70023","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In this paper, I propose a view that extends the range of our core agency to include contributions our actions make to public values. This Extended Range View takes seriously Simone de Beauvoir's suggestion that values are not merely handed to us but created and shaped together by our actions. If we properly appreciate the moral weight of our contributions to the value systems that we all engage in—what I will call our evaluative landscape—then we can explain how we can be responsible for the free actions of others. This view significantly extends what we will need to think of as our responsibility (though not to a fully <i>un</i>restricted range). I will also suggest, however, that we accept a pluralist view about responsibility on which the way that we take responsibility and hold agents responsible for these kinds of value-based contributions is different from the standard responsibility practices like blame, punishment, and guilt.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 1","pages":"206-217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562528","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Imaginative Synthesis and the Basic Function of the Second Part of Kant's Transcendental Deduction in B","authors":"Michael Pendlebury","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70016","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70016","url":null,"abstract":"<p>Most recent commentators on Kant's Transcendental Deduction assume that the main purpose of the second part of the B-Deduction (“BD2”) is to show that human intuitions must fall under categories for reasons connected with their spatio-temporal form. But there are good reasons to hold that the Deduction as a whole is concerned with pure categories, whose application to spatio-temporal objects is undetermined. If so, BD2 cannot establish a connection between the categories and the spatio-temporal order. I advance the alternative view that the basic function of BD2 is to explain in general terms why, abstracting from their specifically human forms, intuitions must fall under categories; and that Kant's explanation is that the forms of imaginative synthesis which yield the intuitions must correspond to the forms of intellectual synthesis involved in the functions of unity in judgement underlying the categories. This alternative interpretation accounts well for BD2's contribution to the Analytic, and an analysis of key passages shows that it can be used to make better sense of the core reasoning of BD2 than the standard assumption. Kant's remarks about space, time, and the spatio-temporal form of human intuition in BD2 serve heuristic purposes, and are not essential to this reasoning.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 1","pages":"33-50"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.70016","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562770","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Cugoano on Responsibility and Oppression","authors":"Iziah C Topete","doi":"10.1111/ejop.13084","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13084","url":null,"abstract":"<p>This article contributes to the growing literature on the West African Quobna Ottobah Cugoano by reconstructing his concept of responsibility from <i>Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil and Wicked Traffic of the Slavery and Commerce of the Human Species</i>, first published in London in July 1787. In this text, Cugoano drew the thesis that every individual in the British empire was responsible for the oppression of Africans. Objections to the plausibility of his claim are raised. By contextualizing the argument in eighteenth-century abolitionist thought, I clarify that his thesis is not grounded in causation but in judgment. I develop a <i>passive judgment</i> principle that animates his argument: to judge oppression <i>qua</i> oppression without intervening is to be complicit in it. He applies this principle to different instances, particularly the case of slavery's legal toleration in the British empire.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 1","pages":"17-32"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562200","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Range of Moral Responsibility: A Beauvoirian Model","authors":"Hannah Winckler-Olick","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70023","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In this paper, I propose a view that extends the range of our core agency to include contributions our actions make to public values. This Extended Range View takes seriously Simone de Beauvoir's suggestion that values are not merely handed to us but created and shaped together by our actions. If we properly appreciate the moral weight of our contributions to the value systems that we all engage in—what I will call our evaluative landscape—then we can explain how we can be responsible for the free actions of others. This view significantly extends what we will need to think of as our responsibility (though not to a fully <i>un</i>restricted range). I will also suggest, however, that we accept a pluralist view about responsibility on which the way that we take responsibility and hold agents responsible for these kinds of value-based contributions is different from the standard responsibility practices like blame, punishment, and guilt.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 1","pages":"206-217"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147562617","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"History and the Will to Power: Foucault and Nietzsche on Genealogy","authors":"Anthony Garruzzo","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70010","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70010","url":null,"abstract":"<div>\u0000 \u0000 <p>In recent years, there has been a revival of interest in genealogy among social and political philosophers. I argue, however, that this growing literature has tended to obscure what distinguishes genealogy as an approach to the interpretation of history. Any normative evaluation of something that appeals to an account of its origins has come to be called a “genealogy,” even if this account is explicitly hypothetical or unabashedly teleological. But a genealogy, according to Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault, is not merely an account of origins: it is an account of the <i>contingent</i> origins of the <i>integration</i> of an institution, practice, or concept within a regime of <i>power</i> and <i>control</i>. In other words, genealogy investigates an institution, practice, or concept through the lens of what Nietzsche calls “the will to power.” This paper aims to reconstruct the conception of the will to power Foucault inherits from Nietzsche in a way that explains why investigations into struggles for power from the past can provide insight into the strategies used for exercising and maintaining power in the present. The critical contribution of genealogy, I argue, is not normative insight but <i>tactical knowledge</i>: to oppose something successfully, first you must <i>know your enemy</i>.</p>\u0000 </div>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 1","pages":"191-205"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147564114","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Does Sarah Chapone Endorse a Republican Conception of Liberty?","authors":"Samuel C. Rickless","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70008","url":null,"abstract":"<p>In <i>The Hardships of the English Laws in Relation to Wives</i> (1735), Sarah Chapone argues that the English laws governing marriage, including the common law doctrine of coverture, are cruel and unjust to wives. In a close study of this work, Jacqueline Broad (2015) argues that Chapone endorses a republican (or nondomination) conception of liberty, as the absence of anyone else's arbitrary, non-normative power to intentionally worsen one's choice situation without tracking one's own needs and interests with respect to matters of importance in one's life. In this essay, I argue that Chapone is better read as a rights-based moral theorist who argues that English laws are unjust by virtue of the fact that they give husbands (not the non-normative power but) the legal authority to violate the moral rights of their wives, and otherwise do not protect wives from being wheedled, coerced, or manipulated into giving up that to which they have a moral right. This picture is consistent with a non-republican understanding of liberty as the absence of interference rather than as the absence of domination.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 1","pages":"3-16"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147566007","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Case for Contingent Absurdity","authors":"Thom Hamer","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70021","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A popular view on existential absurdity holds that if life is absurd, it must be inescapably so. In opposition to this view, I argue that the concept of existential absurdity allows for life to be <i>contingently</i> absurd. In <i>Nausea</i> (1938) and <i>Being and Nothingness</i> (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre puts forward two distinct conceptions of an absurd life, both of which entail an absurdity that is contingent rather than inescapable. Given the internal coherence of these accounts of existential absurdity, we have reasons to reject the view that existential absurdity is necessarily inescapable. A challenge arises, however, for radically contingent versions of absurdity: if life is absurd in a radically contingent way, it seems that no rational agent will live under absurd conditions for a significant portion of their life. This seems to run counter to the intuition that an absurdity can only be genuinely existential if it is a fundamental feature of human life. In response to this ‘problem of triviality’, I argue that there can be pro-absurdity reasons that outweigh the pro tanto reasons for escaping absurdity. Thus, it would not necessarily be irrational to continue to live under the yoke of absurdity.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 1","pages":"266-280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.70021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147566640","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Case for Contingent Absurdity","authors":"Thom Hamer","doi":"10.1111/ejop.70021","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.70021","url":null,"abstract":"<p>A popular view on existential absurdity holds that if life is absurd, it must be inescapably so. In opposition to this view, I argue that the concept of existential absurdity allows for life to be <i>contingently</i> absurd. In <i>Nausea</i> (1938) and <i>Being and Nothingness</i> (1943), Jean-Paul Sartre puts forward two distinct conceptions of an absurd life, both of which entail an absurdity that is contingent rather than inescapable. Given the internal coherence of these accounts of existential absurdity, we have reasons to reject the view that existential absurdity is necessarily inescapable. A challenge arises, however, for radically contingent versions of absurdity: if life is absurd in a radically contingent way, it seems that no rational agent will live under absurd conditions for a significant portion of their life. This seems to run counter to the intuition that an absurdity can only be genuinely existential if it is a fundamental feature of human life. In response to this ‘problem of triviality’, I argue that there can be pro-absurdity reasons that outweigh the pro tanto reasons for escaping absurdity. Thus, it would not necessarily be irrational to continue to live under the yoke of absurdity.</p>","PeriodicalId":46958,"journal":{"name":"EUROPEAN JOURNAL OF PHILOSOPHY","volume":"34 1","pages":"266-280"},"PeriodicalIF":0.9,"publicationDate":"2026-03-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejop.70021","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"147566641","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"哲学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}