Normativity and Purposiveness

Purposiveness, Necessity, and Contingency

This paper investigates the relationship between Kant's analytics of biology, and the metaphysical conceptions of contingency and necessity in §§76–7 of the CPJ. In general, the connection between purposiveness and contingency is attested within the very project of a critique of a power of judgment. Indeed, the many particular, empirical laws of nature seem contingent regarding the universal la...

Infinitism, finitude and normativity

I evaluate two new objections to an infinitist account of epistemic justification, and conclude that they fail to raise any new problems for infinitism. The new objections are a refined version of the finite-mind objection, which says infinitism demands more than finite minds can muster, and the normativity objection, which says infinitism entails that we are epistemically blameless in holding ...

Normativity, Necessity and Tense: A Recipe for Homebaked Normativity

A reductive analysis of a concept decomposes it into more basic constituent parts. Metaethicists today are in almost unanimous agreement that normative language and concepts cannot be reductively analyzed into entirely nonnormative language and concepts. Basic normative concepts are widely thought to be primitive or elemental in our thought, and therefore to admit of no further (reductive) expl...

Nonprofit Governance, Organizational Purposiveness and Design

Translation and Normativity

So much has been written in the last twenty years about norms and their relevance to translation that it is reasonable to assume at least a certain familiarity with the concept of norms as such (cf. Baker 1998 for a concise statement and references). Allow me therefore to preface my remarks with no more than a brief reminder, in the form of a quotation from Thomas Merton’s 1942 essay ‘The Norma...