Herman Melville’s final novel The Confidence-Man destabilizes conventional Western models of ethical behavior, particularly Kantian notions of moral agency, by exposing and challenging their basis in rationality and a progressivist model of history. The Confidence-Man shows rationality to be nothing more than one way, among many other possible ways, that human beings attempt to fix the world in...

This article charts the history of the concept of system in order to establish a set of conceptual trends in the philosophy of systems. Establishing the importance of the German Idealists, and especially Hegel, in this history, we then focus on the system of Leibniz since he marks a decisive turn toward the problem of individuation within the systematic, ontological immanence so important to He...

More than three decades after Sen‟s first formulation of the so-called “capability approach”, practitioners have yet to measure a capability set. This raises fundamental questions about the empirical viability of Sen‟s approach. In this paper, we argue that Kantian philosophy may offer valuable insights into how to deal with this problem, as the methodological difficulty which has hampered the ...

One the most potent motivations for retributivist approaches to punishment has been their apparent connection to an ethical background shaped by the Kantian notion of morally autonomous and rational human agency. The present paper challenges the plausibility of this connection. I argue that retributivism subverts, rather than embodies, the normative consequences of moral autonomy, justifying a ...