But it is beyond the power of human capacity to frame and retain distinct ideas of all the particular things we meet with: every bird and beast men saw; every tree and plant that affected the senses, could not find a place in the most capacious understanding. During the Middle Ages, much of the debate about universals concerned the question whether or not they could be considered to " exist ". ...

Standard interpretations of Kant’s transcendental idealism take it as a 1 commitment to the view that the objects of cognition are structured or made by con2 ditions imposed by the mind, and therefore to what Van Cleve calls “honest-to-God 3 idealism”. Against this view, many more recent investigations of Kant’s theory of rep4 resentation and cognitive significance have been able to show that K...

Critical Realism (CR) states that knowledge (epistemology) is different from being or existence (ontology). There is a reality (unobservable structures) which exists independent of human thought. Critical realists believe that these unobservable structures cause observable events. Therefore, the social world can be understood only if people understand the structures that generate events. This i...

In this paper I discuss how the need for defining truth in a political context retains its importance even light of insistence from realists that such attempts will necessarily fail.1 mention two debates philosophy intersect at issue. The first is dispute between those who, like Rawls, adhere to epistemic agnosticism and deny we can have an operational definition politics following Habermas, ar...

Debunking skeptics claim that our moral beliefs are formed by processes unsuited to identifying objective facts, such as emotions inculcated by our genes and culture; therefore, they say, even if there are objective moral facts, we probably don’t know them. I argue that the debunking skeptics cannot explain the pervasive trend toward liberalization of values over human history, and that the bes...

Introduction In this paper, I defend the importance of narrative to moral philosophy, in particular to moral realism. Moral realism, for the purposes of this essay, is the claim that there are moral truths independent of human beliefs, attitudes, desires and feelings.i Contemporary philosophers typically focus on discursive arguments and exclude narrative. But narrative is considerably more pow...

Abstract This paper makes the case for a revision of contemporary forms political realism in theory. I argue that realists have gone awry increasingly centring their approach around metaethical claim: theory should be rooted form normativity is distinct from moral normativity. Several critics argued this claim unconvincing. But suggest it also counterintuitive starting point realism, and one un...

The occasion for this paper was an invitation from organizers of the Society for Classical Realism to participate in a special session, at the American Philosophical Association Central Division Conference, of the Society for the Study of Ethics and Animals. Implicit in this invitation was the idea that those interested in classical realism, ofwhich I am one, might make some contribution to the...