Chapter 1 focuses on drawing two contrasts. According to the first contrast, philosophers typically tend to believe both (i) that there is a single, objectively correct morality, and (ii) that certain moral virtues, concepts, ideals, and institutions which reflect that morality are universal. Philosophers are also here presented as holding that universal, objectively correct moral principles can be discovered merely by considering abstract thought-examples, such as the famous trolley problem.

By contrast, a minority of dissenting philosophers and most social scientists are introduced as taking seriously the fact that there is a wide variety of local moralities embedded in different traditions, cultures, and religions. From this second perspective, what for most philosophers seems objectively correct and eternal appears to be the result of contingent factors, such as one’s education and upbringing. This insight then leads to a worthy scientific project of studying the many moralities that exist in the real world. This chapter also introduces the contrast between the Humean view, according to which all humans share the same underlying nature consisting of shared motivations, principles, and behaviours, and the opposing Herderian view, according to which there are very different ways of flourishing as a human, based on moral concepts and beliefs that differ from culture to culture.

Chapter 2 is on the difficult demarcation problem, the question of what makes something count as ‘moral’ or ‘morality’ in the first place. In this chapter, Lukes traces the historical origins of the words ‘moral’ and ‘ethical’ back to Ancient Greece and Rome, and he also explores how these words have been recently used in English and other European languages. This chapter, furthermore, outlines a view according to which morality is not merely one source of competing practical requirements amongst many (prudential, legal, and the like). Rather, in a wider sense, morality is here argued to be an all-encompassing central perspective of inner life, a moral point of view, from which the relative priority of all other considerations is judged. In this sense, morality is an ineliminable part of human life, which means that all sceptical attempts to reject its demands merely end up confirming its importance. On this view, then, there is no separate domain of morality, but rather morality in its different forms pervades inescapably all human life.

Chapter 3 draws on both philosophy and sciences (psychology, economics, anthropology, biology, and several other fields) to explore further how different forms of inquiry can help us to solve the previous demarcation problem. Inspired by Levinas, Strawson, and Darwall, the chapter first focuses on the kind of reciprocal recognition that is uniquely present in human interactions. Based on the work of primatologist Frans de Waal, it then describes how the behaviour of many animals displays ‘proto-morality’, including elements of good-naturedness, reciprocity, revenge, helping, kindness, soothing, and fairness. The chapter also examines various suggestions about how human morality transcends earlier forms of proto‑moralities found in non‑human animals. These suggestions include widening moral concern to the community as a whole, accountability, collective intentionality and action, perspective-taking and Smithian projective empathy that requires considering both how others feel and should feel, rules that are unalterable by agreement, normative self-governance, the capacity to question social conventions, and moral universalism and the recognition of universal human dignity.

Chapter 4 then turns to mass atrocities. It thus examines the extent to which human beings can resist authority and problematic social norms under extreme social conditions, and thereby also how philosophical, sociological, and psychological research can help us to make sense of the darkest episodes in human history. This chapter begins with Zygmunt Bauman’s description of how modern bureaucracies and industrial organisations can undermine pre-social human morality, and with Hannah Arendt’s famous discussion of the banality of evil. It then explains how three famous experiments (the Milgram experiment, the Stanford prison experiment, and the Princeton Theological Seminary experiment) led to a situational consensus, with the adoption of the view that external factors are decisive in explaining human behaviour. It was thus commonly thought that anyone could become a perpetrator under the right circumstances.

Lukes questions this consensus by arguing that the situations individuals face are also shaped by their inner dispositions, which themselves have been formed by previous situations. Because of this, it is not clear that you would act in the same way as many Germans did during the Second World War, given that you have not been brought up by authoritarian parents or been subjected to similar state propaganda (and even if you had been, you would now be a different person). This chapter also contains fascinating discussions of the rescuers who actively created opportunities and relied on the language of universal solidarity, the debate in the Journal of Perpetrator Research on whether thick concepts such as ‘perpetrator’ and ‘rescuer’ should be used to assign responsibility within scientific explanations, and how the conception of morality the Nazis had relates to our morality.

Chapter 5 understands values as what we see as important, desirable, and justifiable to ourselves and others. It then espouses value pluralism, the view that there are many different values that are neither reducible to one another nor to some ‘super-value’. These values can furthermore be incommensurable, incompatible, and even irreconcilable. Much of this chapter then focuses on describing and comparing Isaiah Berlin’s and Max Weber’s versions of value pluralism. It also discusses empirical sociological research concerning the similarities and differences between people’s values globally. Even if this research is often recognised to be methodologically problematic, it seems to support the idea of a pan-cultural consensus. For example, values such as benevolence, self-direction, self-fulfilment, friendship, family, and treating human life as precious are almost universally regarded as more important than power, tradition, position, and things. Despite these similarities in values, there is, however, also considerable evidence that cultural practices vary significantly across societies. One appealing explanation for this is that the same values can be realised and enacted in different ways in different cultural contexts.

The concluding Chapter 6 begins by locating common ground between the Humean and Herderian positions. According to Lukes, Hume was correct that human nature is universally shared; however, the shared capacities are precisely those that enable the cultural diversity highlighted by Herder. This chapter also explores the fascinating question of how we are to determine whether some behaviour counts as realising a shared value or a different value altogether. When, according to Herodotus, the Callatians famously ate their dead, were they honouring them or desecrating them?

According to Lukes, answering such questions requires Smithian empathy, drawing on our reason, emotions, and judgment when attempting to occupy the perspective of others. In this way, our own interpretative horizon, which is based on our values, sets the limits of intelligibility of others’ behaviour. Therefore, the demarcation problem can only be answered from “somewhere”, rather than from the impersonal view from nowhere. The failure to recognise this, furthermore, leads only to insensibility, coldness, and blindness. The book finally concludes with a brief coda on the recent threat of political polarisation and how democratic deliberation could function as an antidote to it.

The best way I can describe The Diversity of Morals as a book is to compare it to a mosaic or a mix tape, in both good and bad ways. The book certainly exhibits Lukes’s extensive and nuanced understanding of both historical and contemporary literatures across a broad array of disciplines. This makes the book an excellent resource for philosophers who want to learn about how morality has been understood in social and human sciences. Synthesising material from multiple disciplines to create a broader picture is, furthermore, itself illuminating, as it often highlights both novel contrasts and how research from different fields can complement and support one another in new ways. Some of the described research is also especially fascinating, such as political scientist Scott Straus’s work on the conditions under which genocide tends to happen (105–6; Straus 2006). Lukes’s synthesising approach in the book, however, also has its downsides. In describing different views, Lukes mainly relies on extensive quotations, which makes reading the book unnecessarily cumbersome and leaves less room for critical analysis, rigorous argumentation, or development of the author’s own original views.

Finally, from a philosopher’s perspective, the book also contains some, well, philosophical problems. Let me conclude by raising just two of them. First, I am not fully convinced by the claim that morality is not just one normative domain amongst many, but rather an overall perspective of practical reason from which the weight of the competing considerations from other domains must be judged (28, 40–3). Consider Marcia Baron’s (1991, 855–6) example in which your own child is in a long queue waiting for an urgent lifesaving surgery. In this case, to give your child a better chance of survival, you would be able to pull the strings in the hospital to reschedule the surgery for next week (so that your child would not need to wait two or three months). Here, it seems clear to me that morality, whatever it consists of either objectively or within our culture, forbids you to move your child up the queue. After all, the other children in the queue are exactly in the same position as your own child, and so you could not justify pulling the strings for them on any reasonable grounds. It is not, however, obvious that, despite this, you still should not pull the strings, all things considered. This, thus, appears to be an exceptionally rare situation in which moral requirements are outweighed by considerations arising from your relationship with your child. This case, therefore, suggests that morality is not the overall practical perspective from which the weight of different values is evaluated. Rather, it seems more plausible to think that there is an overall perspective of practical reason from which moral reasons and values can be recognised as especially weighty considerations amongst many other, often less significant values.

The second philosophical issue I want to raise concerns the book’s interpretation of Hume. Based on the famous quote from the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, in which Hume emphasised the similarities between the motives with which people act across different nations and ages, Lukes (168) ends up with the following interpretation of Hume: “Hume’s was a view of the human world from nowhere within it. It was a conception of objective knowledge that abstracts from the forms of perception and actions characteristic of humans”. This reading seems to ignore the fact that, according to Hume, almost everything we are aware of in the world is a projection of human sentiments, including causal connections, external objects, personal identity, morality, and aesthetic qualities. For Hume, thus, if you take away human sentiments and sensitivities, there is nothing worth calling objective knowledge left—there is no world as it would appear from a view from nowhere.

Furthermore, if one reads Hume on morality with care, it becomes clear that, for him, virtue cannot be recognised independently of the forms of perception characteristic of human beings. Rather, in his view, our human passions enable us to see certain character traits as virtuous. As Hume himself puts it (EM 9.12),

It must be…allowed that every quality of mind, which is useful or agreeable to the person himself or to others, communicates a pleasure to the spectator, engages his esteem, and is admitted under the honourable denomination of virtue or merit.

Yet, despite these two philosophical issues—and a few others like them—I want to conclude by emphasising that The Diversity of Morals is well worth reading for any philosopher interested in how other disciplines, especially the social sciences, have sought to make sense of many key aspects of morality.

REFERENCES

M. Baron 1991. “Impartiality and Friendship,” Ethics. 101: 836–857.

D. Hume 1998 [1751]. An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. T. Beauchamp. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

S. Straus 2006. The Order of Genocide: Race, Power, and War in Ruanda. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

These knock-down arguments are said to emerge from Fiocco’s fundamentalist approach to metaphysics, which he calls “original inquiry”. This inquiry is occasioned by confronting the world (“all this”), and it aims to answer the question “What is all this?” without taking anything for granted. Such a presuppositionless inquiry is said to permit us to “move past stalemate in metaphysical discussions” (22) and to lead us to the undeniable truth about time and the world, which includes Fiocco’s two theses.

To make progress with original inquiry, Fiocco thinks that we first need to address the fundamental ontological question “What is a thing?” (11). As he clarifies, “a thing is just an entity, an existent, a being” (60). Many philosophers will doubt that anything interesting can be said about things, in this general sense, that goes beyond the trivial observation that things are whatever quantifiers range over and singular terms denote. Fiocco disagrees. For him, elucidating the notion of thinghood is the most important question in metaphysics, and what ultimately leads to his two main theses.

Original inquiry provides Fiocco with the theoretical framework for a rich and wide-ranging discussion that spans almost the entire breadth of contemporary metaphysics. There is far more material in this book than one can hope to cover in a short review. Instead of saying a little bit about many different topics, I think it might be more helpful to focus on Fiocco’s main arguments for his two theses, which are contained in two very short passages on p. 77 and p. 179, respectively. The nothing-explains-anything argument on p. 77 promotes a radical restriction on the possibility of explanation; the farrago argument on p. 179 advocates a novel objection to eternalist thesis that past, present, and future are equally real.

My plan for this review is to give a detailed exposition of these two pivotal arguments, plus a quick survey of the rest of the book.

No Thing Explains Any Thing (p. 77)

After spending the first seventy pages on a leisurely (and somewhat repetitive) exposition of original inquiry, Fiocco’s answer to the fundamental ontological question arises quite suddenly. On p. 73, he tells us that things are the ontological bases of explanations for the diversity in the world (“all this”). As it is given to us, the world is not uniform. The function of things is to explain this diversity. This might sound quite innocent, but the subsequent discussion reveals that Fiocco’s view is not that things can explain but that they must explain for them to count as things at all. It is not obvious how an original inquirer, who is not supposed to assume anything, arrives at this view. Why can’t there be terminal explananda that are explained by other things but do not explain anything themselves?

A few pages later, we discover that Fiocco holds a much more radical view. He does not merely deny the existence of terminal explananda, which would be the end points of chains of explanations, he claims that there cannot be any chains of explanation at all because no thing can be explained by any other thing:

If how an entity, e, [is] were explicable (in its entirety) in terms of some other thing, e itself would be ontologically idle, making no contribution per se to how the world is; such an “entity” would, if anything, merely be a manifestation of the latter, that genuine existent. Hence, if there were something that made e how “it” is, e’s contribution to how the world is would be made by that thing that wholly determines or makes e how e is. Yet if e “itself” were not capable of contributing to a partial explanation for how all this is as it is, if “it” per se were insufficient to do at least this, e would be no thing at all. “It” could in principle make no contribution to the world and, therefore, is literally, nothing. (77)

It is not immediately clear whether the view is that an explanatory redundant e cannot exist or that it cannot be a thing. This issue gets settled a little bit later, in Section 4.2, where Fiocco argues that the world is not a thing because all this is explained by all the things there are, and we are supposed to have learned on p. 77 that no thing is explained by any other thing. This is an unexpected discovery. The world is the starting point of original inquiry and denying its existence is not a viable option. So how can it, the world, fail to be a thing? Fiocco does not seem to be using ‘thing’ in the liberal sense that he advertised earlier, when he told us that “a thing is just an entity, an existent, a being” (60). Since the world exists, it is presumably an “existent”, yet Fiocco explicitly denies that it is a thing. To make sense of Fiocco’s theory of thinghood, it appears that ‘no thing’ cannot mean the same as ‘nothing’, the negated existential quantifier (¬∃).

Even if we restrict ourselves to every thing (rather than everything), we might wonder why explanatory redundance entails non-thinghood. Suppose that d explains e and that e explains part of the diversity in all this. Assuming the transitivity of explanation, the presence of d would render the intermediate e explanatorily redundant. But this does not change the fact that e also explains part of all this. Compare the case of logical entailment. If p entails q and q entails r, then q is logically redundant in the sense that p already entails r on its own. But this does not change the fact q also entails r. So what mistake would an original inquirer make if she concluded that—despite its explanatory redundance—e still qualifies as a thing because it does perform what Fiocco has identified as the essential function of things, which is to explain all this? In other words, why doesn’t the fact that d performs the same explanatory role merely show that d and e are both things? Fiocco’s very short argument does not address this question.

In the second paragraph on p. 77, Fiocco presents another argument for the thesis that “no thing can be made to be by something else”. There, he argues as follows. Suppose for the sake of reductio that x explains the existence of y, and that “x makes to be y” (as Fiocco puts it). For x and y to stand in the makes-to-be relation to each other, both need to exist, which means that the existence of y is a pre-condition of its standing in this relation. Hence it cannot be by entering into the makes-to-be relation that y exists. Fiocco concludes that the existence of y cannot be determined by x. No thing is made to be by another thing.

Fatema Amijee (2026) objects that there is no reason why this argument needs to be restricted to every thing rather than to everything. If the argument succeeds at all, then it also shows that nothing explains anything, and not just that no thing explains any thing. We would get the conclusion that explanation is impossible, including the explanation of the diversity in all this that is supposed to be the hallmark of things. (See Fiocco 2026 for a reply to Amijee.)

While Fiocco focusses on grounding explanations, his argument would apply equally well to causal explanations. Consider your relation to your parents. Since nobody is a parent without any children, your existence is a pre-condition to anyone bearing the parent-relation to you. But it does not follow from this that you do not owe your existence to your parents or that your existence is somehow inexplicable. The parent-relation merely reflects the fact that your parents made you. The relation did not create you; your parents did. Friends of ontological levels might reply in the same way to Fiocco’s argument against grounding. What makes it the case that y exists is the existence of its ground x, not x’s standing in the makes-to-be relation to y. Nobody claims that the makes-to-be relation makes y; what makes to be y is x. The ground is doing the grounding, not the grounding relation. Perhaps there is more to be said about these issues, but Fiocco does not elaborate. The entire nothing-explains-anything argument, which is the linchpin of his view on ontology, occurs on the single page p. 77.

The Farrago Argument (p. 179)

Fiocco’s account of the nature of time emerges in Chapters 5–11 as a corollary of his broader views about original inquiry and the fundamental ontological question. Section 5.3 argues that we must distinguish time and moments, and that the former generates the latter: “Time is a thing in the world, the necessarily existing substance that enables change by yielding the moments that it requires” (135). Over the next one hundred and eighty pages, these ideas get turned into a theory of time that Fiocco calls ‘transient presentism’.

While developing his positive view, Fiocco touches on countless other issues in the philosophy of time, but most of this discussion is really an intramural debate amongst different versions of presentism. The main rival to all versions of presentism—the eternalist view that past, present, and future are equally real—gets dispatched with a quick argument that starts at the bottom of p. 179 and that is as pivotal to Fiocco’s views about time as the nothing-explains-anything argument is to his views about ontology. This “farrago argument” combines a reflection on how the world (“all this”) is given to us and an unusual claim about how the world would appear if eternalism were right:

If one is at a moment, m1, experiencing the world as thus and just as real at an equally real moment, m2, experiencing the world as so, then one should be having—at both moments—an experience of the world as thus and as so… [W]ere temporal reality ontologically homogeneous, there would be some conflation of the experiences one has at m1 and m2… [O]ne’s experience would be some farrago of the things at both moments. (179)

If eternalism could be refuted by the farrago argument, then the only remaining question would be which particular version of presentism is correct, and how such a presentism fits into Fiocco’s theory of things. That is how Fiocco views the matter, but I doubt many eternalists will be converted by this argument.

As far as I can tell, nobody accepts the spatial or modal counterpart of the farrago argument. Suppose that one person is freezing in Antarctica and another is sweltering in the Sahara. The fact that Antarctica and the Sahara are equally real does not entail that both people would have a farrago of both experiences. At different places, people are having different experiences. Similar remarks apply to the modal case, where an actual person might be experiencing the actual world as thus and a merely possible person might be experiencing some merely possible world as so. Modal realists think that both possible worlds are equally real, but they do not think that the inhabitants of both worlds would experience a farrago of both experiences. In different possible worlds, people are having different experiences.

One might be impressed by the fact that, in the temporal case, the experiences could be had by the same person at both moments, rather than by different people at different places or by different people in different possible worlds. However, many eternalists subscribe to a metaphysics of temporal parts on which persons persist through time by possessing different temporal parts. On such a view, it would be these temporal parts that are having the various experiences. The person-at-m1 who experiences the world as thus is distinct from the person-at-m2 who experiences the world as so, just as the freezing person in Antarctica is distinct from the sweltering person in the Sahara.

The farrago argument suggests that Fiocco rejects the widely held view, sometimes attributed to Einstein, that “time is what keeps everything from happening at once”. Fiocco might well be right about this, but I am not sure that, as it stands, his very brief presentation of the farrago argument will make many converts. As with the nothing-explains-anything argument, I think we would need a more detailed defense of the farrago argument to “move past stalemate in metaphysical discussions” (22). Otherwise, the friends of ontological levels will reject the nothing-explains-anything argument, eternalists will reject the farrago argument, and we are back at the “stalemate”.

How to Read this Book

As I said before, there is much more material in this book that one could address in a short review. Those who are interested in learning everything about Fiocco’s views on ontology and time should employ the “classical” method of reading the book cover to cover. Others might want to structure their engagement with Fiocco’s work around the two pivotal arguments that I have highlighted here. Those who are interested in ontology should start with the nothing-explains-anything argument on p. 77 and then decide whether to read Chapters 2–4, which contain Fiocco’s account of ontology (minus the bits about time). The best approach to reading the discussion of time in Chapters 5–11 depends on one’s antecedent views about time. Committed eternalists should go straight to p. 179 and take a closer look at the farrago argument. Those who have already been converted to presentism might want to start with Section 10.1, where Fiocco compares his transient presentism with other variants of presentism. Either way, readers should consult Section 1.2, which gives a good overview of the entire book.

REFERENCES

Amijee, F. 2026. Whence Original Inquiry? Analysis, doi.org/10.1093/analys/anag003

Fiocco, O. 2026. Radical Ontology and the Limits of Inquiry. Analysis, doi.org/10.1093/analys/anag007

As fate would have it, these two logics were shown to diverge just before Entailment was published, as was noted immediately after the above quote, although it is unclear the extent to which tears and abandonment have resulted (although this did result in E losing its privileged position amongst all the relevant logics). Enter Edwin Mares. In The Logic of Entailment and its History, Edwin Mares shows that abandonment of E as the correct logic of entailment on the above grounds is unwarranted, by providing an independent foundation for regarding E as the correct logic of the entailment connective, which in no way depends on its connection to the relevant modal logic R☐.^[1] 

The central idea behind this new foundation for the relevant logic E is built on the idea that a logic of entailment should play two key roles in our logical theorizing. First, it should encode proof plans, which in some sense indicate the way in which a theorist can go about constructing a proof of a proposition. This notion is left somewhat underspecified, although we’ll say more about it below. Second, it should express closure conditions on theories. The idea here is that the entailment connective should act, in a sense which we’ll describe in more detail below, as a Tarskian closure operator on theories. This connection between the logic of entailment and theories is one of the distinctive, and in this reviewer’s eyes, exciting, aspects of this book. Theories play a starring role in both the semantics for the entailment connective (acting as points of evaluation), and in the proof-theoretic treatment of the entailment connective (where they are used both to interpret the indices in the Fitch-style natural deduction system for E, as well as acting as labels in the novel labelled natural deduction system Mares introduces which formalizes the notion of a proof procedure). The notion of theory here is not merely the logician’s notion of a set of sentences closed under logical consequence but rather something more akin to the treatment of models in the philosophy of science. Mares’s official account, discussed in Chapter 6, splits the difference between the received view of scientific theories and the semantic view of scientific theories by treating theories as abstract objects which, in some sense, induce both a distinguished class of (scientific) models, and (relative to a given language) a closure operation (134). This emphasis on the use of theories in giving an account of entailment is one which has gripped a number of other authors in the broadly relevant logical tradition in recent years. What Mares’s account does, though, is make very explicit the underlying disagreements in this area in a unified vocabulary. We’ll return to this aspect of the book further below.

After an introductory chapter, the book is split up into three parts. Part I ‘Entailment in the Twentieth Century’ provides a history of the development of logics of entailment, covering the work of C.I. Lewis and his students (Chapter 2), possible worlds theories of entailment (Chapter 3), and the Anderson and Belnap school of relevance logic (Chapter 4), ending with a chapter on the notion of ‘reflexivizing’ a logic by the addition of a modal operator representing logical necessity (Chapter 5). This opinionated survey of the history of entailment acts as valuable context for the story that is presented in the rest of the book and should provide the reader not immersed in the relevant logical tradition sufficient background to understand the broader context for moves being made in what follows.

Part II ‘Theories and Entailment’ then introduces the central notions of a theory—understood, as mentioned above, as a scientific theory—and Tarski’s notion of a closure operator on formal theories (Chapter 6) and then introduces two relevant logics, Tarski Logic and Generalized Tarski logic, which isolate many of the key features of the semantics of entailment to come (Chapter 7).

Finally in Part III, ‘The Logic E of Relevant Entailment’, Mares presents his full story regarding the relevant entailment logic E, arguing that the entailment connective should satisfy more principles than those of Generalized Tarski logic through the introduction of a novel natural deduction system for reasoning about theories (Chapter 9), and then introducing negation and disjunction (Chapter 9), both of which are treated using the notion of (in)compatibility between theories, and finally the quantifiers (Chapter 10), which are treated using the semantics given in terms of propositional functions, which Mares developed in conjunction with Rob Goldblatt (2006), as well as delicate issues concerning the proper treatment of identity in relevant logics in general, and the logic of entailment in particular. The final chapter (Chapter 11) closes by looking at some remaining philosophical issues concerning how to use relevant logics to study theories that are closed under other logics, in particular classical logic, and how to model the way theorists often use one theory as a background theory to reason about other theories.

As you can see, the book covers quite a lot of ground, and what I want to convey in the remainder of this review is to survey the development of semantics for the logic of entailment that Mares presents, situating it within a broader trend in thinking about issues in philosophical logic in terms of theories, and then briefly return to the issue of ‘reflexive’ accounts of entailment, like that of R☐, and what Mares account says (or more conspicuously doesn’t say) about them.

Semantics for the Logic of Entailment

Understanding and interpreting the semantics for relevant logics is a fraught and often unsatisfying business. One of the distinctive features of Mares's approach to the semantics of entailment is how it is built up in stages, the first stage centering the connection to consequence operations, the second features of theories and theory induced consequence operations, and the third and final stage features of proof plans. Each of these stages is tied to a different (relevant) logic of entailment.

The first of these logics is TL or ‘Tarski Logic’ and is closely tied to Tarski’s notion of a consequence operation. A consequence operation C is an operation which satisfies the following conditions, where X and Y are sets of sentences: (1) X⊆ C(X), (2) if X⊆ Y then C(X) ⊆ C(Y), and (3) C(C(X)) ⊆ C(X). This is the usual, language agnostic, account of a consequence operation. To deal with conjunction, Mares adds to these the condition that A∧B∈ C(X) iff A∈ C(X) and B∈ C(X). We can then specify the valid entailments of TL as precisely those entailments where (A1∧…∧An)→ B iff B∈C(X), where each of the Ai∈ X (p.126).

Mares then shows that this logic can be conservatively extended by the addition of disjunction and a de Morgan negation, yielding Priest’s basic relevant logic N4 (132-134). N4 is a relatively underexplored logic, but it has a very tight connection to the logic FDE, with the only entailment formulas provable in this logic being precisely those entailments that are valid in the FDE, if we allow conditionals to appear in first-degree entailments, but give them no special inferential properties (treating them essentially like propositional variables). In several works beginning with (2017), Jc Beall has argued that FDE is the correct logic of theory closure, and so the correct logic of entailment, and this connection between N4 and theory closure only makes this case stronger.

One notable weakness of TL as a logic of entailment is that it validates no iterated entailment claims that aren’t instances of identity. But intuitively, there are many proof plans that do involve transforming entailment claims into other entailment claims. To rectify this, Mares introduces the second logic on our path to what he regards as the true logic of entailment. The intensional semantics that Mares offers for this logic, Generalized Tarski Logic or GTL, has theories as its indices of evaluation. Models for this language consist of a set of theories T, a distinguished theory Ó—the theory of entailment—along with an ordering relation ≤, and a binary operation o on theories.^[2] 

The guiding idea here is that we should understand an entailment claim A→ B as being satisfied by a theory a iff for all theories b which satisfy A the theory that results from applying a’s closure relation Ca to b satisfies B.^[3] The binary operation o of the semantics is to be interpreted in terms of the consequence operations that are induced by different theories, with a o b picking out the theory Ca(b) that results from applying a’s closure operation to the theory b. These theory-relative closure operations are argued to satisfy analogues of conditions (2) and (3) above, but not, crucially, condition (1).

Why? Because if all theory closure relations satisfied the analogue of condition (1), then all theories would have to contain all the true entailments, making all theories theories of entailment. What we do have, though, is that condition (1) is satisfied for our distinguished theory. The resulting logic GTL is essentially the implication-conjunction fragment of the relevant logic DJ, and the techniques used in the following chapters to treat the other sentential connectives could be used to transform GTL into DJ proper in a similar way to how we were able to lift TL to the logic N4. Shay Allen Logan has given a similar interpretation of the operational semantics for relevant logics to that given by Mares for GTL (2024), except that he rejects condition (3), yielding the minimal relevant logic B as the correct logic of entailment.

Why not think, then, that a logic like DJ or B is the correct logic of entailment? Because, Mares argues, such logics give us no direction on how to stage proofs. Mares provides the following abstract example: suppose A→ (B→ C) is an entailment and that we are considering a theory T which satisfies A and want to show that T satisfies C. Mares argues that what we ought to do is try to show that T satisfies B. But for this to be an appropriate proof plan, we would need it to be the case that Ca(a) = a—a weak form of contraction. It is through considerations of proof plans that Mares argues that our logic of entailment should be the relevant logic E.

The arguments that Mares gives for accepting principles are presented in terms of a Prawitz-style, labelled natural deduction system whose rules manipulate judgements that a particular formula is part of a given theory. This makes very visible the ways in which the different structural principles concerning the theory relative consequence operations are being appealed to and what different proof plans require—in the above case, for example, we can see that this weak form of contraction requires that all theories be closed under modus ponens—if they contain a conditional and its antecedent, then they contain its consequent. Mares refers to this as a calculus for reasoning about proof processes, which demonstrate how a proof plan can be implemented (151).

It is here in Chapter 7 that I think we get the clearest picture of how we are meant to understand proof plans through the way they are meant to be used. Proof plans are ‘used to make inferences about the contents of theories’ (151) by providing an inventory of the methods of proof that are available in all theories.^[4] The use of this calculus of proof processes makes Mares’s justification of the additions to GTL which result in the logic E clear and focused in a way which I suspect will assist in moving the debate regarding what the correct logic of entailment is forward.

Considerations of theories and proof plans settle the logical behavior of the conditional and conjunction. What, then, of the other sentential connectives? Mares account of the semantics for negation and disjunction is given rather elegantly in terms of the notion of incompatibility between theories. On this account, a negation is satisfied by a theory a just in case any theory which satisfies the sentence negated is incompatible with a. The notion of incompatibility is then used to give the satisfaction conditions for disjunction, in order to maintain the De Morgan duality between it and conjunction. This is done by identifying the class of saturated extensions of a theory a—roughly those theories that extend a and are compatible with a unique maximal theory—and then having a disjunction be satisfied by a theory a iff every saturated extension of a satisfies one of the disjuncts. This is an elegant advance of the usual treatment of these issues in Fine’s operational semantics.

Reflexivization and the logic NR

One feature of the book which I was disappointed was not discussed in more detail was the connection between E and R☐(which Mares refers to as NR) mentioned above. In Chapter 5, Mares does discuss how we could construct a logic of entailment by adding a logical necessity operator to R and then internalize facts about natural deduction proofs in R in terms of the strict implication connective defined in terms of it.

On the topic of why we shouldn’t think of this as giving us the correct logic of entailment, assuming that R is the correct logic of contingent relevant implication, we are told that the tasks that Mares has in mind for a logic of entailment “do not seem to require an underlying theory of contingent implication” (111) and that the resulting logic we get from such an account is not E.

What seemed to be missing here is some discussion of what to make of this situation, especially considering Mares’s endorsement of NR as the correct logic of entailment in his earlier book, Relevant Logic: A Philosophical Interpretation (2004) . For example, early in the book on p.8 we are told that “there are…At least two distinct notions of entailment: one that treats theory closure and proof plans and another that deals with metaphysical closures of various kinds”. Why not think that something like NR is capturing that second notion of entailment, the notion of entailment which seems to be more closely tied to Moore’s original discussion of internal relations? A discussion of this issue would have the additional virtue of allowing for a deeper discussion of how the view here interacts and sits with the view of entailment in Relevant Logic.

Conclusion

Relevant logic is currently undergoing something of a renaissance, but largely with a focus on weaker relevant logics. Mares’s book (especially in conjunction with his earlier book on R) stakes out a claim for the continued interest and importance of ‘stronger’ relevant logics like E. The book provides a fresh and stimulating argument for regarding E as the correct logic of entailment, situating it in both the history of relevant logic, as well as recent trends in philosophical logic towards situating logic more broadly within our overall theorizing. I’ve only managed to scratch the surface of the wealth of philosophical and logical insights the book contains. Anyone interested in the concept of entailment, or wanting an entryway into the contemporary renaissance in relevant logic should read this book.

REFERENCES

[1] Alan Anderson and Nuel D. Belnap. Entailment: The Logic of Relevance and Necessity, Vol. I. Princeton University Press, 1975.

[2] Jc Beall. There is no logical negation: True, false, both, and neither. Australasian Journal of Logic, 14:1-29, 2017.

[3] Kit Fine. Models for entailment. Journal of Philosophical Logic, 3:347–372, 1974.

[4] Shay Allen Logan. Relevance Logic (Elements in Philosophy and Logic). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.

[5] Edwin D. Mares. Relevant logic: A Philosophical Interpretation. Cambridge University Press, 2004.

[6] Edwin Mares and Robert Goldblatt. An alternative semantics for quantified relevant logic. The Journal of Symbolic Logic, 71:163–187, 2006

Stenberg works towards this account by first developing an account of individual happiness (Part I) and then arguing (Part II) that not only is common happiness the ultimate end of human beings themselves, but the requirements of “law, virtue and grace” are all ordered to that common happiness. While I agree that “common happiness” is essential to Aquinas’s eudaimonism, and while I agree that some of Stenberg’s claims will provoke controversy, I do not consider his central thesis to constitute the significant break with existing scholarship on Aquinas that he does.

In Part I, Stenberg offers an account of Aquinas’s view of individual happiness. While Thomists commonly understand Aquinas to be a “perfectionist” about happiness, Stenberg argues (Ch.1) that Aquinas is a specific kind of perfectionist about happiness (i.e., that he understands happiness to consist in a perfection of human nature), namely, a “Restrictive Perfectionist”. Restrictive Perfectionists, unlike “Inclusive Perfectionists” (who understand all perfective goods to be constitutive parts of an individual’s happiness) and “Personal Perfectionists” (who understand all perfections of a person to be constitutive parts of that person’s happiness), consider “only a subset of an agent’s perfections” or perfective goods to constitute an individual’s happiness (24, 28, 32).

By focusing on the question of what “constitutes” happiness, Stenberg intends to zero in on what is actually part of happiness, as opposed to what is merely necessary for, presupposed by, or helpful for happiness. Key limes, eggs and sugar are constitutive of key lime pie; an oven is necessary for making the pie, a professional’s advice is helpful. Stenberg is interested in what constitutes happiness, not in what is necessary or helpful for happiness. He argues (Chs. 2-5) that while Aquinas recognizes various forms of happiness, every form of happiness is “exclusively” constituted by the same thing: by “enjoying genuinely good activities”. Both “exclusivity” and “enjoyment” have important roles to play in Stenberg’s account.

The claim that happiness is exclusively constituted by enjoying good activities is intended to highlight the difference between things that help, fill out, or are preconditions of happiness and those things that are, in fact, constitutive of happiness. So, for instance, in his discussions of Aquinas’s account of the various kinds of happiness, Stenberg is concerned to distinguish between things that are preconditions of, necessary for, or even increase existing happiness and those things that are actually ingredients of happiness (79-95, 116-119, 132-141).

But he also seeks to draw attention to an important respect in which (according to Stenberg) Aquinas’s understanding of happiness differs from Aristotle’s. Aristotle claims that happiness consists of the activity of virtue “in a complete life”. As Stenberg interprets this claim, this means that for Aristotle a complete life is an ingredient, i.e., a constitutive part, of happiness. Aristotle, as Stenberg reads him, would not consider individuals with abbreviated lifespans or even those who (whether long-lived or not) meet with calamitous ends, to be happy. Stenberg argues that Aquinas, rejecting Aristotle’s “complete life” requirement for happiness, instead considers happiness to be “episodic”, which is to say, “something that primarily characterizes episodes in a life or parts of a life” (40; see also 104, 119). Stenberg offers the most extensive arguments for the “episodic” nature of happiness in Chapter 2, in the context of his discussion of imperfect happiness, which raises important questions about whether and in what respect perfect happiness would be “episodic”. I will return to this question at greater length in what follows.

In claiming that for Aquinas, happiness consists exclusively in the enjoyment of genuinely good activities, Stenberg is proposing that “enjoyment”, where “enjoyment is understood in a certain highly specific way”, is just what happiness is. The full import of this thesis becomes clear in Stenberg’s consideration of perfect happiness in Chapter 3, especially in his interpretation of Aquinas’s claim that “fruitio” (usually translated as enjoyment) is “the very essence of happiness” (66). Since Aquinas also repeatedly claims that the essence of perfect happiness is the vision of God and describes fruitio (enjoyment) as “like” a per se accident that follows on the vision, Stenberg proposes that Aquinas must understand the fruitio that is the “very essence” of happiness to be a “complex activity with two constitutive elements: the vision of God in God’s essence and the enjoyment of that vision” (73).

This requires holding that Aquinas, in spite of comparing the enjoyment that follows on the vision of God to a per se accident, does not actually consider it to be such (since a per se accident is not part of the essence). Stenberg argues that this view is preferable because it makes Aquinas’s view more similar to that of his contemporaries and is also—in his view—a plausible reading of Aquinas’s text. Stenberg seems to believe that “enjoyment”, understood in this way, is operative in all the varieties of happiness, but it seems to have the most dramatic implications for perfect happiness.

Finally, Stenberg argues that the “true ultimate end” of each human being, at any level, is the common happiness. “Common happiness”, as Stenberg understands it, is

constituted by all (or very many) of a community’s members engaging in and enjoying genuinely good activities that are consistent with, partially constitutive of, and motivated at some level by the individual happinesses of a community’s members. (166)

Perfect happiness, the happiness of heaven, “is an individual’s participation in the shared activity of heaven” (171), and the analog of this is evident in the forms of happiness available on earth (176). The remaining chapters on law (Ch.7) and virtue (Ch.8) argue that the requirements of law and virtue, too, are ordered to the common happiness.

At the risk of stating the obvious, different types of philosophers approach Aquinas in different ways and typically have as their primary interlocuters other scholars who share their philosophical approach. Stenberg approaches Aquinas from the standpoint of an analytic philosopher, and one of his primary goals seems to be to make Aquinas appealing to other analytic philosophers. As someone who agrees with Stenberg that more people should love Aquinas, I think this is a good thing. At the same time, however, precisely because those operating from different philosophical “schools” approach Aquinas in different ways and talk mainly to each other, it can happen that a reading that seems quite revolutionary from one standpoint seems quite common from another.

Stenberg has, to his credit, made a very thorough canvas of existing scholarship on Aquinas. That thorough research notwithstanding, the question that loomed largest in my mind throughout my reading of Stenberg’s book was whether specialists in Thomist moral philosophy, especially those whose approach to Aquinas is more historical than analytic, would agree with his claim that Aquinas’s interpreters “almost universally” disagree with the idea that common, rather than individual, happiness is the central aim of human life (40, 171). The most recent version of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on Aquinas’s moral, political, and legal philosophy, for instance, says that the desire for beatitude that guides practical reason is “not to be thought of as the happiness of the deliberating and acting individual alone, but rather as the common flourishing of the community, ultimately the whole community of humankind” (Finnis, 1.2). In his excellent paper on self-love in Aquinas, similarly, David Gallagher claims that for Aquinas, the rightly ordered human being thinks only of the common good (1999, 43). Neither of these readings presents itself as breaking with traditional understandings of Aquinas.

Stenberg is clearly not unaware of either of these pieces of scholarship: Gallagher’s piece is in his bibliography, even if it is not directly engaged, and an earlier version of the Stanford Encyclopedia entry is cited among those who Stenberg believes “almost universally disagree” with his central claim. But since their claims sound—at least to my mind—so similar to the one Stenberg wishes to advance, I would have hoped for some detailed account of what he understands the difference between his account and theirs to be.

Stenberg’s project is a sweeping one, and very much more could be said than I have the space to address here. I would like to round out this review by addressing two central claims that I do think many readers will find surprising and perhaps controversial. The first has to do with Stenberg’s claim that Aquinas, in depicting happiness as “exclusively” about “enjoying genuinely good activities” and understanding happiness as “episodic”, makes a significant departure from Aristotle. Aristotle certainly does say that happiness is the activity of virtue “in a complete life”, but there is significant scholarly disagreement over what he means by that. The most reasonable interpretation, in my view, takes seriously the sense intended by the person Aristotle quotes (Solon), namely, that the happiness of a human life needs to be judged retrospectively: happiness is an assessment made of a life as whole (1995, 253).

Viewed as a whole, a very abbreviated life, like that of hero who dies young but who gives his life to save an entire city or nation, might exhibit much more happiness than that of someone of more ordinary virtue, who dies at a ripe old age, asleep in his bed. And the happiness of a life has to be assessed retrospectively, at least some scholars have argued, because virtue can be lost and because certain ways of acting (especially in our reactions to misfortune) show the happiness we thought another or ourselves to have possessed was never really there in the first place.

If this is Aristotle’s view, then “completeness” is not one ingredient among others but a vantage point from which something is assessed, and therefore not at all akin to an ingredient, essential or otherwise, of a pie. I can’t know if the recipe for my pie succeeded until the pie comes out of the oven, and I eat it. If this is Aristotle’s view, then it sounds very like the view that happiness is more continuous the more genuine it is, a view that squares well not just with Aquinas but with Aquinas’s view of heavenly happiness. Even the best earthly happiness is imperfect because it is interrupted and interruptible; it is the more perfect the less interruptible it is, and heavenly happiness, which is not interrupted, is best of all.

Finally, although less central to the case he wishes to make, Stenberg’s notion of “enjoyment”—i.e., of happiness as composed of both activity and enjoyment, each as essential constituent parts—merits a word. If one is to argue that what Aquinas says is “like” a per se accident is, in fact, not a per se accident, then it seems to me that one would be best served by making that argument on the basis of the very nature of a per se accident itself. If the enjoyment that follows on the vision of God is not a per se accident of that vision, then it should be possible to point to some feature that per se accidents have that enjoyment does not. Such an analysis would seemingly be more convincing than any considerations of Aquinas’s contemporaries or even possible ways of reconciling texts.

With all this said, the author of this book evinces a clear love for Aquinas and a desire not just to present Aquinas’s comprehensive vision but to persuade others of its value.

REFERENCES

John Finnis, “Aquinas’s Moral, Political, and Legal Philosophy”, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, (2021).

David M. Gallagher, “Thomas Aquinas on Self-Love as the Basis for Love of Others”, ACTA Philosophica 8, no. 1 (1999).

Paul Farwell, “Aristotle and the Complete Life,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 12, no. 3 (1995).

Throughout the book, Wüthrich and Huggett argue that it is possible to have a world without spacetime at its most fundamental level of description, but in which spacetime “emerges” as some approximate or effective description. For this, they appeal to spacetime functionalism, which would be analogous to the common functional reductions and explanations that appear in other areas of physics or science. For instance, to explain how a gas made of molecules can appear to behave as a continuum fluid, one can analyze the roles that macroscopic quantities like pressure or temperature play and try to see if the microscopic entities could fulfill them, even if in an approximate manner. Although there is no fluid exerting a constant and uniform pressure over the walls of a container, this effect can be explained by the collisions of the molecules, which, on average, are quite uniform and constant. The idea then is to apply the same strategy to spacetime: even if a theory of quantum gravity predicts that there is no spacetime, if the functions and roles we usually ascribe to it can be functionally recovered, then a theory without spacetime at the fundamental level could be compatible with our world.

Spacetime functionalism differs from standard functionalism in that it cannot make use of spacetime concepts to identify functions and is therefore not as straightforwardly applicable. While in the case of the gas, it is straightforward to identify the fluid with the molecules as they occupy the same space and their dynamics develop in similar ways, understanding how non-spatiotemporal entities behave and how they can play spatiotemporal roles poses a formidable challenge. Wüthrich and Huggett acknowledge this, and in Chapter 2, they develop in detail their account of spacetime functionalism. For a functional reduction of spacetime to be satisfactory, they establish two requirements. First, one needs to mathematically derive, probably in some approximate manner, spatiotemporal structures from non-spatiotemporal ones. Second, this derivation needs to be “physically salient”.

The first requirement is largely uncontroversial, while the second one is harder to pin down. Wüthrich and Huggett share the intuition many of us have that not every mathematical derivation makes a satisfactory functional explanation and so they demand something more. Their explanation of this additional requirement is somewhat disappointing: for them, it is something context-dependent and changing. They illustrate this with the case of local, mechanistic explanations. Throughout the history of physics, the status of explanations with non-local features has been changing: they seemed too controversial in early modern physics, then they became accepted with Newton’s law of gravity, then they were replaced by propagating field explanations, and the story continues. They take this case to show that the concept of “physical salience” shifts with paradigm change, and that it is ultimately empirical success that determines what is considered physically salient. Given this analysis, their conclusion is somewhat surprising. One might think that, as “physical salience” seems to be contextual, it is ill-defined, and that it shouldn’t be a requirement. Instead, they keep it as a necessary condition for functional explanations of spacetime to be satisfactory. In any case, the philosophical discussion of spacetime functionalism is very complete, and it is interesting from the broad philosophy of science and metaphysics perspectives.

The remainder of the book analyzes three approaches to quantum gravity and argues that spacetime is missing at the fundamental level of each, that spacetime can be derived functionally in all of them, and that these derivations are physically salient. These approaches are causal set theory, loop quantum gravity (LQG), and string theory. The presentations by Wüthrich and Huggett of all these approaches are thorough, and they not only serve to advance the book’s philosophical arguments, but they are excellent introductions to these three approaches that cover the motivations, intuitions, and a technical overview, as well as discussions of other interesting philosophical issues arising in them, such as background independence and the role of background structures, A-theories and B-theories of time in the context of causal set growth, or the interpretation of dual models. The book is therefore a delightful compendium that works as a perfect introduction to quantum gravity and the philosophical issues arising in it.

Even if some aspects of quantum gravity are technically challenging, especially those surrounding string theory, Wüthrich and Huggett make a considerable effort to make quantum gravity accessible, and most of the book can be read without advanced knowledge. Some passages are a bit more technical and will satisfy the more mathematically oriented reader, but they can be skipped, as Wüthrich and Huggett continuously guide the reader and insist on their main philosophical claims. The book is also an excellent guide to the bibliography, as the authors constantly direct the reader to the relevant literature, including the most basic and introductory, but also the more technical and advanced works.

Do Wüthrich and Huggett achieve their main philosophical goal? In my opinion, they successfully show that some spatiotemporal features are missing in some of the structures in the approaches they discuss, but they ultimately fall short of demonstrating a complete case of spacetime emergence. In some cases, this is because the allegedly non-spatiotemporal entities remain quite spatiotemporal, and in others, because the way in which the spatiotemporal roles are supposed to be recovered is unclear or questionable. Regarding physical salience, they claim the putative cases of emergence they discuss have physical salience, although to me, the concept remains quite elusive.

The first of the three approaches analyzed is causal set theory. This approach takes causal relations to be the fundamental constituents of spacetime and proposes replacing continuum spacetimes with causal sets, which are discrete collections of elements—similar to atoms of spacetime—endowed with causal relations. As Wüthrich and Huggett explain, from a macroscopic perspective, causal sets are indistinguishable from continuum spacetime, just as a collection of molecules appears to be a continuum fluid. In this sense, they argue that causal sets are able to fulfill the roles of spacetime, and the claim of emergence is granted. They further argue that causal sets are very different from a continuum spacetime, as they can be organized in ways that do not resemble spacetime. Nevertheless, as a case of spacetime emergence, it is not spectacular: if one considers that the causal relation is the fundamental ingredient of spacetime, rather than having spacetime emerge from something non-spatiotemporal, it instead emerges from a discrete version of itself. There is a point of semantic discussion here, but regardless of whether one considers causal sets as spatiotemporal or not, the emergence they demonstrate is not of the most radical or controversial kind possible.

The case of loop quantum gravity has the potential to be an example of the most interesting case of emergence. Wüthrich and Huggett give a detailed outline of how, by applying the canonical quantization procedure to general relativity, one can arrive at this theory, and they also explain the way in which LQG has shifted recently to a covariant formalism that avoids some of the original problems. In this way, they give a complete and up-to-date introduction to the theory. The claim of disappearance of spacetime is supported by two features of the theory. First, the states of the theory, spin networks, are discrete structures that are similar to discrete spaces, although in some cases they can present features like disordered locality that make them not straightforwardly discrete spaces. Wüthrich and Huggett dedicate most of their effort to arguing that this is a case of spacetime emergence. However, as in the causal set case, that a discrete structure can approximate a continuum one is not that surprising, and the most philosophically interesting claim of emergence has to do with the dynamics of the theory.

Loop quantum gravity, like other canonical approaches, suffers from a problem of time and change: the Schrödinger equation that tells states how to evolve in time becomes trivial, and states do not evolve, as Wüthrich and Huggett explain in more detail. For this reason, the theory is described to be timeless and changeless, and it could provide a more interesting case of spacetime emergence. The authors mention two ways in which this problem of time and change is claimed to be solved in the literature in order to have time and dynamics emerging from this timeless formalism. These are relationalism and the use of the covariant formalism that embeds states in a spatiotemporal setting. However, despite this type of emergence being the most interesting (at least from my point of view), the authors dedicate little space to discussing these two strategies for solving the problem of time and do not consider in detail the arguments that can be raised against them. It is for this reason that I think that the chapters on loop quantum gravity, despite being an excellent introduction to the theory for philosophers and a great reference on the topic, fall short of showing a complete case of spacetime emergence.

Finally, the chapters on string theory do a wonderful job in introducing this approach to philosophers. Despite the more technical passages, the authors make these chapters very readable, clearly explaining the philosophical issues arising in this approach and the positions they take. Regarding emergence, their main argument is concerned with dualities, in particular, T-duality. In some models of string theory, one has two formal spaces: target space and winding space, describing how strings move and how they are wrapped around a compact dimension. While it is at first tempting to interpret target space as the space we seem to inhabit, dualities make the case not so straightforward, as for any model in which the interesting dynamics happen in target space, there is a dual model in which the roles are swapped, and winding space seems to be the space corresponding to physical space. Wüthrich and Huggett’s position is that dualities mean that neither of these two formal spaces is space, and that one should think of space as emergent. This is a well-argued case of emergence, and different in kind from the discrete-continuum emergence. But notice that it is, at least as presented, a case of emergence of space and not of spacetime. Regarding time and dynamics, string theory keeps the structure of quantum field theory, and in the discussion in this book, we do not find indications that time would disappear.

Despite not being convinced by its main philosophical point, I can only recommend the reader to dive into Out of Nowhere and enjoy a complete and up-to-date presentation of the philosophical issues surrounding quantum gravity. There is much to learn from this book, which I am certain will become an indispensable reference in the area and one that will attract attention and generate enriching philosophical debate.

Mehta rejects monism, the assumption that the same kind of sensory awareness is deployed towards both objects and their properties. He argues that perception consists of two distinct kinds of sensory awareness woven together. First, an infallible nonrepresentational kind of awareness of sensory qualities (conceived of as universals) that partly reveals their essence; he calls this deep awareness. Second, a fallible representational kind of awareness of particulars that does not purport to reveal any essences. The view is pluralist because it posits more than one form of sensory awareness. It is rich because of its ancillary commitments regarding hallucination, sensory imagination, and episodic memory. Hence the name rich pluralism.

Mehta’s book is divided into four unequal sections. In the first section, in Chapter 1, he sketches his view and the dialectical terrain. In Chap. 2-4, he builds up and explains rich pluralism. The second section consists of a single chapter (Chap. 5) comparing rich pluralism to representationalism. Against the representationalist, Mehta argues that rich pluralism can help itself to all the machinery of the representationalist and so gain all its explanatory power. However, rich pluralism is superior because it correctly predicts that we cannot err about the essence of sensory qualities. In the third section (Chap. 6-9), Mehta compares rich pluralism to naïve realism. Against the naïve realist, he argues that naïve realism has no explanatory advantages over rich pluralism. Rich pluralism is superior because it extends elegantly to conscious hallucinations, episodic memories, and sensory imaginings. Naïve realists would need to introduce complications to account for those phenomena. In the final section (Chap. 10-12), Mehta helpfully disambiguates “phenomenal character”, responds to the Argument from Hallucination, and sums up his view. Concision forces elision so I shall focus on presenting rich pluralism from the ground up and then raise some worries.

Mehta’s framing assumption in Chap. 1 is that “When you (consciously) see the mango, you are sensorily aware of it and its color and shape. In addition, whether you (consciously) see or hallucinate a mango, you are not sensorily aware of any peculiar mental entities” (2). This assumption carries an incredible load because Mehta rather quickly takes it to rule out adverbialism, dual-component theories, and sense-data views (2-3). He also takes it to build in the directness of perception: when a perceiver sees a mango, the perceiver does not see it in virtue of perceiving something else (3). Mehta is left with two opponents: representationalists and naïve realists.

In the rest of the first section, Mehta isolates the distinctive features of the two, contrasting kinds of sensory awareness that form the core of rich pluralism: deep awareness and successful sensory representation. To build up to their core features, we need to understand some of Mehta’s machinery: revelation, partial revelation, universals, and essences.

Mehta tells us that

[f]or a mental state or event M to reveal a truth p about some entity e is for the following conditions to be met:

(i) M makes the subject aware of entity e.

(ii) For a conceptually sophisticated subject, rational reflection on M will, by itself, make it seem that p is true.

(iii) The subject’s awareness of entity e, as described in (i), provides an intelligible basis for its seeming that p is true, as described in (ii). (18)

Mehta is charitably read as restricting the ‘revealed’ propositions p to those about the nature of e, rather than mundane truth such as “e appears to the left of the ball”. Mehta clarifies that, strictly speaking, it is not, say, redness that is revealed but true propositions about redness (ibid). These propositions need not seem immediately or obviously true and may require “complex feats of reasoning, imagination, and memory” (19). Mehta adds a demanding fourth condition in response to an objection: “Recall that for a perception to seem to reveal a claim, it is not enough for the claim to seem to be true to some subject just on the basis of reflecting on that perception. The subject must be fully rational” (39).

How much does revelation reveal? Mehta takes the middle path between the claim that it reveals nothing (21-24) and the claim that it reveals the entire essence of its targets (25-41). He rejects both in favour of:

Partial revelation: Consciously perceiving any sensory quality Q reveals a substantial portion of the essential truths about Q, that is, truths of the form <It lies in the essence of Q that…>. (49)

Examples of the truths Mehta has in mind include “It lies in the essences of scarlet and lime green that nothing can at once be wholly scarlet and wholly lime green”, “It lies in the essences of scarlet, mango orange, and lime green that scarlet is more similar to mango orange than it is to lime green”, and “It lies in the essence of scarlet that any instance of scarlet is spatially extended” (19-20). Revelation is partial because it does not reveal whether, for example, colours are elemental or compound (36). Mehta extends partial revelation to cover cases of sensory qualities not just in perception but also hallucinations, sensations, sensory imaginings, and both genuine and apparent episodic memories: hence extended partial revelation (§3.1).

Why think that extended partial revelation is true? Mehta argues it is because perceivers are sensorily aware of universals (§3.6), in virtue of which the truths revealed involve essences. Why essences? The experience of an instance of scarlet reveals not only that this instance is spatially extended, but that all instances of scarlet must be. What explained that? Mehta thinks the answer must be that spatial extension is part of what it is to be an instance of scarlet—which is just to say that it is part of the essence of scarlet; hence essences (16-18).

With these materials in hand, the first kind of sensory awareness is deep awareness:

DA1. Deep awareness occurs in all sensory experiences, including all conscious perceptions, hallucinations, sensations, sensory imaginings, genuine episodic memories, and merely apparent episodic memories.

DA2. At least in the sensory experiences of beings like us, the only targets of deep awareness are certain universals— the sensory qualities.

DA3. Deep awareness is a nonrepresentational form of awareness that reveals a substantial portion— not necessarily all!—of the essences of its targets. (59)

DA1 delineates the scope of deep awareness, D2 its targets, and D3 its structure and epistemic significance. Because its targets are either instantiated or uninstantiated universals (as in hallucination), it is partly essence-revealing across all the types of conscious awareness, including hallucination (as mentioned in DA 1). Because it is nonrepresentational it cannot mistake the essence of a sensory quality (§2.9, §5.10). Deep awareness is constitutively linked to conscious awareness. Deep awareness identifies those consciousness states and events that characteristically generate the hard problem of consciousness (§4.6-4.7).

In contrast to deep awareness, the second form of sensory awareness is successful sensory representation:

SSR1. Successful sensory representation occurs in all perceptions and in all (genuine) episodic memories, whether conscious or unconscious. It does not occur in any hallucinations, sensory imaginings, or failed episodic “memories”— here we find only failed sensory representations.

SSR2. The targets of successful sensory representation include particulars, such as ordinary objects and their property-instances. (Rich pluralism is neutral on whether these targets sometimes include universals, too.)

SSR3. Successful sensory representation is a representational form of awareness that never even seems to reveal any portion of the essences of its targets (58-59).

Analogous to DA 1-3, SSR1-3 delineate the scope, targets, and structure and epistemic significance of successful sensory representation. Unlike deep awareness, it is not constitutively linked to conscious awareness, nor does it even purport to reveal the essence of ordinary objects and their property-instances. Because it is a kind of representational awareness, it can err. Hallucinations are thus failed sensory representation.

How are deep awareness and successful sensory representation woven together? In veridical perception of an ovoid orange mango, the perceiver is deeply aware of the universals ovoidness and orangeness and successfully sensorily represents the mango and its property-instances. Crucially, sensorily representing those property-instances as universals binds the two kinds of awareness into a unified mental event (7).

The final component of rich pluralism is an account of categorisation or the automatic and subpersonal application of concepts. Both experiences and their targets are categorised. For example, experiences are categorised as perceptions, sensations, or sensory imagining. Their targets are categorised as, for example, mind-independent or not. Categorisation is the product of an overall gestalt based on cues like vivacity, stability, continuity, involuntariness, and cues pertaining to how the target interacts with the environment or the subject’s body (§8.3-8.11).

With deep awareness, successful sensory representation, and categorisation in hand, the rich pluralist distinguishes veridical perception from matching hallucination as follows. In both cases, the perceiver is deeply aware of the universals of ovoidness and orangeness. The universals are instantiated in perception and uninstantiated in hallucination. Perception involves successful sensory representation with genuine singular content. The matching hallucination involves failed sensory representation with only purportedly singular content. In both cases the overall gestalt is perceptual, correctly so in perception and mistakenly so in hallucination.

Let me turn to two worries. First, Mehta states that his theorizing starts not from common sense or theory but from data—the verdicts of armchair introspection. He appeals to them at important junctures (2, 3, 136, 196, 201, 285). Although he acknowledges introspection may be unreliable, he thinks the verdicts he appeals to are “very hard to dispute” (2fn1). I am less sanguine. For example, he rules out adverbialism because it is plausible that perception has an act-object structure, “just on the basis of introspection” (2). This has been vigorously disputed. Russell, for instance, thought experience has an act-object structure but denied it was introspectable (1913: 121). C.D. Broad thought that introspection reveals a spectrum of cases: some with a clear act-object structure such as seeing the mango; some with an in-between character such as smell (I surmise); and some without any clear act-object structure, such as a headache. It is not obvious that headaches involve an act towards a “headachy” object (1927: 254-257). The methodological upshot is that philosophers often cannot adjudicate the verdicts of introspection without appealing to theoretical considerations. The point is pressing because Mehta himself acknowledges that introspection can mislead (202, 285). Introspective verdicts require more defense than Mehta provides to carry the burdens he places on them.

My second worry concerns Mehta’s use of parsimony. A monist admits only one kind of sensory awareness; Mehta admits two. Mehta’s strategy is to force monists to posit another kind of sensory awareness. Their views then prove just as unparsimonious as his on the number of kinds of sensory awareness (xii, 9, 119, 131, §5.9, 142, 232, 236, 290, 292, 294). Mehta provides no clear criterion for individuating kinds of sensory awareness, so adjudicating these disputes is tricky. Even if—a big if—we grant Mehta’s arguments on the narrow point of the number of kinds of sensory awareness, I worry that weighing parsimony so narrowly resembles weighing three-course meals by their first course alone. Mehta’s view commits him not only to two kinds of sensory awareness, but also universals, essences, infallibility, and fully rational subjects. Arguably, global considerations of parsimony speak against him.

Mehta’s book suits an advanced undergraduate or graduate-level class on the philosophy of perception. The book is easy to navigate, as Mehta indents key definitions, arguments, and theories from the main text, systematically enumerates and responds to several objections, and provides a helpful glossary. It is packed with provocative arguments and ideas. Mehta’s pellucid and fleet-footed prose is such a joy that this reader would have welcomed a hundred pages more on those matters over which he passes over too quickly.

REFERENCES

Bengson, J.; Grube, E. & Korman, D. Z. 2011. A New Framework for Conceptualism.
Noûs (45: 167-189)

Broad, C.D. 1927. Scientific Thought. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co.

Byrne, A. & Logue, H. 2008. Either/Or in Haddock, A. & Macpherson, F. (eds.) Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge. Oxford University Press. pp. 57-94

Russell, B. 1913. Theory of Knowledge: The 1913 Manuscript. London: Routledge

In the vein of recent work on epistêmê as understanding (for example, Moravcsik 1979, Burnyeat 1980 and 1981, Annas 1981, Schwab 2016 and 2020, Moss 2020), Jagannathan’s thesis is that Aristotle’s concept of practical wisdom (phronêsis) should be interpreted as practical understanding. Jagannathan’s main strategy in the book is to argue from contrasts. By showing how practical wisdom is unlike a range of other epistemic states related to the human good (such as an intuitive sense of what to do; ethical experience (empeiria); theoretical wisdom (sophia); science (epistêmê); and so on), he concludes that “what is left is for practical wisdom to be a distinctly practical form of understanding” (121). Very roughly, phronêsis is a form of understanding in that it is a virtue—a developed intellectual perfection—by which we consistently hit on the truth in a certain domain; by which we grasp universal causes and principles explaining why things are so in that domain; and by which we have a thorough, comprehensive grasp of that domain. And it is a practical form of understanding in that it is used for deliberating about and choosing virtuous action.

The book stands out in several respects. Jagannathan helpfully brings Aristotle into uncommon conversations: for example, with Isocrates, Protagoras, Demosthenes, Hippocratic writers, Albert the Great, Aristophanes, and Xenophon, among others. His deployment of the concept of understanding captures important features of practical wisdom: that it grasps the truth, as well as “the why” behind those truths; that it integrates the general with the particular; that it grasps the connections among different practical values and goals; that it involves thinking successfully and getting things right across contexts and over a complete life; and, of course, that it is a major intellectual accomplishment, and therefore a virtue in Aristotelian terms.

Finally, Jagannathan positions his interpretation as a way of addressing long-standing debates in Aristotle’s ethics and epistemology. His main focus is the debate between “anti-intellectualists”, who think phronêsis does not include a grasp of universals, and “intellectualists”, who think phronêsis is an ethical science with universal principles. Jagannathan describes practical understanding as sharing key features with both anti-intellectualism and intellectualism about phronêsis, thus offering a third way out of the controversy.

Let me elaborate on these core features of the book in each of its chapters.

“Deflationism About Practical Knowledge” opens the book with some philosophical context for Jagannathan’s thesis that Aristotelian practical wisdom is practical understanding. Jagannathan situates the Nicomachean Ethics in response to a deflationary view of practical wisdom that he finds in Isocrates and Protagoras: the view that practical wisdom is not knowledge, but merely fallible, intuitive guesswork about what to do. Deflationism about phronêsis is motivated, Jagannathan argues, by two points.

First, practical matters are unclear and unstable. And second, practical matters are unclear and unstable because there are no objective facts about what is good or bad, only shifting conventions about what seems good or bad to a group of people. Jagannathan argues that Aristotle agrees with the deflationist about the first point, but that he denies the second point by invoking “for the most part” principles. “For the most part” principles are facts about mind-independent reality that can be known, and can give us practical knowledge of what to do by giving us explanations or “reasons why” certain things are to be done (or not), or are good (or bad), “for the most part”. Aristotelian practical knowledge, Jagannathan argues, is concerned with these “for the most part” principles and regularities.

“Ethical Experience in the Nicomachean Ethics” advances Jagannathan’s account of practical wisdom by exploring a key step in its development: gaining ethical experience (empeiria). Ethical experience, Jagannathan argues, is an ordinary form of practical knowledge, arising from good habituation, by which we know that certain things are true: that general facts about the human good are true; that specific things are to be done in specific circumstances (which involves “deliberative competence”); and that such-and-such techniques reliably helps us do those things. Such knowledge-that ensures significant success in performing the actions required by virtue.

Still, ethical experience does not rise to the level of practical wisdom or ethical understanding. Though it grasps generalities about the human good and how to apply those generalities in particular cases, ethical experience does not grasp the generalities as reasons why specific actions should be done. Thankfully, Jagannathan argues, ethical experience gives us the right starting point from which to inquire fruitfully and productively into the “reasons why”, and ultimately, to gain practical wisdom.

“The Nature of the Virtues of Thought” is Jagannathan’s account of what makes practical wisdom a virtue. He identifies three main features that make phronêsis a genuine virtue of thought: (1) phronêsis and its exercise are choiceworthy ends in themselves; (2) phronêsis achieves the goal of one of our intellectual capacities, namely, the goal of practical truth; and (3) phronêsis meets Aristotle’s “Independent Agency Requirement” on being a virtue. In support of (1), Jagannathan argues that practical wisdom is choiceworthy as an architectonic, prescriptive state that organizes our practical and technical activities in light of the human good. IIn support of (2), he argues that truth is the goal of all of our intellectual capacities as such, and that practical truth is the specific goal of our capacity for thinking about contingent matters. Practical wisdom is the state in which we are guaranteed to grasp practical truth, which is exemplified in virtuous choices that combine virtuous desires with excellent deliberative thinking. And in support of (3), Jagannathan argues that in order for practical wisdom to organize all our practical activities in light of the human good, it must be a state we ourselves have. Phronêsis could not do this merely by relying on virtuous others. In all three respects, therefore, practical wisdom is a genuine virtue of thought.

“Practical Understanding and Ethical Science” argues that practical wisdom is not an Aristotelian science (epistêmê). Jagannathan develops his account of Aristotelian phronêsis as a third option in the debate between “intellectualist” and “anti-intellectualist” interpretations of phronêsis—between those who say practical wisdom is a science, and those who deny that practical wisdom involves any universal and explanatory knowledge.

His focus in this chapter is to oppose intellectualist readings, which hold that phronêsis is some kind of ethical science. Jagannathan argues that science and practical wisdom differ in their characteristic outputs (demonstration vs. action); in whether they consist in a grasp of particulars (phronêsis does in part; epistêmê does not); in the precision with which they grasp universal principles and causes (less precisely for phronêsis, more precisely for epistêmê); and in the metaphysics of the principles and causes they grasp (“for the most part” for phronêsis; universal and necessary for epistêmê). Based on these differences, Jagannathan argues that no part of practical wisdom is scientific knowledge. In fact, he says, these differences show that “the character of understanding differs based on the domain”: practical wisdom and scientific knowledge are understanding of different domains—the domains of contingent matters, and matters with unchanging, necessary principles—but these differences in what they are understanding of also make them different qua understanding (104). As such, no part of ethical understanding is scientific and vice versa.

“Knowledge of Practical Universals” continues the argument from Chapter 4 by identifying what Jagannathan thinks “anti-intellectualists” have gotten wrong about practical wisdom: practical wisdom, on his view, includes universal and explanatory knowledge. This is so, he argues, because practical wisdom includes an understanding of the characteristic goals of virtuous action, i.e., of the actions prescribed by the virtues of character. Such goals are universal in that they are non-situation-specific (they are determinable); and they are explanatory principles in that they help the practically wise person to understand why such-and-such an action should be done in a specific situation, in a specific manner, and at a specific time. Jagannathan motivates his point with an interpretation of the virtue of particular justice and its characteristic goal. But of course, a well-lived, virtuous life pursues many practical goals. Jagannathan emphasizes that, in addition to the characteristic goals of all the character virtues, the practically wise person also understands the single, overarching goal of practical wisdom: eupraxia, acting well and successfully. However, he argues that eupraxia is not a separate goal that the practically wise person understands. Rather, the characteristic goals of virtuous action are understood by the practically wise person as different ways of achieving eupraxia. Understanding these goals, in turn, “grounds and orients” the excellent deliberation that leads a practically wise person to practical truth and virtuous choices.

The book’s final chapter, “Political Wisdom”, further supports Jagannathan’s argument from Chapter 5 that practical wisdom involves understanding practical universals. Jagannathan argues that practical wisdom (phronêsis) and political wisdom (politikê) are, for Aristotle, the same state of understanding applied to different contexts: to an individual life and to life in a political community, respectively. They are the same understanding because they understand the same subject matter, namely, the human good.

On the basis of the identity between phronêsis and politikê, Jagannathan argues that practical wisdom involves understanding universals because political wisdom does, in the form of laws that it crafts. Civic laws are universal in the sense that they apply to a range of situations, and wise rulers must understand which laws are good and why, insofar as they promote the human good—the ultimate goal of politics. In order to deliberate wisely about, identify, and choose good laws, then, a political ruler “requires an articulate understanding of the goals proper to human flourishing” (167). But Jagannathan has argued in previous chapters that this understanding is practical wisdom. Insofar as practical wisdom, applied to politics, is expressed in the formation and prescription of general laws, it follows that practical wisdom involves an understanding of general, non-situation-specific truths about the human good.

Let me now raise a question that readers may want to consider as they engage with Jagannathan’s work.

Is practical understanding true? In contemporary philosophy, we might debate whether understanding is always true and factive, or whether we can understand false or fictional things. In the context of Aristotle’s epistemology, though, it seems clear that the intellectual achievement of understanding would have to be true. The Nicomachean Ethics says this is the case for epistêmê: science or scientific understanding is always true (1139a15-18). Jagannathan rightly notices that in the very same passage, Aristotle also identifies phronêsis as a state in which we grasp the truth—specifically, practical truth. On Jagannathan’s interpretation, however, practical truth is specifically found “in virtuous choice”, which combines virtuous wish for an end with excellent deliberation about what to do in pursuit of that end (96). But even if phronêsis guarantees that we grasp practical truth and make virtuous choices, it is not clear, on Jagannathan’s interpretation, whether everything else we understand with phronêsis is true. For instance, as we have seen, he argues that phronêsis includes an understanding of our practical ends.

But is this understanding true? It seems odd (in an Aristotelian context) to deny that the phronimos grasps the truth about which ends are worth pursuing in life. But if ends are not choices (prohaireseis), our understanding of them would not be practically true. Would our understanding of ends be true in some other way, and if so, in what way? Jagannathan also says that “it is a mark of practical wisdom” to identify salient specific features of a practical situation in which we are trying to achieve a virtuous goal (143). But again, if salient particulars are not choices, does practical understanding help us discover the truth about them? Again, it seems odd (in an Aristotelian context) to deny that the phronimos grasps the truth about the salient particulars that could help them achieve their ends. But if our grasp of salient particulars is not practically true, is it true in some other way? And if phronêsis specifically guarantees that we grasp the truth in the sense of practical truth, but our grasp of ends and salient particulars is not practically true, how can a practically wise person be sure of grasping these other truths? Such questions about the relationship between truth, practical truth, and practical understanding are left open by Jagannathan’s interpretation.

REFERENCES

Annas, Julia, 1981, An Introduction to Plato’s Republic, New York: Oxford University Press.

Burnyeat, Myles, 1980, “Socrates and the Jury: Paradoxes in Plato’s Distinction between Knowledge and True Belief”, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplement, 54: 173–191.

—, 1981, “Aristotle on Understanding Knowledge”, in Aristotle on Science: The Posterior Analytics, Enrico Berti (ed.), Padua: Editrice Antenoire, pp. 359–384.

Moravcsik, Julius, 1979, “Understanding and Knowledge in Plato’s Philosophy,” Neue Hefte für Philosophie, 15: 53–69.

Moss, Jessica, 2020, “Is Plato’s Epistemology About Knowledge?” in Hetherington and Smith (eds.) What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology, New York: Routledge: 68–85.

Schwab, Whitney, 2016, “Understanding Epistēmē in Plato’s Republic”, in Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy, Volume 51, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 41–86.

–––, 2020, “Plato’s Ideal Epistemology”, in in Hetherington and Smith (eds.) What the Ancients Offer to Contemporary Epistemology, New York: Routledge: 86–105.

Entering these complex dynamics, Song shifts the discourse, asking not how Eurocentric philosophy should accommodate others but rather how a “Ruist comparative theology” might encounter, engage, and evaluate diverse traditions. His use of "Ruist," referring to the lineage of scholars or literati, reflects his preference for a more etymologically accurate translation of Chinese terms typically rendered as “Confucianism.” Part of Song's approach to comparative theology is rooted in Ruism’s historical interactions with European theologians dating back to the 1500s; part reflects Song’s constructive project aimed at presenting Ruism as a contemporary philosophy and way of life.

The first two chapters establish Song’s theoretical lens on theology, especially related to the use of this term in a Chinese context. In “Comparative Theology as a Liberal Art”, Song encourages contemporary scholars to look back to the pre-Christian use of theology in Aristotle’s work to reclaim both the existential valence and pluralistic openness of the term. Likewise, in “Comparative Theology as a Science”, Song returns to the Greeks to revive a sense of the spiritual dimensions of observation and inquiry as parts of a larger philosophical lifeway.

In taking readers outside certain ossified truisms about assumed differences between the so-called East and West, Song relies on the work of Pierre Hadot to help build his vision of Greek philosophy as a tradition largely in agreement with Ruism in practice, if not always in theory. By framing theology as a component of a pre-Christian philosophical lifeway that conducted rational inquiry and empirical observation as spiritual exercises, Song allows us to imagine Ruist interventions in current discourse. What if the influence of Church doctrine had not shorn philosophy of its spiritual components and separated it from theology? What if Europe’s modernist trajectory had not veered toward a reductive scientism and splintered off so many separate disciplines from the broad-ranging philosophy of the Greeks? In a sense, Ruism gives us glimpses of other directions our own discourse might have gone had “Western” thought not taken these specific historical twists and turns.

I say this is imaginative because, of course, Greek and Chinese scholars were not in communication with each other during the period at which there might have been the greatest overlap. Song’s third chapter, “The Transcendence Debate in the History of Christian-Ru Interaction”, picks up at the point of first contact, namely, encounters between literati in the latter half of the Ming dynasty (1368–1644) and Catholic clergy whose sense of “theology” was already quite distant from Aristotle’s. Song traces the debates over transcendence to the work of Matteo Ricci (1552–1610) and associated missionaries, who were deeply impressed by (and conversant in) China’s rich classical heritage but who nonetheless sought to establish that the ultimacy of Taiji 太極 (which Song translates as Ultimate Limit) was, indeed, not ultimate enough. This is the beginning of the debate: “For them [i.e., Catholic missionaries], the Christian God was more transcendent since He alone could be the origin of cosmic realities, including the reality of Taiji” (56).

Song then traces the discourse through the work of James Legge (1815–1897) and into a range of twentieth century and contemporary scholars, including Christian theologians (such as Hyo-Dong Lee), Ruist philosophers (such as Tu Wei-ming), and comparativists (such as David L. Hall, Roger T. Ames, and Robert Cummings Neville). Here, Song’s careful parsing is extraordinarily helpful in disambiguating the layers of miscommunication that have accrued in the debates over time.

As he shows, many scholars talk past each other, using different definitions of transcendence and hence not directly addressing opposing viewpoints. Likewise, many scholars are rooted in specific Ruist schools and do not necessarily clarify how this shapes their positions in the debates. That is, as Song insightfully discusses, one will have a very different Ruist answer to the question of transcendence if one is implicitly drawing from Zhang Zai (1020–1077) versus Zhu Xi (1130–1200), or, relatedly, if one is not engaging Song dynasty developments in Ruism at all. Song’s overview moves quickly, but he provides several helpful charts that allow readers to see overarching dynamics. He draws out at least four uses of transcendence at play in the debates: “something determinate and ontologically unconditioned”; “something indeterminate and ontologically unconditioned”; “something constantly advancing” beyond present conditions; and “something beyond humans” that is the source human life and the origin of moral values (68).

Song indicates that his concern is with the first two senses. That is, his book investigates the question of whether Taiji or Tian might be considered an ontologically independent creator who brings forth the existing cosmos out of nothing. To disambiguate the debates, Song proposes to provide a thorough historical overview of the development of the concept of creatio ex nihilo in Christian thought and the concept of sheng sheng 生生, or “birth, birth”, in Chinese thought. This occupies the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth chapters.

First, however, Song spends the fourth chapter addressing questions of method by surveying methodological options drawn from the areas of comparative theology, comparative religion, and comparative philosophy of religion. Drawing on his use of theology established earlier, he refers to his own method of Ruist comparative theology “as a rooted, nonconfessional, and scientific liberal art” (85). He identifies his central hermeneutic tools as the notions of “vague category” (drawn from Neville’s Piercean semiotics) and “situational thinking” (drawn from Jonathan Z. Smith’s Wittgensteinian approach to the study of religion). At this point, I would have been interested to hear some of Song’s methodological commitments articulated in the language of Ruist scholarly practices, although this dimension is implicit in Song’s overall approach to Ruism as a way of life in other chapters.

With his methodology in place, Song investigates creatio ex nihilo from Plato through Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834) and Paul Tillich (1886–1965) and sheng sheng from Confucius through Zhu Xi and later Ming dynasty interpreters and critics. This culminates in Song’s assessment of Zhu Xi’s metaphysics in reference to sheng sheng as an expression not of creatio ex nihilo but generatio ex nihilo. Unlike those competing scholars whom Song refers to as Qi-monists, Zhu Xi asserts what Song describes as the ontological priority of Li (pattern-principle) with respect to Qi (vital-energy).

Song further differentiates, however, two senses of Li suggested by Zhu’s work, namely, Li as existing patterns in a Qi-based cosmos and Li as Taiji or Ultimate Limit, “the ultimate creative power that generates all possible vital-energies and their pattern-principles” (235). As Song notes, Zhu Xi does not make this distinction consistently. Accordingly, Song argues against conflating Li and Taiji. By maintaining this distinction, Song says, we gain a picture of Zhu’s mature metaphysics in which Taiji is the indeterminate and ontologically independent source of Li and Qi. Song’s final position in the transcendence debates asserts the similarity between the Zhu Xi lineage of Ruism and what Song calls a minor (as opposed to mainstream) strand of Christian theology, namely, “the de-anthropomorphic understandings of divine creation in Schleiermacher’s and Tillich’s thought” (237).

Throughout the book, Song refers to Ruist comparative theology as a “seeded, open inclusivism” that avoids the totalizing trajectory often problematized in critical discourses on transcendence. In particular, at various points in his argument, Song addresses those critics who might say that Christian theology and Western metaphysics, relying on the language of transcendence, have both been implicated in Europe’s imperialist and colonialist projects, and he defends his understanding of transcendence in Ruism in light of these concerns.

In his concluding chapter, he sums up his responses to a variety of voices in the transcendence debates, applies his Ruist comparative theology to a selection of other issues (such as theodicy), and indicates directions for future research (especially more investigation into the question of transcendence for the Qi-focused lineages of Ruism, which play less of a role in Song’s book, but which perhaps accord with strands of European thought that privilege the language of immanence and process). As Song insightfully points out, his own comparison has been carefully delimited in recognition of the diversity of thought across both Chinese and European contexts, making any essentialized picture of “East” and “West” untenable (262).

Given how entrenched scholars may be on one side or another in the transcendence debates, possibly Song’s book will change no minds. Nonetheless, no matter where a given reader stands, I would recommend this book broadly to anyone working in Chinese philosophy, sinology, comparative theology, and related areas. Many features of Song’s argument are compelling on their own, regardless of the debates, such as his careful parsing of Matteo Ricci’s Chinese sources, his reconstruction of Zhu Xi’s mature thought, and his overall methodological lens on Ruist comparative theology. This book marks the successful culmination of a research trajectory that Song has been developing for many years and that promises fruitful conversations to come.

Although these proposals will strike some as radical, even skeptical readers will find much of interest in Guerrero’s diagnosis of the failures of electoral democracy. He insightfully catalogues its flaws and shows how hard it would be to address them satisfactorily; even so, his contention that the failures are endemic has been notably criticized by Landa and Pevnick (2025). Readers will also find much of interest in the elaboration of his lottocratic proposals. Here, he succeeds in his aim of showing that lottocratic institutions are feasible and promising without getting bogged down in canvassing the contingent obstacles to their implementation. Guerrero works out the details of his proposal with great care and circumspection, displaying an admirable balance of idealism and realism.

Of even greater interest, to my mind, is Guerrero’s original approach to institutional evaluation. The argumentative strategy of the book is to compare the merits of electoral and non-electoral institutions on the basis of a functional standard of success, combined with the deployment of other normative standards of political morality, such as rights and equality. I will focus my remarks on Guerrero’s account of institutional success because it is so philosophically rich in its own terms and also because it is crucial for establishing his core conclusions.

Political Functionalism and Institutional Capacities

First, in order to avoid stacking the deck (or seeming to) against electoral institutions, Guerrero develops and defends a standard for assessing governmental institutions that he calls political functionalism. It is a welcome departure from the tired dichotomies that otherwise characterize democratic theory—liberty vs. equality, procedure vs. outcomes, procedure vs. substance. Instead, Guerrero argues that institutions should be evaluated holistically based on how well they enable citizens to solve practical problems of moral significance that arise from the “human political condition” (35). These include the promotion of “wellbeing, individual autonomy, social equality, and justice”, as well as the protection of “certain moral rights of individuals and communities” (30). However, defining a function around such general aims proves difficult. It must also accommodate the variety and complexity of problems that communities might face.

Therefore, Guerrero adopts a form of political contextualism, according to which we should never conclude that an institution will be effective for a given society without first taking into account certain facts about that society, including factors such as its education level and the degree of “racial, cultural, linguistic, socioeconomic, and religious diversity” it exhibits (38). While Guerrero thinks that claims about the merits of political systems can be fully objective and evaluator-independent, he stresses that they are conditional and “contextually relative” (40).

How, then, can the virtues of lottocracy be shown while upholding both political functionalism and political contextualism? Guerrero’s solution is to shift the focus to institutional capacities. He thinks that since all institutions will need certain basic capacities in order to function, institutions can be evaluated on the basis of having these capacities. But whenever capacities are used as a basis of evaluation, a whole host of theoretical problems arise. The first concerns how we are to think of multi-element or multi-dimensional capacities. At one point, for instance, Guerrero says the capacities include weighing evidence “accurately and appropriately” (42). Assuming these two goals are distinct, can or should they be jointly maximized, and at what cost to other capacities?

A second challenge concerns how we are to factor in resource scarcity. In the case of an individual agent, it is important to develop a sense of when the time has come to stop deliberating and act. But whenever agency is distributed and institutionalized, how can we say in general what amount and format of deliberation will manifest the capacities conducive to effective action?

A third challenge appears when we consider time horizons. A group of novices may find it preferable to adopt a structure in which the development of their capacities is slower but more resilient because they utilize the learning process to improve their judgment. In such cases, the capacity to expand one’s capacities is also, technically, a capacity. Not enough is said to address these sorts of challenges.

Nor is it clear how shifting the focus to capacities permits us to make comparisons that are sufficiently sensitive to context. On the one hand, when Guerrero urges a genuine respect for complexity and contextualism, he seems to accept a commitment to endogenous specifications of functionalities. But once we have that kind of genuine contextualism, it’s very difficult to know from the outside how to compare. If, for example, we were to look at two different societies’ ways of balancing liberty and rights, we would not be in a position to compare the pair in terms of capacities for effective functioning instructively, as long as effective functioning is defined in terms of solving a unique set of moral-political problems in a given society. But the whole point of the project is to make a meaningful comparison between types of institutions. So there has to be some context-independence in the standard of success. But the more committed we become to one definite construal of capacities, the less contextualist we will be. Whereas shifting the focus to capacities had promised to be an escape from the challenges of context and complexity, in the end it seems to give rise to its own set of problems.

To my mind, these shortcomings limit the applicability of Guerrero’s approach to evaluating institutions. The adoption of political functionalism had promised to make comparative assessments of institutional forms tractable, but once it is combined with political contextualism, it seems that we are no better off. It also leads to an awkward rhetorical tone in which the author urges us to reserve judgment on almost everything because of the twin issues of complexity and context, even while displaying confidence in the overall capacity of lottocracy to address these very issues.

The Deployment of Other Normative Concepts

In addition to his advocacy of political functionalism as a standard for institutional assessment, Guerrero presents a suite of other normative concepts by which institutions can also be judged, such as equality and responsiveness. Here, Guerrero adopts a method we may call “strategic disambiguation”. First, he gathers up a more or less comprehensive list of things he expects readers to care about in political morality, such as justice, rights, equality, autonomy, etc., with the aim of showing that on each dimension, lottocratic institutions would perform no worse, and may in fact perform better, than electoral ones do. Taking them one by one, he disambiguates each concept into its possible plausible formulations. For example, when it comes to ‘political equality’, Guerrero spells out 10 possible things we could mean. Then he argues that some of the disambiguated formulations of equality can be eliminated because they would make the normative concept unattractive or infeasible, and, among the ones remaining, lottocracy fares well enough (315-324).

Such a strategy allows Guerrero to defend lottocracy while minimizing the need to commit to any particular concept of political equality. This ecumenically non-committal strategy has the virtue of not alienating a reader who happens to have a different conception of equality than the author does. But it also seems oddly coincidental that the only viable conceptions of equality, in this exercise, turn out to be the ones that fit with lottocracy. The reader feels as if they are being sold a new jacket on the grounds that, among all the possible settings in which they would wear it, the only ones where it wouldn’t be suitable are places that they wouldn’t want to go anyway. Just a coincidence?

Two instances of this exercise in strategic disambiguation left me particularly dissatisfied. One occurred during the discussion of responsiveness and accountability, which was otherwise quite insightful (334-344). Here, Guerrero points out that what it means for a decision maker to be morally accountable is different from what it means for them to be politically accountable. The latter normative concept, he thinks, once it has been fully isolated from the former, is not all that valuable. And, he thinks, while moral accountability is valuable, once it has been fully disentangled from notions of political accountability, the value of moral accountability is every bit as realizable under lottocratic institutions as under electoral ones. His prising apart of the moral and political dimensions of accountability, however useful on its own, makes it harder to appreciate the value of their combination. Often political accountability can foster moral accountability, and this is part of why we value it.

Another instance in which the strategic disambiguation exercise proves unsatisfying is Guerrero’s discussion of participation. Guerrero admits that it might seem that lottocratic institutions offer citizens fewer outlets to get involved in issues that move them, thereby neglecting a core democratic value. His response is to pose the philosophical question: what is valuable in the first place about an individual’s ability to participate in politics? Assuming that it is about having a say, he points out that the lifetime odds of serving a turn in a lottocratic institution (roughly 12%) is an opportunity that is more meaningful than the vanishingly small odds of influencing an electoral outcome (326-329). On the other hand, if it is about political advocacy, he says, then the opportunities under lottocratic institutions are more or less equivalent to things as they now stand. By the end of the exercise, Guerrero has factored out the elements of participation in such a way that whatever makes them valuable is addressed just as well by lottocratic institutions as by electoral ones. Again, one may ask: just a coincidence?

It’s useful for Guerrero to separate out and zoom in on these aspects of participation, but the segmentation of conceptual space makes it harder to see the big picture. People’s desire to participate—to ‘have a say’ in the decisions that affect them—is not necessarily about shaping policy in any determinate way. Sometimes, folks just want a ready outlet to express their dissatisfaction. Casting a vote for a certain party or candidate can be a way of registering discontent, but such ‘protest votes’ can also affect the development of a party platform. Voting affords both opportunities at once. If electoral participation opportunities can be good in multiple ways, their value may amount to more than the sum of their parts by virtue of their convergence.

It's even more evident that something gets lost in such segmentation exercises when Guerrero considers political participation on the part of groups organized to counter other groups with whom they disagree. Here, his segmentation strategy focuses on why we find group conflict concerning. He separates out three possible answers (330-332). First, if the disagreement is substantive and reasonable, he argues, it is more likely to get the public reckoning it deserves in a SILL than in an election. If it is not, then, secondly, the concern is about how to get political losers to accept their losses. There, he figures, the acceptance of loss in an electoral system depends to a large degree on the perceived fairness of the system. And such a perception of fairness, for him, is just as available for lottocracy as for elections. A third possibility would be cases of ‘us versus them’, i.e., pure group conflict. Then, he reasons, the grounds for optimism are thin across the board—across all the institutional options.

Again, Guerrero’s strategy of separating things out presupposes that each element of his segmentation can be analyzed conclusively when taken on its own. But what if their combination is equally important? In some cases, such as protection of minority languages, a group’s perception of being overlooked is related to the objective fact of their being overlooked, so it matters that the resolution is both fair and accepted as such. Furthermore, as can be seen with trade union strikes, sometimes the clash is both a pure group conflict and a substantive and reasonable disagreement. The opposition of propertied and propertyless classes is a perennial source of factionalization in politics, as James Madison observed. Although political dynamics can unnecessarily amplify the perception, the interests of the two classes are genuinely opposed. Assessing the adequacy of a solution to one aspect of the problem, i.e., the perception, is not independent of the adequacy of the solution to the other aspect, i.e., the real opposition of interests. Guerrero’s strategy of segmentation misses this important point.

Now, no analysis can capture everything, but there is a pattern that emerges from seeing what has been left out. Guerrero’s framework, to my mind, rests on a picture of governance according to which political competition (including bargaining) simply is not part of what makes institutions effective at problem solving. Why accept this picture?

As John Stuart Mill observed, the incorporation of healthy antagonism among those making the decisions can improve the quality of governance. The thought is that the competition for power, the rivalries, and even the tribalism can actually have a positive role in functional terms. Mill argues accordingly that Parliament should be organized so as to enable members to form a locus of organized opposition. There should be a pont d’appui, as he calls it: a focal point for the opposition to find its footing, a place from which it can push back against prevailing views. For Mill, a deliberative body can avoid the slow drift towards “collective mediocrity” only when there is a backstop against groupthink provided by those members who are incentivized simply to obstruct. His point is that only by accepting some unproductive friction can an institution reap the benefits of productive friction.

A lottocratic system, however, is designed to banish this sort of healthy antagonism. The whole point is to limit decision-making to certain deliberative contexts that are shielded from power differences, echoing Habermas’s dream of realizing a Herrschaft-free deliberative sphere. The practice of legislative bargaining, for example, seems to be eschewed as a method of policy-making (despite briefly acknowledging the practice of ‘logrolling’, in which certain bills are bundled with others in order to seal a negotiated compromise between opposing factions). Lottocratic institutions also shield deliberative bodies from the dynamics of political competition that operate in the wider society.

Under lottocracy, there is no obvious outlet for mass movements of reform. Those who are animated by the energies of opposition, resistance, and revolution lack an organizational structure through which they might have their reform aims articulated and pursued effectively. In some circumstances, the stability and cohesion of the society can be jeopardized by the lack of an outlet for mass movements. A leaderless democracy is not a ship that can be redirected; it cannot have a new course set for it by way of a groundswell. The possibility of schism is the first and most important problem to be solved in politics. For someone so concerned with the function of problem solving, Guerrero seems surprisingly unconcerned with political stability as such.

Perhaps Guerrero’s defense of lottocracy is intended to rest on a wholesale rejection of the potential for political competition to enhance institutional performance. If the rejection of this potential is not wholesale, however, and if it is admitted that it may have potential benefits, then shouldn’t these benefits be put into the balance with other factors when arguing for the superiority of lottocracy? Ideally, a new approach to institutional evaluation would give us a way not only to weigh and balance but also to integrate and reconcile the different normative standards that are relevant. Whatever the merits of Guerrero’s ecumenical and multi-factorial approach to institutional evaluation, allowing us to make an all-things-considered rating of the merit of an institutional form is not one of them.

This point echoes earlier concerns about adopting a methodology that seeks to honor complexity in all its forms. A defense of lottocracy in comparative terms would not be intelligible unless we had a legitimate basis for the comparison. Guerrero’s argumentative strategy, however, is to say that while things are mind-bogglingly complicated in certain respects, they are simplifiable enough to hold that lottocracy is defensible with respect to every consideration that might matter for political morality, at least in the circumstances we are familiar with today. To my mind, lottocracy can be defended with a strategy that emphasizes simplicity, or a strategy that emphasizes complexity, but not both at the same time. Guerrero’s mixture, along with the ecumenical deployment of normative standards like equality, makes the whole amount to less than the sum of its individually impressive parts. Guerrero’s project seeks to do justice to the complexity of institutional evaluation, but the particular simplifications and streamlinings seem to be a product of his pre-existing commitment to lottocratic empowerment as the best mode of governing.

In the end, what may explain Guerrero’s loyalty to lottocratic rule is not a hard-nosed political functionalism but a latent ethics of power. At one point, he observes that a member of a minority group may feel obligated as an elected representative to give special consideration to the effects of a political decision on their fellow group members. But under lottocracy, Guerrero says, no one is required to exercise power in this way nor even be tempted to feel that they should (336-337).

The idea seems to be that under lottocratic institutions, no one empowered to rule owes their empowerment to anyone else, so they are free to do what seems best. He illustrates this with a plane crash thought experiment, in which the small number of unhurt victims are suddenly thrown into a position of guardianship, responsible for exercising judgment on behalf of the larger group of stranded survivors (170). These remarks suggest that Guerrero is as interested in the ethical basis of empowerment as he is in its functional consequences. Be that as it may, Guerrero is right to remind us that lottocracy has a privileged relationship to an egalitarian ethos of empowerment. As Plato observed in the Laws, whenever lottery-based empowerment is instituted as legitimate, that is because it is recognized by a particular community as a way of imperfectly ratifying their positive commitment to political equality, not because it uniquely corresponds to moral or natural equality (690e, 757e).

The timing of Guerrero’s intervention is superb, as devotees of the democratic ideal have lost the moral high ground in recent years. The defenders of democracy are on the back foot, now being forced to play as much defense as they used to play offense. Guerrero’s sympathetic critique of democracy is therefore most welcome, even if what the book has to say about democracy’s moral foundations is not entirely new. Entirely innovative, however, are the theoretical interventions made by Guerrero when it comes to assessing institutions across a wide variety of political contexts. Along the way, he capably develops and defends a standard of legitimacy not wedded to democracy, a standard of institutional reform that is anchored in sensible functioning rather than in public justification or accountability, and a way of thinking about the protection of minority groups that recognizes difference without promoting tribalism. Although the overall analysis has its shortcomings, anyone interested in political theory will find this original and stimulating book richly rewarding.

REFERENCES

Landa, Dimitri, and Ryan Pevnick. 2025. “Should We Be Lottocrats?” Free & Equal: A Journal of Ethics and Public Affairs 1(2).

Plato. Laws. Translated by C.D.C. Reeve. 2022. Hackett Publishing Company.

Melissa Zinkin’s Depth: A Kantian Account of Reason is only one of the most recent attempts to secure the common principle or function that will lay bare the unity of the Kantian conception of the faculty of reason. It joins a diverse list of entries: reason’s regulative use in positing the practical postulates of God, soul and freedom (Pauline Kleingeld, Paul Guyer); practical reason’s ultimate object: the highest good (Jens Timmermann); the categorial imperative (Onora O’Neill, Alix Cohen); the standard of healthy human understanding (Melissa Merritt); a conception of reason as ‘comprehension’, understood a capacity for a specific kind of systematic understanding (Karl Schafer) and the principle of purposiveness (Sabina Vaccarino Bremner).

Every attempt to discover the hidden key to the unity of Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophies is ambitious, and Zinkin’s is no exception. Zinkin argues that what unifies reason is a principle, the principle of systematicity, which is the principle of “deep cognition and comprehension” (248). When reason judges in accordance with this principle, its judgments, theoretical and practical, have cognitive depth. (Zinkin’s argument thus, in its broad outlines, closely resembles Karl Schafer’s recent argument in Kant’s Reason: the Unity of Reason and the Limits of Comprehension in Kant, and indeed, it would have been helpful to hear more from Zinkin herself about how she views the differences between them.)

According to Zinkin’s Kant, human beings ought not only form correct judgments regarding the world, works of art and what to do but “become deep thinkers” (185), which means thinkers who strive not only to know what things are but why they are so: why horses are mammals, human beings rational and good actions good. Characterizing our mental lives as intrinsically aiming at depth is an attractive proposition, but I worry that the way Zinkin finds room for it in Kant risks depriving our so-called ordinary epistemic and moral lives of rationality itself.

The book is divided into two parts, dedicated to Kant’s theoretical and practical philosophy, respectively, with about half of the first part dedicated to Kant’s reflections on aesthetic judgment in the third Critique. In its pages, Zinkin illuminatingly weighs in on a number of open questions, e.g., Kant’s seven levels of cognition (Ch.1), the moral worth of Huckleberry Finn’s refusal to turn Jim in, contrary to his conception of his duty (Ch.5), and the transition from Section I to Section II in the Groundwork (Ch. 6). Limitations of space prevent me from going into these discussions’ interesting details, and I will have to limit myself to introducing and commenting on her central, broadest claims.

Zinkin is on surest footing in her treatment of Kant’s theoretical philosophy. In the first chapter, Zinkin introduces the claim that, for Kant, reason is the faculty of deep systematic judgment, which she identifies with Kant’s account of both “comprehension” in the Jäsche Logic (9:65) and reflective judgment in the third Critique. Zinkin rightly emphasizes that Kant’s concern with reason is not merely a negative one: to deny us knowledge by means of reason of anything that is beyond the bounds of experience and restrict the use of reason to a formal logical function as the store of the rules of inference. Rather, reason emerges as “a transcendental faculty that contains the conditions for the possibility of the cognition of objects”, where the cognition in question is not that of determinative judgments about what things are but “the insight into or comprehension of why something is what it is, that is, its organizing principle” (47).

The welcome redemption of reason comes, however, at a high cost. Zinkin asserts a sharp distinction between ordinary determinative judgments of experience and reflective judgments of reason: while determinative judgments are superficial, relying on “pre-given” concepts, deep reflective judgments are ones that employ concepts I “discover for myself”. This is the distinction between making the judgment x is p, say an animal is a mammal, because “it matches a description I have read in a book” (72), and making the same judgment “by discovering for myself that it has mammary glands.”

In the second judgment, “I, myself, have acquired the reason for making this judgment” (72). We already encounter a difficulty: even if there is a meaningful distinction to be drawn between the way in which I know most mammals, i.e., by learning about them from others, and the way I know those few where I happen to have had the occasion to observe the presence of their mammary glands “for myself”, is it right to think of the latter, DIY concepts, as inherently less superficial than the former, which I obtained from experts via written text?

Zinkin goes so far as to claim that ordinary determinative judgments are “mechanical and automatic, determined by habit or some already-given concept” (84). And correspondingly claims that when we judge determinatively, we judge “unreflectively and automatically, as when I am influenced by prejudice” (85). This seems to fly in the face of Kant’s profound concern with securing the rationality of our judgments, the sort of rationality that makes them fit to be the basis of inferences.

By contrast, for Zinkin, deep cognition amounts to cognitive “Freedom”: “the flexibility to apply what we have learned to new contexts—to think further and more deeply about something” (80-81fn14). The strong contrast between ordinary determinative judgments and deep ones threatens to preclude the expansion from one to the other since, and this I take to be of Kant’s most basic lessons, the gap between the mechanical and automatic and the rational is not one that can be easily bridged.

It is, of course, undeniable that our conceptual mastery can expand, as when a basic ability to identify, say, a dog, by a few basic characteristics of its appearance and behavior, develops into a broader and more systematic grasp not only of its form of life but also animal life in general, the division into species and genera, the history of human’s manipulation of dog’s breeds, etc. At the same time, we want an account of this development to illuminate the possibility of this development. This is precisely what characterizing basic determinative judgments in an empiricist fashion as “mechanical” and “automatic” obscures.

Moreover, while in learning what makes dogs dogs, I am deepening my understanding; arguably, the possibility of this expansion is already implicit in my basic determinative judgment. It is, in other words, constitutive of my basic, initial determinative judgments that they can be expanded by means of my gaining further information about what makes things the things they are.

And, finally, the process by which I come to know more things about dogs than I did initially is often no different than the one by which I came to learn to make my initial, simple judgment: by means of others. If I go deep sea diving, I may first consult a quick guide to identify a new life form I have never heard of, but surely in order to expand that knowledge, I am not really required to perform any experiments myself. I may continue to rely on others, my diving instructor, the authors of my guides, as I grow my understanding of this life form and connect it, systematically, to the rest of my knowledge of marine life. This is not the contrast between “mechanical, superficial judgment” (90) and “good, deep judgment”. It is rather the transition from fully rational and adequate empirical judgment employing a rudimentary grasp of concepts to rational empirical judgments employing a better—we might say deeper—grasp of concepts.

Finally, if ordinary exercises of empirical judgment were defective in the way that Zinkin suggests, it would not only be a mystery how I go from the superficial to the deep myself, but it would be unclear how any humans have ever come to possess “comprehension”, for the mechanical prejudicial judgments would hardly be fit to perform the justificatory role that they must in the growing of our complex, systematic empirical knowledge, i.e., what Zinkin’s “comprehension” is all about.

Moving to aesthetic judgements, we find Zinkin assimilating them without remainder to the judgments of comprehension. Beautiful objects, Zinkin claims, give us pleasure because they “deepen our cognition”. The unity and coherence of the beautiful object is, however, not sui generis; it is rather “precisely the systematic unity of reason”, the unity that “makes comprehension possible” (108). Zinkin speculatively proposes that beautiful objects occasion the following cognitive process: we encounter a particular X (e.g., a human being), for which the understanding has a rule, Xs are Fs (e.g., a human being is a rational animal). Then the imagination comes up, of its own accord, with an image of something else, we know not why or wherefrom, that could serve as a possible counter example to the rule (in her example, a cyborg). This prompts a reflection on the original rule: “The imagination playfully asks, ‘Could this thing be an instance of that object (the human)?” (111)

Recall that this process of contemplating a counter example to a rule is meant to be the basis of the judgment, this X is beautiful. Indeed, Zinkin goes so far as to suggest that “for Kant genius is the ability to come up with a good counterexample” (113 fn39). But nowhere does Zinkin take up the question of how the alleged capacity of an object to provoke the imagination to come up with “counter examples” relates to any familiar conception of beauty.

For the sake of argument, let us accept this picture of what gaining further understanding of a concept entails (it is far from clear that we should: Kant’s attempt to answer what human beings are does not proceed by imagining counter examples but takes the form of, among other things, three Critiques of our mental faculties). Surely, any specimen of X, beautiful or otherwise, would do as a basis for the initiation of this kind of furthering of understanding. Why think that the beautiful horse provokes our imagination to come up with fanciful counterexamples more that an average one would?

With this, we arrive at Kant’s practical philosophy. Zinkin’s basic account here parallels the one she offers of his theoretical enterprise. The familiar distinction between performing an action from a motivation that can be traced to our self-love and performing it in recognition of a necessity that can be traced to the very form of our rational capacities is replaced with an internal distinction within moral motivation: the distinction between “superficial” moral motivation and “deep” one. Zinkin claims that this distinction is analogous to the distinction between a case where I do something inscrutable because a friend, whom I trust, instructs me to (“throw this egg outside right away!”) and a case where I understand the end that my action will promote.

In the same way, Zinkin claims, an agent can grasp their duty in an ordinary moral judgment “tentatively and mechanically” (128) or, when contemplating the end of moral action, deeply and systematically. What the end of moral action is exactly varies: one ought to act in order to “cause my will to be good” (158); “give its actions moral worth” (159); “for the sake of humanity” (159); “for the sake of its own reason” (162); to “promote my own rationality” (162) or further “my own rational nature as an end in itself” (163); for “the end of promoting one’s own rational nature ” (241); and “for the sake of humanity as an end in itself” (232). This seems not only to give up on the idea of securing the sense in which, in acting from consciousness of the moral law, we do something that is good for its own sake, but to get things backwards. We do not treat human beings as ends to cause our wills to be good, we treat them as ends because this is our duty, because this is what respect for the moral law means, because it is the right thing to do.

Now, to be sure, it is reasonable to suppose, as Zinkin does, that one is likely to be more motivated, if only because far less perplexed, where one has a sense of why one is to do what one should. And one welcome consequence of this position that should be mentioned is the idea that to respect someone’s humanity is to respect their capacity for deep thought (192). This means that what I owe another human being extends far beyond not interfering with their power to choose as they happen to see fit but includes treating others as capable of reflective thought and deep comprehension. It follows that respecting other rational agents implies a duty to provide them with the opportunities necessary to develop their cognitive capacities. Moreover, this means that it is not enough to not treat others as means in a technical sense, by obtaining bare consent by whatever means necessary; treating others as ends in themselves means engaging their capacities of understanding and judgment fully.

But it is far from clear that this distinction between the superficial moral judgments and deep ones is helpful in understanding the distinction between common moral cognition and the sort of moral cognition made possible by philosophical inquiry. In effect, Zinkin assimilates ordinary moral judgments, those I have not “thought through” in the relevant way, to actions performed merely in accordance with the law, not from recognition of duty but from empirical motives. Accordingly, and startlingly, she goes so far as to claim that ordinary moral judgments’ prescriptions are “arbitrary”, “not authoritative and cannot obligate us” (158), and therefore, acting in accordance with such moral judgments has no moral worth (196). The implications are intolerable: anyone without philosophical grasp of morality is not obligated by the moral law.

For his part, however, Kant insists on the moral adequacy and worth of common human reason and its moral cognition. In the introduction to the Groundwork, he writes that while common human reason may “not think so abstractive in a universal form”, it nevertheless has the moral principle “always before its eyes and uses [it] as the norm for its appraisals” (4:404). He goes on to insist that “all moral concepts have their seat and origin completely a priori in reason, and indeed in the most common reason just as in reason that is speculative in the highest degree” (4:411).

Philosophy is not required to make moral action possible: “I do not, therefore, need any penetrating acuteness to see what I have to do in order that my volition be morally good” (4:403). We need moral philosophy not because without it, ordinary moral judgments remain without worth, but because though ordinary people are “capable of the idea of a practical pure reason”, their moral judgments “remain subjects to all sorts of corruption” (4:390). Innocence, Kant writes, is “splendid”, but “it cannot protect itself very well and is easily seduced” (4:405). By articulating the principle of pure practical reason vividly, practical philosophy helps us defend against these temptations. None of this is to suggest that it is prima facie unacceptable to advance a different, heterodox interpretation, but it is to say that such apparently straightforward statements must be addressed, and a case must be at least attempted to explain why we should be on better exegetical or philosophical ground in overlooking them.

Returning to Guyer’s standard: if Zinkin describes a single conception of reason, as a faculty of cognitive depth in theoretical, practical and aesthetic judgment, I remain skeptical that it is Kant’s. Even so, Zinkin articulates a valuable idea: our rationality finds expression in our ambition not only to get things right but to gain further and further insight, by means of expanding and systemizing our knowledge, whether of the world or of how we should conduct ourselves in it. I remain hopeful that it is possible to find it in Kant, and articulate it philosophically, without dismissing so much of our ordinary, pre-philosophical mental lives.

REFERENCES

Guyer, The Philosophical Review, Vol. 106, No. 2, April 1997.

The book is written in a standard analytic philosophy style and is a perspicuous contribution to philosophical debates about paternalism. Wilkinson writes from the perspective of a trained philosopher who has spent time embedded in multidisciplinary academic departments that include public and population health scholars. While the book includes global examples, Wilkinson’s personal perspective is shaped by the public health systems he knows best, which have their own distinct flavor of public health practice and scope of authority. The book, or part of it, could function well in a public health ethics class. A prime audience would be a public health practitioner or policymaker who is curious about ethics and has taken some philosophical coursework.

The most important point in the book is the discussion of healthism, defined as the tendency to overvalue health and safety (14). Health is one important value that contributes to a good life. Health is instrumental to many important ends. But the relationship between health and wellbeing is not always straightforward and varies across persons. Intuitively, health is important to someone who wants to spend a long, active life outdoors and less important to an audiophile who, upon reflection, most wants to spend her weekends listening to records and getting high on heroin. Wilkinson shows how many public health writers effectively overlook values that can compete with health (such as pleasure or bonhomie) and assume that promoting health is on balance good for people, while threats to health are on balance bad for them. Concomitant with this is the assumption that people who choose unhealthy options choose mistakenly.

‘Wellbeing’ refers to how well someone’s life is going for them. Wilkinson bases his healthism arguments on a preference-based account of wellbeing, which says that a person’s wellbeing is determined by their ultimate preferences for their life (42-44). Subjectivist views like this contrast with objectivist accounts, which say that a person’s wellbeing is determined by the extent to which certain objectively determined values, such as love and knowledge, are present in their life. Wilkinson’s account doesn’t feel airtight. But this does not matter because all plausible views of wellbeing imply that sometimes making someone healthier renders them on balance worse off. Outlawing heroin may make the audiophile’s life worse, even as it improves her health and extends her life, because it frustrates her ultimate preferences or deprives her of objective values associated with her lifestyle.

Wilkinson argues that there is usually insufficient evidence to show that real-world paternalistic interventions make people better off by making them healthier. Wilkinson focuses on efforts relating to tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy foods. To determine whether such efforts promote wellbeing, we need to know whether unhealthy choices align with the chooser’s wellbeing. There are reasons to think unhealthy choices may be misaligned with wellbeing, but they are inconclusive. For example, tempting or deceptive advertisements for unhealthy products abound, which suggests that some people may choose unhealthy behaviors because they are tempted or misled; however, evidence about the precise effects of advertising is incomplete (149-156). Wilkinson argues that a good practical test for whether unhealthy choices align with a person’s wellbeing involves determining whether they all-things-considered regret their behavior (77-79). There is insufficient evidence to show that most drinkers regret their drinking habits (89-94) or most unhealthy eaters their eating habits (94-99). However, there is evidence to show that cigarette smokers regret having started smoking (81-89). This suggests that smoking does not align with smokers’ preferences and that smokers are making a prudential mistake. Wilkinson concludes that interventions designed to curb smoking probably promote wellbeing. Existing evidence does not support the same conclusion for alcohol and unhealthy foods.

While Wilkinson’s remarks about healthism are important, he ignores some considerations that complicate his picture. For one, Wilkinson focuses on physical health and speaks little about mental health, despite the fact that public health is concerned with both. For instance, the World Health Organization has, since 1948, included mental health as a core tenet of health (Bickenbach, 2017). Since there is a tighter connection between mental health and wellbeing, the assumption that promoting health, broadly construed, promotes wellbeing is more reasonable than Wilkinson’s remarks suggest. Another complicating consideration is that some subfields of public health are significantly more sensitive to the hazards of healthism than the subfields Wilkinson focuses on. For example, sexual and reproductive health professionals have been increasingly integrating pleasure and choice into their conception of sexual wellbeing for decades (Gruskin and Kismödi, 2020; Mitchell et al., 2021); another is that public health professionals concerned about social media use acknowledge that health risks, such as sleep disturbances and depression, should be weighed against potential benefits, such as social connection and opportunities for creative expression (Social Media and Youth Mental Health, 2025). These complications suggest that the profession is already more alive to Wilkinson’s healthism critiques than he acknowledges.

Wilkinson’s second main point is that many paternalistic interventions threaten to infringe on autonomy without producing a sufficiently compensatory benefit to wellbeing. Wilkinson views autonomy as the capacity to make competent decisions within a sphere of personal sovereignty (102-105). He levies incisive critiques at several arguments that purport to show paternalistic interventions need not interfere with autonomy. The most interesting parts of this discussion concern self-binding, nudges, and inequity.

Some paternalistic interventions are contingent upon the direct consent of a target who, like Ulysses on the mast, seeks to bind herself against anticipated mistakes (cf. Parfit, 1984, 326-329). Wilkinson illustrates with the example of a New Zealand law that empowers self-described problem gamblers to make it the case that they are not permitted to enter a casino (Gambling Act 2003 §310). Other voluntary self-exclusion schemes elsewhere in the world address gambling problems (Hopfgartner et al., 2023), suicide by firearm (Barks et al., 2025), and opioid use (Massachusetts Bureau of Substance Addiction Services 2018). Wilkinson argues that self-binding interventions do not raise deep autonomy concerns and, as an added advantage, can rest on an individual’s judgement about the particular relationship between their health and wellbeing. In principle, then, he approves. However, Wilkinson is skeptical that people would want to bind themselves through such schemes and so is not optimistic about them in practice (126-132).

We suspect that self-binding schemes would be more utilized if they were better known, tested, and normalized. In principle, a public health apparatus could enable citizens to easily bind themselves in fine-grained ways that are tailored to help them avoid mistakes and more effectively pursue their ends. For example, a paternalistic policy could, in principle, be designed to enable a person to make it illegal for bars to sell them more than two drinks on weekdays. Such creative possibilities deserve more discussion.

Another kind of paternalistic intervention involves nudges, which are standardly understood as modifications of “any aspect of the choice architecture that alters people’s behavior in a predictable way without forbidding any options or significantly changing their economic incentives” (Thaler and Sunstein, 2008, 6). Because nudges enable targets to opt out of their influence, Wilkinson thinks nudges do not infringe on autonomy and are, in this sense, a promising paternalistic tool.

Again, however, the picture Wilkinson paints is more complex than his focus on certain subfields suggests. While it is plausible to say the state may alter the choice architecture of decisions about purchasing unhealthy consumables, it is less clear when these interventions are permissible in more intimate spheres that Wilkinson hardly discusses, such as sexuality or family life. Moreover, it is not always possible to opt out from the presence of nudges, and repeated exposure over long periods of time may feel noxious (especially in intimate spheres) or increase the chances that people act against their preferences. Consequently, Wilkinson’s remarks about nudges in public health feel somewhat incomplete.

Wilkinson’s arguments concerning paternalism and equity will feel especially cutting to public health readers. Health inequalities between the rich and poor are generally viewed by public health as a product or form of inequity. Unhealthy choices exacerbate these inequalities. Many public health writers conclude that paternalistic interventions on unhealthy choices decrease inequity. Wilkinson’s healthism critiques problematize this argument. A poor person might choose an unhealthy option because it is the prudentially best option available to them; interventions that remove or discourage such an option would likely make the person worse off and possibly increase inequity. Generally speaking, paternalistic prohibitions improve poor people’s wellbeing only on the assumption that poor people are incompetent choosers. Yet this assumption, in Wilkinson’s view, is unjustified by current evidence. Wilkinson thinks it better to address inequity through increasing people’s options, e.g., in the form of cash payments, instead of prohibitions (196-210).

Wilkinson’s critique is compelling. The idea that poor people have the most to gain from having options removed arguably expresses the sentiment that poor people are the worst choosers. This sentiment is classist and fits conveniently into a neoliberal ideology that says the poor are poor because they are worse. Paternalistic prohibitions that are specifically intended to help the poor, such as regressive taxes on unhealthy drinks or prohibitions on varieties of products mostly consumed by the poor, e.g., menthol cigarettes (Caraballo and Asman, 2011), are part of the architecture of inequity that public health advocates want to ameliorate.

This book is written as many sectors of public health shift away from a simplistic focus on health and safety towards more complex, multidisciplinary, and holistic understandings of wellbeing (Lee and Lee, 2025). These shifts are occurring along multiple dimensions, including embracing mental, social, and spiritual health within the purview of public health (Long et al., 2024); popularizing harm reduction techniques; increasing commitment to political and economic advocacy, e.g., universal basic income; centering new perspectives on health and wellbeing from disability advocates; and focusing on Quality Adjusted Life Years (QALYs) beyond simple life expectancy. Wilkinson seems to be moving with the tide.

Overall, Wilkinson underscores important considerations about assumptions baked into public health and points to research gaps that could be illuminated with thoughtful studies interrogating people’s motivations, regrets, and preferences. The book concludes with an ethical checklist for public health interventions. This may be the most interesting and constructive portion of the book for public health practitioners. The checklist is reflective of how, as Wilkinson says, skepticism need not be opposition.

REFERENCES

Barks, Bryan, Shannon Frattaroli, and Paul S. Nestadt. 2025. “Psychiatrists’ Awareness and Use of Voluntary Self-Prohibition as a Firearm Suicide Prevention Tool in Virginia.” Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 53 (3): 446–51. https://doi.org/10.1017/jme.2025.10125.

Bickenbach, Jerome. 2017. “WHO’s Definition of Health: Philosophical Analysis.” In Handbook of the Philosophy of Medicine, edited by T. Schramme and S. Edwards. Springer.

Caraballo, Ralph S., and Katherine Asman. 2011. “Epidemiology of Menthol Cigarette Use in the United States.” Tobacco Induced Diseases 9 (Suppl 1): S1. https://doi.org/10.1186/1617-9625-9-S1-S1.

Gambling Act, New Zealand Department of Internal Affairs (2003). https://www.legislation.govt.nz/act/public/2003/0051/latest/DLM207497.html.

Gruskin, Sofia, and Eszter Kismödi. 2020. “A Call for (Renewed) Commitment to Sexual Health, Sexual Rights, and Sexual Pleasure: A Matter of Health and Well-Being.” American Journal of Public Health 110 (2): 159–60. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2019.305497.

Hopfgartner, Niklas, Michael Auer, Denis Helic, and Mark D. Griffiths. 2023. “The Efficacy of Voluntary Self-Exclusions in Reducing Gambling Among a Real-World Sample of British Online Casino Players.” Journal of Gambling Studies 39 (4): 1833–48. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10899-023-10198-y.

Lee, Kheng Hock, and Chien Earn Lee. 2025. “The Evolving Landscape of Health and Social Care Integration: In Search of a Unifying Theory.” Frontiers in Medicine 12 (July): 1464699. https://doi.org/10.3389/fmed.2025.1464699.

Long, Katelyn N. G., Xavier Symons, Tyler J. VanderWeele, et al. 2024. “Spirituality As A Determinant Of Health: Emerging Policies, Practices, And Systems: Article Examines Spirituality as a Social Determinant of Health.” Health Affairs 43 (6): 783–90. https://doi.org/10.1377/hlthaff.2023.01643.

Massachusetts Bureau of Substance Addiction Services. 2018. Voluntary Non-Opioid Directive. Commonwealth of Massachusetts. https://www.mass.gov/news/voluntary-non-opioid-directive.

Mitchell, Kirstin R., Ruth Lewis, Lucia F. O’Sullivan, and J. Dennis Fortenberry. 2021. “What Is Sexual Wellbeing and Why Does It Matter for Public Health?” The Lancet Public Health 6 (8): e608–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/S2468-2667(21)00099-2.

Parfit, Derek. 1984. Reasons and Persons. Oxford University Press.

Social Media and Youth Mental Health. 2025. U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. U.S. Surgeon General.

Thaler, Richard H., and Cass R. Sunstein. 2008. Nudge: Improving Decisions about Health, Wealth, and Happiness. Yale University Press.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Thanks to Jacob Sparks and Martin Wilkinson for comments on a previous draft.

In the Afterword, Cross observes the general consensus by 1250 “that Christ’s human nature is a concrete particular, the subject of non-trivial properties that become properties or predicates of the divine person by some kind of piggy-backing” (247). The book’s ten chapters trace the primitive coalescence of Christological approaches into their increasingly sophisticated forms, ultimately leading to this consensus. The story unfolds through incremental refinements, and Cross does well to stipulate terminology from the outset, preventing what would otherwise be distracting equivocation between authors and texts. The incremental advancements occurred as much in the space between opinions as within articulations of them, and Cross traces how proponents of each opinion adopted specifications or refinements originating in support of contrary approaches. He retells the story of homo assumptus and habitus/non-aliquid Christologies as intertwining with the development, and ultimately the success of, the subsistence theory or Conciliar Christology. Cross draws useful attention to precise ways proponents of the subsistence theory gleaned insights from the first and third opinions to clarify the nature of the hypostatic union.

The Introduction establishes the basic framework, stakes, and terms of the analysis, following which the monograph is divided into two parts, “From the Homo Assumptus to Conciliar Christology, 1050-1180” and “Conciliar Christology, 1180-1250”. Cross offers concise summaries of Augustine, Chalcedon, Boethius, Constantinople II, and John Damascene. Augustine provided a foundation for homo assumptus Christology, while Boethius and John conveyed the outlines of Conciliar Christology to the Middle Ages.

The Introduction also stipulates a terminological framework rooted in distinction of concrete and abstract, universal and particular, and absolute and relative identity. The concrete designates bearers of non-trivial properties, while abstract designates the properties themselves and what cannot bear further properties. Universal properties can be shared with numerical identity, while the particular cannot. Cross further notes a distinction between absolute identity and relative identity. The subsistence theory builds upon the absolute identity of ‘Word’ and ‘man’ in Christological predications, whereas homo assumptus Christology affirms only relative identity.

The language of homo assumptus featured prominently in Latin Christian sources from late antiquity, but, as Cross observes, the absence of definite and indefinite articles in Latin renders the phrase’s meaning at best uncertain. Augustine employed the phrase often and eventually functioned as a legitimating authority for what became Lombard’s first opinion, but Anselm of Canterbury served a pivotal role in specifying homo assumptus as a theoretical approach rather than simply a repeated expression. Anselm framed the distinction between person and nature as a distinction between the particular and the (real) universal (22).

Further significant advancements to homo assumptus were made by Robert of Melun, ultimately attempting to accommodate principles of Conciliar Christology learned from John Damascene. Robert, among other things, divided properties into the common and the singular, argued the form ‘humanity’ must be borne by a human substance in order to be borne by a person, and defended the relative identity of the human substance and divine substance as the same person. Perhaps Robert’s contribution of broadest significance, in Cross’s analysis, consisted in specifying dignity as a condition for personhood. This applied to homo assumptus in that the Word supplied the dignity of personal distinction to the assumed man.

As we shall see, this line of thinking was used in early thirteenth-century theology as a way of showing why the assumed human nature cannot itself be a person: it is not a person because it is united to something of higher dignity or perfection. In the homo assumptus Christology of the twelfth century, it is used as a way of showing why it is that the human nature must be a person: that is to say, the same person as the Son of God. (46)

Cross narrates the development of the Lombard’s third opinion from its origins in Peter Abelard’s mereological approach (Ch.4), motivated to preserve divine simplicity, to Roland of Bologna’s development of the non-aliquid theory and Peter Lombard’s reframing of the position through habitus (Ch.5) and culminating in the “fullest expression of the non-aliquid theory” in the Summa ‘Breves dies hominis’ (Ch.6). To avoid compromising divine simplicity through composition claims, Roland reasoned that the human nature assumed is not composed because it is not itself a substance: “The crucial claim here is that the assumed soul and flesh compose neither man, nor person, nor substance. In short, they do not compose anything at all” (106). Peter Lombard translates Roland’s approach into his own ontological scheme in the third opinion.

Though it came to be known as the habitus theory, Cross argues it is most fundamentally a non-aliquid theory, with Lombard sympathetically casting it in scriptural terms of habitus and regarding humanity as a concrete object rather than an abstract particular. The fate of non-aliquid Christology changed with papal condemnations in 1170 and 1177, with the Summa ‘Breves dies hominis’ likely composed between Alexander III’s two pronouncements. The Summa accepts Christ as man is something but denies that something is a substance and understands the humanity assumed as an abstract particular. The Summa 

makes explicit a number of significant things that were left undecided in other thinkers. For example, it makes it clear that the act of incarnation is to be analysed as a passion in the human nature—an obvious application of an Aristotelian theory of action to the divine activity. (134)

The subsistence theory, Lombard’s second opinion, emerged from Gilbert of Potiers and his extensive engagement with Boethius (Ch.3) and existed in multiple versions up to 1180:

One makes the union of natures fundamental; another makes the union of human nature to divine person central. And, in principle orthogonal to this distinction, some accounts construe natures as ‘abstract’ subsistences and hypostases as ‘concrete’ subsistents; others construe both natures and hypostases as concrete objects and explain the distinction between non-subsistence and subsistence in terms of assumption and non-assumption. (149)

Peter the Chanter, Praepositinus of Cremona, and Stephen Langton all supported and refined the subsistence theory. Cross discerns in Peter a first movement towards the view “that Christ’s human nature is akin to an accident of the divine person” (159). Praepositinus emphasized the strict identity between ‘Word’ and ‘man’ in Christological predications, and Langton similarly highlighted semantic questions, affirming one person as the subject of both natures and connected individuation with persons, foreshadowing subsequent developments.

The innovations and advancements of twelfth-century debates flowered in thirteenth-century university theology. Cross examines William of Auxerre, Philip the Chancellor, Alexander of Hales, Roland of Cremona, and Hugh of St Cher. William famously argues that the human nature ‘degenerates into an accident’, a degeneration shrouded in mystery but supporting the correct supposition of ‘man’ in Christological predications. For William to “be a person, one needs to be singular (distinct from other singulars and from the universal), incommunicable (not a part), and to have a certain dignity (not united to a form of greater dignity)” (188), and Christ’s human nature lacks the dignity requisite for personhood.

Philip introduces a metaphor that Cross notes leads to the idea of a communication of divine esse or subsistence to the human nature, though Philip does not pursue this line of reasoning. Alexander devotes increasing attention to the union itself, rejecting the union as a created accident and insisting that the union is immediate. Hugh of St Cher repeats this view and presents personhood fundamentally in terms of negation, a view later associated with Franciscan Christology. Roland leaves much of the union under-explained but ultimately argues it must be something created, an inesse in the human nature.

The final two chapters are devoted to Christology in the 1240s, treating in turn Dominicans and then Franciscans. The Dominicans Richard Fishacre and Albert the Great add sophistication and some stability to the subsistence theory, displaying particular concern to distinguish it from homo assumptus approaches. Richard insists, to ensure the proper truth values of Christological predications, there must be the same supposition of ‘God’ and ‘man’ because there is one person with two natures. Richard rejects any medium to the union but also specifies that the human nature is united to the divine person, though it is not strictly true that the divine person is united to the human nature, at least not ‘naturally’. Albert argues that the union requires a relation and proposes a union of grace. To clarify this union, Albert employs Avicenna’s distinction between essence and esse, concluding that the union yields one esse but multiple essences: “Given that esse explains the instantiation and thus singularity of a nature, it is no surprise that Albert holds that the singularity of the human nature derives from the divine person” (225).

The Franciscans John of La Rochelle (significantly responsible for the Christological portions of the Summa halensis) and Richard Rufus of Cornwall “both resuscitate something close to the old homo assumptus position” (230). This resuscitation defies easy explanation, especially since Hugh of St Cher had confidently asserted homo assumptus was no longer held in the schools. The Summa halensis borrows some points from the second opinion to modify the first opinion but does not develop any robust understanding of the mechanics of union in the Incarnation. The Summa halensis notes separate characteristics for both subsistence (singularity, incommunicability, dignity) and for personhood (rationality, dignity, independence). Richard Rufus finds all three opinions lacking in some respect but finds the first closest to the truth. He argues, “the Word became numerically the same as, but not absolutely identical with, a human substance” (242) and only objects to any sense of the substance’s priority to its assumption.

Sketching these overall contours fails to convey the many twists and turns investigated by Cross, particularly in his cataloguing of less-known figures and in his attention to how proponents of each approach explained and responded to the other approaches. And, it neglects his insightful tracing of different composition claims articulated within the three opinions. All of this is to acknowledge that the book is broader and deeper than indicated here. What this hopefully indicates, however, are some of the book’s particular strengths and utility to all those interested in the history and development of metaphysics and semantics of the Incarnation, topics which are narrowly focused yet foundational for a vast array of Christological and soteriological questions. Cross meticulously examines a treasury of sources, expounding them with charity and without imposing upon them any alien clarity.

This book rewards careful study and advances broader scholarly conversation on medieval Christology. That is not to say every reader would affirm every interpretation or point, but every reader should come away with a vastly enriched appreciation for the intertwined development of the three opinions. This book represents an important contribution to Richard Cross’s larger project of providing a thorough historical and philosophical analysis of debates on the metaphysics and semantics of hypostatic union.

Different Beasts, based on the authors’ dissertation at DePaul University, is a book that is, on the one hand, deeply ensconced in what one might call this “eco-theology” of secular postmodernism and is reflective of the general arc of this movement. Özbey does not hide throughout the book that her own sympathies lie with the postmodern projects that criticize and seek to displace the human-animal distinction and how it has shaped our societies. Indeed, she says that the real fruit of her comparison is that her study “can help us further understand and transform our own biases, contradictions, investments, and priorities about the human-animal binary” (10) in a way that serves liberal philosophy. Note the “us” of this sentence is clearly referencing those already sympathetic with postmodern liberalism, as Özbey makes little to no attempt to court those outside this choir. Yet, Özbey’s fundamental purpose in the work is not about “proving the untenability of a human-animal binary” but concerns “exploring the complex machinery behind ambivalent attitudes toward it” (12). Hence, her essential thesis is that two figures who might seem amenable to this project—Baruch Spinoza and the Zhuangzi—are not so agreeable as its adherents might wish. In this respect, Different Beasts is a rather fascinating comparative project, since it largely demonstrates how two intellectual projects are not easily circumscribed within the postmodern project of “liberatory” philosophies, while writing from the perspective of supporting and advancing such philosophies.

The main thrust of Özbey’s book is expositional, observing the various ways in which Spinoza and the Zhuangzi treat the human-animal binary. Part I deals with the intellectual contexts of the comparanda; Part II treats the interlocutors on human distinctiveness; Part III deals with how the figures treat animal emotions; and Part IV indirectly approaches the human-animal binary by examining how the two comparanda deal with alterity between ethnic groups, class groups, and gender roles. As Parts II-IV are more central to Özbey’s theme, they are worth a brief description.

In Part II, Özbey focuses on issues such as epistemology and ontology to show how both Spinoza and the Zhuangzi simultaneously critique “particular visions of human supremacy”, while not abandoning the human-animal binary to such a degree that they still support certain conceptions of human supremacy (16). She contends that her interlocutors do not offer “different erasures of the human-animal split but two different models of human distinctiveness” that reinforce the human-animal binary (16). Regarding Spinoza, for example, she argues that he certainly critiques the human-animal binary, but not for the purpose of dissolving it; rather, Spinoza uses man-beast comparison as a kind of “discriminatory move” that actually reinforces the binary through using it as a pejorative basis (119). In contrast, while the Zhuangzi is variously critical of attempts to reinforce anthropocentrism, the text also has its own version of human superiority, such as in the text’s portrayal of humans alone as capable of shifting perspective between various daos (122).

Part III examines how Spinoza and the Zhuangzi articulate the affective lives of human-animals, how this is communicated, and how these areas impact one’s conception of human solidarity. Özbey contends that Spinoza’s concern for misanthropy leads him to reinforce the human-animal binary in “speciesist” ways (179). At the same time, she argues that while the Zhuangzi is more successful at “blurring” the human-animal binary than Spinoza in ways that modern liberals would applaud (182), the Zhuangzi does not do so in ways that foreshadow a modern Western ecological “liberation” movement. For example, the Zhuangzi treats of a tiger trainer who knows the affects of his wards yet is not moved by this to doubt and disrupt the captivity of the tiger (140-141). Hence, the binary is simultaneously critiqued and reaffirmed in different ways by the same text (see 177).

Part IV borrows on connections between race and gender studies and ecological philosophies by examining how Spinoza and the Zhuangzi deal with human “others”. Özbey’s main exegetical point is to argue that both interlocutors fall into certain habits of mind that reinforce a certain kind of human superiority: the Zhuangzi cannot get beyond an assumed superiority of men over women, whereas Spinoza associates the bestial with certain kinds of racial others (Turks) and women. On this score, Spinoza seems less amenable to modern liberalism than the Zhuangzi, since Özbey thinks speciesism is bound up with Spinoza’s own misogynic and xenophobic positions (277). Özbey thinks the Zhuangzi is more suited, then, to finding ways to “condemn dominant forms of power” (285) and “give attention to the sheer multiplicity of lives that are excluded from the ideals of human perfection, if not humanity altogether” (286). Still, the Zhuangzi’s position on gender does not share in this liberal project per se. Hence, the Zhuangzi is less a liberative model to follow and more a guide to questioning how one’s own vantage point might obstruct emancipatory practices (286).

Özbey’s constant insight is that while those advocating the erasure of the human-animal distinction might find aspects of both Spinoza and the Zhuangzi resonant with their own desiderata, both comparanda also reaffirm the human-animal binary in ways modern secular eco-philosophers cannot accept. In general, Özbey’s view is that Spinoza fairs worse than the Zhuangzi, in the sense that Spinoza reinforces the human-animal distinction more strongly than does the Zhuangzi. Yet, Özbey reminds her reader that despite the Zhuangzi being antagonistic towards certain kinds of normalizing order and speech, the text does not consistently undo the norms associated with the human-animal distinction.

Overall, Özbey’s book is a fascinating read. In part, this is due to the sheer novelty of her comparison, as few readers who know one of her comparanda well will know the other as familiarly, and Özbey is a gifted and faithful expositor. Given the limitations of space, Özbey deals well with the complex historical contexts of both comparanda, albeit in ways specialists might find insufficient or too hasty—such is the nature of comparative study. As a scholar of Chinese philosophy, I found her presentation of the Zhuangzi erudite and compelling, and I learned much from her discussions of Spinoza. Graduate students, in particular, would benefit from Özbey’s book as the structure of her comparison—four parts pairing two expositional chapters with a concluding comparative assessment at the end of each part—seems a very good model for the comparative enterprise and is worth exploring for emulation.

Of course, Different Beasts has its faults. Though generally successful at avoiding eisegesis of her sources (see 182-183), it seems to me that Özbey overly identifies postmodern concerns—such as the suspicion of “power structures” and “hierarchy”—with the concerns of the Zhuangzi in particular. While the Zhuangzi might well be critical of certain social norms of power and influence, for example, this is not the same as thinking the Zhuangzi is concerned with power and hierarchy in the same way a postmodern “liberatory” philosopher is.

Additionally, as I noted above, Özbey’s book is primarily written for those who already share with her the inclination to dispense with the human-animal distinction. Rather than taking the posture of a philosopher wondering whether the human-animal distinction is true, she accepts ecological activism as a kind of doctrinal (if not dogmatic) principle, in light of which to engage her sources. As a Thomist myself, I was left wondering at many points why the fact that Zhuangzi and Spinoza both reaffirm the human-animal distinction, even while critiquing it in certain ways, did not convince Özbey that, perhaps, the human-animal distinction is ultimately true, and thus, rather than dispensing with it, we ought to attend to that distinction more appropriately and justly. I, at least, could not see any part of the work where Özbey entertained such a possibility.

Of course, this makes sense when one learns from Özbey what the “very purpose of doing philosophy” is: “fostering collective self-understanding and imagining new futures” (282). Those who, like myself, see philosophy instead as aimed at the humbler task of “loving wisdom” are unlikely to find much in common with the author’s underlying commitments and her attempts to apply what she gains from her sources. Despite being an “outsider” to Özbey’s academic tribe, I found much of Different Beasts to be thought-provoking and illuminating, and I am confident it will be a worthwhile read for all those with an appetite for comparative philosophy or Chinese philosophy.

Chapter 1 introduces readers to the concept of subjectivity, defined as “consciousness as it is experienced by the subject of conscious states” (1). Zagzebski raises the perennial question of whether knowledge is acquired through experience—whether the “what it’s likeness” of an event is reducible to physical facts. She writes that, regardless of whether knowledge is gained through experience, having an experience means entering a qualitatively different conscious state, and a cognitively perfect being must be able to distinguish among changes in subjectivity. Moreover, “the objective does not exhaust reality, whether or not the physical exhausts the objective” (7-8).

Zagzebski also provides a brief historical account of the concept of subjectivity. While the first-person pronoun is primitive and universal, she writes that “the idea that there is anything about the I that is interesting as the object of I’s awareness is not universal” (18). Descartes was not personally interested in “anything distinctive about the self”, but the Cartesian method of anchoring human questions in the individual ego’s search for knowledge played a part in the “revolution in subjectivity” (15-16). Zagzebski’s narrative includes thinkers such as Kant, Herder, Wojtyla, and others. The turn to the self as a possessor of unique subjectivity also developed through art and literature, specifically the novel (16-19). That the concept of subjectivity developed, in part, through the novel becomes more interesting later when Zagzebski foregrounds Divine subjectivity in narrative, stating that we are all part of God’s unfolding story (189).

Zagzebski provides several arguments for why God must be omnisubjective. She writes that omnisubjectivity is entailed by omniscience. God’s perfect knowledge is comprehensive and thus must include all objective and subjective facts (30, 50). For example, if God does not know what my present disappointment feels like to me, then he does not have perfect knowledge of all things. Omnisubjectivity is also entailed by omnipresence. God is in all things, including in our sorrows and pains (39-41, 43-44). Furthermore, omnisubjectivity follows from common prayer practices. We assume that God is relatable and that we can connect with him directly while praying (45-47). Much of the text is discursive in this way between reason and religious practice. Zagzebski examines rational consistency among properties of God, while also evaluating which properties are assumed in Christian prayer and practice.

There are also Divine justice reasons for accepting omnisubjectivity (54-57). When someone is wronged, there is often a magnitude gap between how the perpetrator and victim perceive the significance of the harm (190-191, see also Baumeister 1995). Left to our own devices and the “confusion of our desires”, we may be unable to collectively discern responsibility and blame. However, a divine judge with complete subjectivity of everyone’s deepest desires, thoughts, and intentions can ably discern what is just (54-55). Intersubjective access means nothing remains hidden, such that judgments are fitting.

Zagzebski offers four models for how omnisubjectivity might obtain—total empathy, perception, panentheism, and creative consciousness. I will focus on the empathy model because it receives the most attention throughout the book. In human empathy, we grasp the emotion of another person as if we were that person (63). The Divine empathy model likens intersubjectivity to this capacity. It consists of a “complete and accurate grasp” of our sensations (66). The empathy view is appealing from a Christian vantage for its relational character. Moreover, empathy is an improvement on the perception model because there is no merging of persons when one empathizes. That is, when I empathize with a grieving person (Pat), I imagine myself in Pat’s position and take on his grief. However, my grief is “not qualitatively identical” to the grief of Pat (63). Mine is an imagined version. This imaginative distance means that God grasps our sensations without folding into them. This matters when I have unfitting or outsized anger, for example. He grasps my unfitting anger without losing himself in that anger.

Empathy is applied analogically to God. However, Divine empathy comes out not sounding very much like human empathy at all, which Zagzebski attests. She writes that Divine empathy would be “quite different from empathy in human beings” (67). When I empathize with the grief of another, I grieve. By contrast, when God empathizes with the grief of another, “God does not grieve” (93). Additionally, human empathy is constrained by imaginative limits, namely, our experiences and understanding. Divine empathy lacks these constraints. Human empathy is first-personally felt and representational. Divine empathy is direct, nonrepresentational, and not emotional, since the perfect grasp of a feeling is not itself a feeling (82-85). Divine empathy includes a “whole range of psychic states other than emotions and feelings” (65), and some of these states are counteractual, meaning that they are subjective states that may have obtained for possible creatures in other possible worlds (116-118, 134).

Whereas the empathy of a friend feels personal and particular—like privileged attention—Divine empathy’s diffuse coverage of a comprehensive set of actual and counteractual sensations makes empathy feel less meaningful. I may be wrong about this; maybe thinking of empathy as privileged attention is just a function of the fact that humans have limited attention spans and cannot empathize with everyone in the way that God can. While I find these descriptions impersonal given the scale, Zagzebski finds omnisubjectivity “emotionally comforting” (57). Also, while Divine empathy is unilateral, in that God grasps our sensations without us doing the same for God, Zagzebski posits that the Beatific Vision may amount to human sharing in Divine subjectivity (189).

The section on empathy generates two questions. The first is how similar a capacity must be to be predicated of God analogically. Zagzebski refrains from offering a theory of human empathy, opting instead to draw on a common experience of imaginative adoption. However, a theory may be helpful because the concept of “empathy” grows less recognizable over the course of the text.

Second, divine imagination does a great deal of work in the empathy model and in omnisubjectivity more generally, and it is unclear what divine imagination is (102). Zagzebski writes that divine imagination is truth-conducive and distinct from the senses and the intellect—two faculties traditionally understood as playing a role in securing knowledge (134). It consists of “picturing [a state of affairs] as one would experience it if it were actual”, rather than grasping a proposition (135). This distinguishes the imagination from the intellect. However, the deliverances of the imagination seem to depend on the deliverances of both the senses and the intellect. It is difficult to conceive of how one might ‘picture a state of affairs’ without drawing on either faculty. Zagzebski writes that the divine imagination has received little attention from philosophers, something she regards as a mistake (133). She does a nice job initiating this conversation and motivating further discussions on the topic.

The final chapter argues for the primacy of subjectivity. It defends the claim that “God knows us first as subjects, and only derivatively as objects, if indeed, he knows us as objects at all” (189). Zagzebski calls intersubjectivity the “glue of the universe” and source of our interconnection with everything in existence (189). In this chapter, Zagzebski also assesses normative implications of intersubjectivity. She writes that an awareness that intersubjectivity is the “most basic feature of being should…affect the way we approach other people and other conscious animals” (187). This is because our individual lives are woven together in a common story. This generates two questions.

First, it is unclear why intersubjectivity makes the difference here. Thinking about one’s position among many creatures certainly prompts perspective on one’s life, but insofar as we are created and sustained by God, we are part of a narrative greater than ourselves regardless of whether that narrative is forged intersubjectively. If the idea is that God’s subjectivity is the ‘middle term’ in our relationships with one another, such that our ordinary interactions are sacred, we may have this regardless of whether God is intersubjective.

Second, it is unclear what Zagzebski has in mind when she says that intersubjectivity impacts our approach to people and other conscious animals. What material difference does intersubjectivity make in how I regard other animals? Zagzebski writes that we should jointly create stories in our communities as sources of common meaning and think in richer ways about our connections to one another. What kinds of stories can we tell that will be thick enough to be action-guiding in increasingly polarized contexts? I imagine Zagzebski has good answers to these questions. The final section was just underdeveloped compared to the rest of the book.

Omnisubjectivity is excellent, and I highly recommend it. While reading, I kept returning to the thought that Linda Zagzebski must be a great teacher. She is articulate, thorough, and careful. She anticipates arguments and addresses them honestly. In these ways, she models the care of an excellent teacher.

REFERENCES

Roy Baumeister. 1999. Evil: Inside Human Violence and Cruelty. Holt.

Bradley Hillier-Smith’s book is thus both welcome and timely. It defends a robust account of the rights of the refugee and the particular moral importance of defending those who face the interpersonal forms of degradation found in the violation of human rights norms. It criticizes conventional modes of understanding the duties states hold towards refugees, while defending the relevance of the moral story undergirding conventional definitions of the refugee. The book is divided into two halves, each of which criticizes what might be called a default account of moral duties towards the refugee.

The first half focuses on negative duties—and on a moral account in which the state of rescue is a mere bystander to the moral drama of the refugee’s migration; the state cannot exclude that refugee but otherwise has no particular duties towards her. The state providing refuge, on this conventional account, has done nothing to create the refugee’s antecedent circumstances and so has merely negative duties to refrain from harming that refugee.

The second half focuses on positive duties to assist and deals with the commonplace moral idea that the refugee’s moral claims begin with the simple fact of her vulnerability; it is the fact of her deprivation and lack of rights-protection that gives rise to the international duty to protect that refugee, and states ought to focus primarily on the provision of the necessities of life in determining who is to be rescued and who ought to perform that rescue.

Hillier-Smith advances sophisticated criticisms against both of these default moral views. On the first proposition, Hillier-Smith argues that the wealthy Northern states of the world are not innocent bystanders but are actively involved—through their policies of deterring prospective migrants, including refugees and economic migrants—in producing the harms that are experienced by actual refugees. The states of the world engage, most obviously, in lethal violence in the process of defending their physical borders. More than this, however, they also maintain and deploy such harmful practices as encampment as a response to refugee flows; Hillier-Smith follows Serena Parekh in understanding the refugee camp as itself constitutive of a sort of harmful denial of human dignity.

These states, finally, engage in structures of migrant containment and seek to make the physical journey to refuge more dangerous and difficult than it otherwise might be. While Hillier-Smith acknowledges the moral complexity of this last form of migration prevention, he argues that it is best understood as the imposition of a harm upon the migrant—which, in conjunction with the other practices listed above, means that the states to which refuge is sought are not innocent bystanders but actively and intentionally harming the world’s refugee population. These harms, moreover, are more significant than any competing moral value that might be derived from being free from refugee flows—with the result that Hillier-Smith concludes that the world’s wealthy states are failing their negative duties to refrain from harming the world’s most vulnerable people.

This is an elegant and sophisticated argument—and I am particularly impressed with Hillier-Smith’s insistence that this makes refugee justice not a systemic matter but one in which particular state agents are unjustly causing harm to particular refugees. I am not, however, entirely convinced that Hillier-Smith has succeeded in refuting the moral framing on which the non-complying wealthy state is often best described as failing in its duty to rescue. Hillier-Smith argues that, based upon his account of harm—on which states harm if they make refugees “occupy a level of wellbeing which is worse than it would be in the nearest possible world in which that policy or practice does not occur” (57-58) that any effort to make a refugee’s journey more difficult is best understood as harmful. The analogy given is what Hillier-Smith calls the denial of escape; a stranger might escape from the path of an oncoming train, but we tie her to the tracks, and she is killed—and we are best understood as having harmed her, rather than having failed to rescue her (63). Hillier-Smith argues that any attempt to make the refugee’s journey towards safety less easily made is morally akin to such an attempt; we are, he says, “tying refugees to the tracks” on a grand scale (65).

I am not entirely convinced. If I had a habit of often leaving the door to my house open because I like the breeze, but then close that door when a riot comes to my neighborhood—with the result that an innocent victim fleeing an unjust killing cannot easily run into my house—it would seem plausible to me that I have failed in my positive duty to rescue that victim; I cannot entirely see how I am best understood as having killed her. The fact that my door was open prior to the riot is true; but I am not yet clear as to why it must therefore stay open, if I ordinarily have the right (absent a duty of rescue) to close that door—a right I emphatically do not have, of course, when it comes to tying strangers to train tracks.

Much refugee containment, though, seems akin to precisely such a closing of the door; the S. S. St. Louis, in an example discussed by Hillier-Smith, was rebuffed and returned to Europe, and this is rightly regarded as a shameful violation of the moral duty to rescue the vulnerable stranger (135)—but I do not yet see why this cannot be viewed as a failure to rescue, rather than the initiation or causation of a direct harm. The United States did not lower the gangplank; that was morally reprehensible, but only because a duty to rescue made the usually permissible action of keeping the gangplank up morally disreputable. Hillier-Smith seems to describe any case in which a means of rescue from harm is removed as being itself responsible for the initiation of the harm—but that seems, to my thinking, simply not true.

This can be seen more easily, perhaps, if we start by looking at cases in which the means of escape is not usually present. If the United States were surrounded on all sides by an enormous natural wall, and only those who were selected for entry were given a rope ladder with which to enter, then the failure to give that rope ladder to the passengers of the S. S. St. Louis would be a moral failure—but that failure would still seem to be a failure of positive duties, rather than the creation of an independent harm. If the United States had a more conventional coastline, and sometimes allowed entry, and sometimes did not—I imagine the moral story might be distinct, but I cannot entirely see why it should be utterly distinct. The migrants on the boat do not usually have the right to walk off the boat on to the gangplank, just as the neighbors on the street do not usually have the right to enter my house. If I remove the tools by which the migrants—or the neighbors—might enter a given place, I may or may not have done something rightful; but it seems hard to see why I ought to be taken as having caused the harm that is about to occur.

At the very least, examples like this seem to my thinking to indicate that there is still more work to be done here before we can comfortably assert that all cases of refugee containment are best described as failures of negative duties to refrain from harm, instead of failures to comply with the positive duty to assist.

The second half of the book focuses on the vexed issue of how to understand the strength and nature of the positive claims of the world’s refugee population; and, here, Hillier-Smith begins with the welcome idea of beginning with that population as it stands and examining the particular source of their vulnerability—and what it is they have been provided with in response. This part of the book develops the idea, in particular, that there is indeed something special about being subjected to the violation of a human right; the fact of that violation, distinct from the particular form of deprivation or lack that is brought about by that violation, counts as having an independent moral weight, and therefore, potentially as a mode by which the claims of the refugee might be thought greater than the claims of the merely vulnerable and needy.

Hillier-Smith argues, most centrally, that such a violation of rights demands an independent response, such that we ought to take ourselves to have a duty of justice to provide refuge for those who have been treated with injustice and a denial of dignity. We have humanitarian duties to help those who are rendered needy, simply because they are needy; but we also have duties of justice, to vindicate the rights and the dignity of those who have been wronged through practices contrary to human rights. For Hillier-Smith, this confluence of moral duties produces obligations of significant strength towards those who have had their human rights abused; we are obligated not only to provide them with the necessities of life, as we would with any needy person, but also to overcome the denial of their moral status, through the provision of that moral status through something like inclusion in our own polity.

These ideas seem both plausible and novel—they do, as Hillier-Smith notes, fly in the face of a great deal of consensus here, on which it is the simple fact of vulnerability and deprivation that ought to be taken as morally primary. For my part, I would note only two worries about this focus on what might be termed the discursive aspect of refugee protection—in which we are obligated to begin with human rights violations, as it were, because we want to reject the disrespect demonstrated by those who perpetuated such abuse. Both of these worries can be found in the world of non-ideal theory; I am concerned, to put things most simply, about the unintended consequences of a world deciding to focus on refugee protection as a site with which to speak back to particular forms of injustice.

The first is that a great deal of involuntary migration, in the years to come, will be the product of climate change—a phenomenon which undoubtedly implicates human rights but which is imperfectly understood as one in which particular individuals have made choices to disrespect or denigrate the human rights of particular others. (Indeed, climate change is morally difficult in part because it is often hard to allocate moral responsibility for the profoundly negative changes that it entails and even more difficult to figure out who to condemn or blame for the horror that has been unleashed.) Hillier-Smith’s account focuses on a rejection of direct forms of injustice, as it were; but it is harder to apply this account to contexts in which vulnerability is clear, but the causal and moral responsibility for that vulnerability is more complex. Again, Hillier-Smith’s analysis that refugee injustice is often direct, rather than systemic, is both welcome and potentially worrisome as regards complex phenomena such as climate migration.

The second unintended consequence is that, where there is differential responsibility for refugees based upon whether that refugee’s vulnerability is produced by injustice, states may find themselves with incentives to tell motivated and corrupt stories about the nature and origin of that vulnerability. If a state can reduce its normative obligation to rescue, by arguing that a given vulnerability was produced not by injustice but by impersonal facts about bad luck or political culture—then states are likely to do just that and to use these materials to seek to reduce their obligation to assist needy outsiders. A norm that focuses upon rescuing the vulnerable because they are vulnerable might be morally less accurate but less susceptible to the sorts of corrupt self-dealing that are increasingly on display by states that wish to escape from their obligations to outsiders. Whether someone is starving is, put simply, easier to establish than whether their starvation is best explained with reference to injustice and moral wrongdoing. This is not, of course, a dispositive objection; we might well prefer a more morally robust and complex rule, even if that complexity creates opportunities for moral failure. It is, however, at the very least worth considering the costs of Hillier-Smith’s proposal and explicitly discussing whether and why they are worth paying.

Hillier-Smith’s book, in short, is an excellent contribution to an important debate; it is complex, morally persuasive, and original. Even those of its readers who are unconvinced by its conclusions are likely to find much of value in its arguments.

However, focusing on the constitutive ambiguity of love does not imply an ‘anything goes’ approach to the issue at hand. In fact, it is precisely the troubled nature of love that Gregoratto uses to inform her normative perspective. The basic idea in this regard seems to be as follows: No erotic relationship is free from ambiguity and trouble. Yet, to a greater or lesser extent, the normative potential of love is realised in some relationships, while in other cases it is repressed and subverted by dynamics of oppression and domination. Freedom is pivotal to this normative potential: ‘Love is desirable when it is free’ (148). More specifically, Gregoratto’s thesis is that love can teach us to be free. This does not occur through a moralistic attempt to identify an uncontaminated romantic core of eros. On the contrary, education in freedom is a journey through love’s inherently troubled nature. The transformative power of Eros necessitates experiencing trouble. In summary, love is ‘a process in which we learn about ourselves, about others, and about love itself’ (79). However, the process of achieving free love does not lead to individualistic and hedonistic freedom. Rather, it is a complicated process of achieving freedom together that highlights the positive and negative aspects of erotic relationships (85).

In order to articulate her theoretical proposal, Gregoratto draws on a variety of intellectual resources, ranging from pragmatism and political philosophy to queer theory and contemporary literature. The theory of recognition plays a decisive role in this regard. By creatively reviving this approach, Gregoratto adopts a ‘power-based, agonistic picture of loving recognition’, understanding relationships of recognition as ‘in themselves ambivalent processes that include the negative, antisocial, irrational and aggressive aspects of human psychological and social realities’ (69). Focusing on recognition thus enables us to overcome dichotomies, such as dependence versus interdependence, passive versus active, and individual versus collective, that prevent us from understanding the emancipatory potential of erotic relationships. In this way, eros emerges as a form of interdependence that enables lovers to regain their independence (105). Recognition is therefore not merely about accepting someone as they are, but also about identifying and nurturing their unfulfilled potential, as well as that of the person doing the recognizing.

The process of erotic education towards freedom does not seek to exert rational control over so-called irrational emotions. It is neither an attempt to accommodate the world as it is nor to dispense with the need to feel at home in it. Rather, the passive, impulsive, and seemingly unfree aspects of eros are significant in that they potentially pave the way for a future sense of belonging in a new world that is yet to be fully figured out and brought to life (91). Erotic bonds often involve feelings of confusion and unease at different levels: with ourselves, with our loved ones, and with the world as it is. It is important to sit with these feelings of confusion and unease, resisting the urge to articulate them, because they have the potential to ignite self-transformation and transformation of the world (161).

Consequently, freedom through love can be achieved by learning to give and receive care and to reject it when it becomes suffocating rather than empowering (80). This presupposes that love can be hijacked and used to manipulate, control, and demean others. Contemporary rhetoric surrounding ‘toxic love’ often focuses on individual traits as the cause of relational toxicity. In contrast, Gregoratto’s critical approach focuses on social and objective disorders—“damaged and damaging patterns” (106)—that recur in cases of unfree and manipulative love. This involves critiquing the idea that love is autonomous from other social, political, and economic spheres. This idea blinds us to the fact that erotic bonds are clearly affected by capitalism in at least two ways. Firstly, erotic experiences appear to be influenced by an economic logic of sorts. Secondly, losers in capitalist competition are perceived as being less attractive. Furthermore, an intersectional perspective clearly demonstrates how gender and race issues also contribute to the suppression of the emancipatory power of eros.

However, while acknowledging the role of economic, social, and political factors in shaping erotic relationships, and rejecting the romantic notion of love as an autonomous social sphere, Gregoratto does not advocate a sociological debunking of love. This distinguishes her approach from other critical approaches to love, such as Eva Illouz’s. Gregoratto argues that love can realise freedom, even in adverse conditions. Furthermore, Eros can provide valuable insights into social injustices and inspire social change. By experimenting with erotic relationships, people can learn to articulate what is wrong in society together. The fact that this dissatisfaction with dominant models of love is embodied in the erotic relationship itself, rather than being merely an intellectual judgement, makes it more powerful.

This presupposes that love cannot be reduced entirely to social conditions. Instead, its ‘exceedance’ (149) is a potential source of critique and of individual and collective transformation. This ‘exceedance’ is largely due to the emotional aspect of eros. While acknowledging, in line with Arlie Hochschild, that emotions and affects are influenced by social structures and norms, Gregoratto does not endorse social constructivism. Instead, she advocates a critical naturalist approach that rejects the idea of a dichotomous separation between emotions and affects that are purely ‘natural’ and those that are socially constructed. This approach enables us to recognise the critical and transformative role of eros in disrupting and challenging prevailing social rules and structures (166). Here, Gregoratto skilfully reveals the dark political side of social constructionism. Many authors endorse social constructivism on the basis that if norms are constructed, they can be changed. However, if everything is subsumed into the iron cage of social structures and norms, there is no room for the unsettling, disturbing, and extravagant ‘natural’ force of eros.

Gregoratto’s endorsement of critical naturalism aims to preserve the political agency of eros. The emergence of a collective erotic ‘we’ directly impacts the lives of those involved in relationships and can indirectly transform wider social and political levels, although this is not a guaranteed outcome. “What happens between lovers is extravagant; it may transcend the erotic ‘we’ and extend to other areas of social life” (178). Free erotic love is an experimental space (189) that gains public importance when it opens new avenues for criticising dominant norms and structures and anticipating a new possible reality. As long as their relationships and practices gain public recognition, a small erotic ‘we’ can wield political influence over other groups.

However, it could be dangerous to link the political value of a group activity too closely to public recognition. There is a risk that the emancipatory and critical potential of such a group will be reduced if its political significance depends on its conformity to a given society’s dominant standards of evaluation. This is a pivotal issue when considering erotic relationships that challenge traditional norms and rules, such as queer and/or polyamorous relationships. This objection is particularly pertinent when recognition is considered only in institutional and legal terms. However, this changes when recognition is understood as a social transformation requiring profound changes in shared feelings and emotions. By critically integrating the paradigm of recognition with John Dewey’s social philosophy, Gregoratto argues that public recognition involves publicising the outcomes of experiments in erotic relationships. This enables the experiment to impact the lives of others and offers a tangible alternative to prevailing models of love. From this perspective, public recognition is more about broadening the scope of people who can engage with experiments in love than about official legitimisation. If we depict erotic freedom as a journey, then public recognition of erotic experiments must relate to the capacity to influence other individuals and social groups travelling alongside us, rather than conforming to a pre-existing standard of evaluation.

Love Troubles is a book that successfully achieves the difficult feat of offering a critical and original perspective on eros while considering the key political and theoretical approaches to the subject. Focusing on the structural ambiguity of erotic bonds enables us to consider the political potential of eros without resorting to simplistic political perspectives. Furthermore, the examples taken from films, TV series, and songs play an excellent illustrative role in sophisticated theoretical theses, setting a standard of originality and rigor that trivial and harmless pop philosophy could take as a model.

However, as is often the case with original and intense books, one question remains unanswered and, in my opinion, deserves further consideration. I am referring to the relationship between erotic love and other forms of non-erotic love that the author excludes from her investigation. The author explicitly excludes those kinds of love—for example, familial love, such as that between parents and children or siblings—from her analysis, where the freedom to end the relationship is structurally constrained. Crucially, she does not dismiss vulnerability and dependence per se but rather forms of love characterized by profound asymmetry that essentially preclude the possibility of ending the relationship. This focus on erotic love is both legitimate and productive (86-87). However, it is also useful to consider the issues arising from the interplay between erotic and non-erotic love. What happens to erotic love when it coexists with one partner providing heavy care duties for the other? What happens to erotic love when a heavy care load towards a third person comes into the picture? One might argue that these are not strictly love troubles, as they result from the interaction between different kinds of love. However, if the impact of capitalism on love is a legitimate subject of inquiry, why should the influence of non-erotic love on eros not be considered?

I would like to conclude with a more specific example. For example, it would be interesting to analyze, from the perspective presented by Gregoratto, the interplay between eros and caring in situations where there are conditions of asymmetry that make it very difficult to exit such a relationship—a topic that has been addressed by disability studies scholars such as Kelly Fritsch and Chiara Montalti, among others. Asymmetry and the difficulty of exiting do not in themselves seem to preclude the eroticization of the relationship of care and dependence. Complementarily, the establishment of an asymmetrical situation of care within a pre-existing erotic relationship seems to produce new and original problematic scenarios. Therefore, it is important to analyze how a caregiving situation profoundly influences eros in a ‘troubling’ way—in the author’s broad sense of the term. These “troubles” obviously offer as many risks as opportunities for individual and political transformation. A rich, profound perspective that takes into account the constitutive ambivalence of romantic relationships is ideally suited to analyze these further love troubles.

Deleuze remains a figure outside the philosophical mainstream, yet to be canonized. By placing the problem of experience at the centre of Difference and Repetition and reconstructing Deleuze’s arguments within a recognisably Kantian framework, Yinon makes both Deleuze’s philosophical motivations and his departures from transcendental idealism newly intelligible. In doing so, he not only clarifies the internal structure of Difference and Repetition but also sharpens the question of Deleuze’s position within the transcendental tradition, as well as the broader history of twentieth-century philosophy.

The book consists broadly of two parts. The first three chapters are devoted to justifying the transcendental framework. Chapter One situates Deleuze’s project within the problem of experience and establishes his sustained interest in both empiricism and transcendental philosophy throughout his earlier historical studies of Hume, Nietzsche, Kant and Bergson.

Even in Deleuze’s work on Bergson (1956/1999; 1966/1988), a noted anti-Kantian, Yinon claims that we can discern a certain fealty to transcendental philosophy. “Bergson’s thought is not presented simply as a strand of thought for which Deleuze […] has sympathy”, he writes, “it is presented as a [perhaps imperfect] way of overcoming the transcendental view of experience” (30). Given Deleuze’s later embrace of the transcendental label, Yinon suggests that he already suspected that Bergson employed “the wrong means to achieve” this goal (30), and that any use of Bergsonian concepts in later work “reinterprets them within the same framework that they were designed to replace” (34).

Chapter Two advances the novel thesis that transcendental empiricism, as formulated in Difference and Repetition, is original to that text. Despite Deleuze’s pre-established interest in empiricism and transcendental philosophy, Yinon argues that “the meaning attached to the terms in question and the attitudes toward them change significantly” across these earlier works (34). Thus, on his view, Difference and Repetition cannot be a straightforward synthesis of previous work. In this respect, Yinon challenges the prominent claim that “Deleuze’s historical monographs were […] preliminary sketches for the great canvas of Difference and Repetition” (Smith, Protevi, Voss 2023).

Chapter Three presents a revised account of Deleuze’s intellectual environment. Yinon challenges familiar narratives concerning the dominance of Hegelianism and phenomenology in twentieth-century French philosophy, situating Deleuze within a general preoccupation, shaped by understudied figures such as Jules Vuillemin and Mikel Dufrenne, with Kant and the transcendental. The chapter also engages competing interpretative positions, namely Badiou’s presentation of Deleuze as a pre-critical metaphysician, as well as post-Kantian interpretations, represented variously by Vincent Descombes, Manfred Frank, Daniel W. Smith and Levi Bryant.

The second half of the book turns to the systematic reconstruction itself. Chapter Four offers an analysis of Deleuze’s concepts of repetition and difference as transcendental principles, while Chapter Five reconstructs Deleuze’s notoriously difficult philosophy of time, the so-called “three syntheses of time”, as an account of the genesis of subjectivity. This chapter also features a helpful comparative engagement with McTaggart’s philosophy of time (154–55).

Chapter Six “attempt[s] to capture the disintegrative moments of constituted subjectivity” (163). In other words, it addresses the methodological question of how the transcendental is accessed from our vantage point in experience. Much of Yinon’s discussion focuses on the experience of learning—a classic Deleuzean case study (184–93). But much more illuminating is his own illustration, drawn from neurologist Oliver Sack’s account of his recovery from a severely injured leg. Recounting his rehabilitation, Sacks describes his disorientation and alienation from his damaged limb:

Suddenly, […] I found myself precipitated into a vertigo of apparitions. The floor seemed miles away, and then a few inches; the room suddenly tilted and turned on its axis. […] and then I perceived the source of commotion. The source was my leg—or, rather, that thing, that featureless cylinder of chalk which served as my leg—that chalky-white abstraction of a leg. Now the cylinder was a thousand feet long, now a matter of two millimetres; now it was fat, now it was thin; now it was tilted this way, now tilted that. It was constantly changing in size and shape, in position and angle, the changes occurring four or five times a second. The extent of transformation and change was immense […]. (Sacks 1987, 111; cited in 198)

A student of Kant, Sacks understands his ordeal as confirming a kind of transcendental idealism, according to which “experience must presuppose a continuous self and environment” (198). Yinon, however, argues that such discombobulation is not an exception that proves the rule—that is, not a kind of “non-experience” that confirms a Kantian account of experience’s conditions and limits. Rather, cases like these show Kant’s account to be inexhaustive, for not all experience exhibits the sort of structure described in the Critique of Pure Reason. As Yinon puts it, “this experience should have led to a problematization of the Kantian view […]; it should have led to the thought that the self is not already there but is rather generated through processes that do not presuppose any former structures” (199). Such uncanny experiences should thus be recognised as clues for a transcendental empiricism, according to which “beneath our ordinary experience there is a transcendental field that generates its structure, but this structure cannot be found in the transcendental field” (199).

Several features of Yinon’s study deserve particular emphasis. Chief among them is its framing device—namely, the problem of experience. Yinon argues that “modern philosophy presupposes a certain understanding of difference and repetition as characteristic of the structure of experience” (3). In other words, our tacit concepts of repetition and difference underpin how we understand the structure of experience, as well as its relation to thought or reason. For Kant, for example, the general, i.e., repeatable, applicability of concepts to diverse phenomena is constitutive of experience: “had there been no repetition, experience would not be possible” (9). By presenting difference and repetition as tacit, yet decisive, structuring principles within modern conceptions of experience, Yinon renders Deleuze’s often unobvious motivations relevant and accessible, allowing readers unfamiliar with Deleuze to situate him as part of, though innovating within, the modern philosophical tradition in general and the transcendental tradition in particular.

A second major virtue lies in the book’s emphasis on the concept of repetition, particularly in Chapter Four. Deleuze’s thought is often characterised as a “philosophy of difference”, but this characterisation “is as good as telling half the story” (85). Resisting this temptation, Yinon focuses much of his attention on repetition, patiently guiding the reader through a series of non-examples. The Platonic and Humean models “consider repetition as deriving from existing objects” (92), as a relation between empirical copies of an original ideal, or as associations in the mind of a subject. The Kantian model, on the other hand, inverts this picture. Again, the applicability of general concepts is itself a constitutive feature of the experience of any object, and thus, in a crucial sense, “repetition precedes the repeating objects” (92): “There is no original that is repeated, only a rule or a concept that is constitutively repetitive” (94).

For Yinon, Deleuze’s own concept of repetition emerges through his critical engagement with Kant. While the notion of repetition underlying Kant’s account is a byproduct of the general-particular schema, or derivative of the rule-governed application of a general concept, Deleuze argues that this schema is itself produced by a more primordial kind of repetition, or that “the generality of concepts is transcendentally conditioned by repetition” (95). Among other case studies, Yinon presents Deleuze’s appropriation of Kant’s argument from incongruent counterparts (99–104). The claim here is that incongruence, e.g., the relation between one’s left and right hands, expresses “a stubbornness of the existent in intuition” (102; Deleuze, 1968/1994, 13). In other words, incongruence exhibits a kind of repetition that resists conceptualisation, introducing a “natural blockage” (96–107) to concepts and thus quite literally determining or generating their generality: “for every concept there will be a repetition in existence that produces nonconceptual differences like those manifested in the case of enantiomorph objects” (102). It is this more profound and active concept of repetition, so adeptly presented by Yinon, that (alongside a concept of difference) characterises the transcendental field underlying all experience.

Despite the book’s achievements, several questions remain. The first concerns its engagement with existing Kantian or quasi-Kantian interpretations of Deleuze. Given the ambition to offer “a comprehensive, systematic interpretation” (5), the limited discussion of Salomon Maimon is striking. Maimon’s influence is argued to be highly significant, especially in relation to Deleuze’s reading of Kant.^[1] 

And yet, Yinon discusses him only briefly in the main body of his book (75–76), confining much of his critical appraisal to an endnote (23, n. 40). Yinon’s aim to de-emphasise Maimon’s influence notwithstanding, the book would have benefitted from a discussion which reflects the prominence and strength of claims regarding Maimon’s influence in the wider literature.

Similarly, Yinon’s engagement with Christian Kerslake’s work is minimal (144, n. 23; 162, n. 48). Kerslake also argues that “the peculiarity of Deleuze’s philosophical work […] comes from its direct continuation of the Kantian turn” (Kerslake 2004, 481; see also Kerslake 2009). A fuller dialogue with such a position, as well as with Maimon-emphasising interpretations, would have refined the distinctiveness and scope of Yinon’s project.

A second issue is the ambiguous status of ontology within the transcendental framework advanced in Yinon’s book. Though he rejects Badiou-style readings of Deleuze as a pre-critical metaphysician, Yinon’s own formulation appears to oscillate between a strict transcendental delimitation of experience and claims that seem to attribute to Deleuze a more robust metaphysics. For example, we are told that Deleuze embraces “a judgment-centred interpretation to his ontological terminology” (119) but also that his goal is “not anthropological but truly ontological” (128) and that on his account “an unconscious ideality […] directly relates to Being” (162). The following passage illustrates the same ambiguity:

Despite the claim that these principles are not immanent to a subject, they are still transcendental: Deleuze sees difference and repetition as principles of the production of experience that do not open a gap between an independent ontology and cosmology and a subjective experience of it. This is precisely the meaning in which difference and repetition are transcendental—they are only applicable to and account for experience […]. (86)

If Yinon is willing to embrace the implications of Deleuze’s thought for the “gap” between ontology and experience, then one wonders why he claims that such thought is “only applicable to […] experience”, rather than allowing that transcendental empiricism may itself amount to a reconfiguration of ontology.

This ambiguity might have been clarified by greater engagement with the fourth chapter of Difference and Repetition—which, relatedly, contains various engagements with mathematics and the sciences, inviting a more ontological interpretation, but which receives limited treatment compared to earlier chapters. The book’s relative lack of sustained engagement with this dimension of Deleuze’s text leaves this question open, and it is here that readers may wish for a more decisive statement of Yinon’s position.

Though Chapter Five’s reconstruction of the three syntheses of time is impressively comprehensive, it at times assumes a degree of familiarity with Deleuze that may challenge readers approaching him for the first time. This is perhaps inevitable given the difficulty of the material, but it sits somewhat uneasily with the book’s otherwise admirable effort to render Deleuze’s project accessible.

A final point on argumentation. In Chapter Six, Yinon reconstructs Deleuze’s claim that the transcendental ought not merely to exhibit the structure of the empirical abstractly:

if the transcendental is merely the abstract form of the empirical, there is no way in which this form could be arrived at other than by abstracting it from the empirical, and therefore it presupposes the empirical. Yet, if the transcendental conditions the variable content, that is, the empirical, then the procedure of inferring the condition from the conditioned is fallacious. Thus, Deleuze arrives at the conclusion that the transcendental must be radically distinct from the empirical […]. (168)

This passage, I believe, contains an equivocation. The activities of “abstracting [the transcendental] from the empirical” and “inferring the [transcendental] from the [empirical]” are not the same. One might make what Deleuze considers the appropriate inferences without imbuing the transcendental with the form of the empirical, as Yinon himself demonstrates later in his book (see our above discussion of Sacks). Also, “inferring the condition from the conditioned” need not be fallacious. Indeed, this just seems to be how transcendental arguments work (Stern and Cheng 2023).

Yinon’s reconstruction of transcendental empiricism is ambitious and illuminating. By reopening the question of Deleuze’s relation to Kant in systematic form, it will undoubtedly shape future discussions of his place within the transcendental tradition and the history of philosophy more broadly.

REFERENCES

Deleuze, Gilles. 1956. “La Conception de la différence chez Bergson.” Études bergsoniennes 4, 77–112. Translated as “Bergson’s Conception of Difference” by Melissa McMahon, in John Mullarkey (ed.), The New Bergson. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1966. Le Bergsonisme. Paris: PUF. Translated as Bergsonism by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. New York: Zone Books, 1988.

Deleuze, Gilles. 1968. Différence et répétition. Paris: PUF. Translated as Difference and Repetition by Paul Patton. New York: Columbia University Press, 1994.

Jones, Graham. 2009. “Solomon Maimon.” In Graham Jones and Jon Roffe (eds.), Deleuze’s Philosophical Lineage, 104–129. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Kerslake, Christian. 2004. “Deleuze, Kant, and the Question of Metacritique.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 42, 481–508.

Kerslake, Christian. 2019. Immanence and the Vertigo of Philosophy: From Kant to Deleuze. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.

Sacks, Oliver. 1987. A Leg to Stand On. New York: Harper Collins.

Smith, Daniel W. 2010. “Genesis and Difference: Deleuze, Maïmon, and the Post-Kantian Reading of Leibniz.” In Sjoerd van Tuinen and Niamh McDonnell (eds.), Deleuze and The Fold: A Critical Reader, 132–154. London: Palgrave Macmillan.

Smith, Daniel W., John Protevi, and Daniela Voss. 2023. “Gilles Deleuze.” In Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2023). Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab.

Stern, Robert and Tiancheng Cheng. 2023. “Transcendental Arguments.” In Edward N. Zalta and Uri Nodelman (eds.), The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2023). Stanford: Metaphysics Research Lab.

Voss, Daniela. 2011. “Maimon and Deleuze: The Viewpoint of Internal Genesis and the Concept of Differentials.” Parrhesia 11, 62–74.

The question then naturally arises regarding the need for yet another book on the subject, and part of the answer, of course, depends on who one considers the proper readership of the book to be. On the back cover, it says that the book ‘introduces readers of all levels to the major arguments found in the Genealogy’, and if one indeed regards the book merely as an introduction, then it succeeds quite nicely, though the question still remains whether earlier guides could not serve the uninitiated reader at least equally well. I say something about this below.

After the first chapter, which consists of an introductory overview of the book itself, as well as of the Genealogy’s main themes, there follows a chapter on Nietzsche’s biography, intellectual development and (thorny) legacy (Chapter one). What I found especially interesting here—besides the occasional juicy biographical nugget (Nietzsche’s self-medicating with opium, cocaine and possibly hashish)—are the short discussions of some of the philosophical and scientific influences on Nietzsche’s own thought: for example, thinkers not widely known, such as the philosopher Maximilian Drossbach or the evolutionary physiologist William Henry Rolph, both of whom, according to Welshon, provided support for Nietzsche’s psychology of drives/affects and the will to power.

The following chapters discuss the Genealogy’s Preface, and each of its three Essays (Chapter Two, Three, Four, and Five, respectively). These are mostly familiar waters (the slave revolt in morality, the origin of bad conscience/guilt, and the ascetic ideal), and the discussion is rather uneventful for the seasoned scholar, but for the newcomer, who is the proper audience for this book, Welshon’s coverage provides ample guidance and orientation. Indeed, Welshon demonstrates throughout thorough familiarity with the text, its complexity, and the various philosophical problems it raises, judiciously placing emphasis on what is of more central importance, while devoting less time to what he considers to be less significant or interesting (examples of the latter are Nietzsche’s discussion of art and the ascetic ideal in GM III, 1-5, or his ‘hostile review of the New Testament’ in GM III 22 (Welshon, 212)). He also at times provides summaries of certain lines of argumentation, which I found to be extremely helpful and illuminating, e.g., p.167, p.218.

But what I found especially valuable—especially from the perspective of the novice—is that following his commentary—which closely follows, section-by-section, Nietzsche’s text—Welshon devotes the last part of each of Chapters 2-5 to a “Discussion”, which provides a more in-depth look at some of the philosophical problems that Nietzsche’s text either explicitly or implicitly broaches and that require more careful handling and clarification. This is of vital importance, for, as readers of Nietzsche know, the philosophical density of his texts is such that he can, as he himself put it, ‘say in ten sentences what other people say in a book, - what other people do not say in a book…’ (TI, Skirmishes, 51). More explicit unpacking, then, is often needed of Nietzsche’s arguments, assumptions, and concepts, which also involves teasing out the various deeper issues that his thoughts give rise to. It is here, in the “Discussion” sections, that Welshon also tries to address various puzzles the text leaves unanswered, e.g. the homunculus problem Nietzsche’s discussion of drives and affects allegedly gives rise to (see 124), and defend—though not at any cost—Nietzsche’s views form possible objections.

This manner of separating the commentary on the text from the more reflective analysis could be of use, I believe, to the reader who might only be interested in the main ideas that the Genealogy explicitly brings up and is less concerned with getting into the philosophical weeds. A problem, however, is that such a line could be hard to maintain, for every commentary is, at least to some extent, reflective, and so goes beyond the text. Indeed, it seems to me that Welshon occasionally traverses the line more blatantly, which results in over-embellishing or over-interpreting the text. For instance, in his commentary on GM I 13-15, Welshon claims that the slave revolt succeeded in convincing the masters to accept the new scheme of values by ‘browbeating, persuading, coaxing, promising, humiliating, assuring, preaching, hoodwinking’ the masters ‘until they accepted that reconfiguration’ (107). In another case, the slaves are described as ‘dimwitted’ (107-108). It is not clear what part of Nietzsche’s text supports these claims.

Another nice feature of the book is that at the end of every chapter, there is a list of “Further Reading”, where the interested reader will find plenty of secondary sources that delve even deeper into some of the issues that each of the Genealogy’s Essays brings up. Indeed, most of Welshon’s commentary and discussion do not explicitly make reference to the secondary sources. This might prove useful for the uninitiated, since it helps keep the text uncluttered by scholarly information. On the other hand, the more advanced reader will at times be frustrated here, since their wish to know on what specific secondary source Welshon’s interpretation of a passage is based will remain unsatisfied. And Welshon’s commentary is clearly based and draws upon some of the latest results of Nietzsche scholarship in general, and interpretations of the Genealogy in particular. Indeed, this is perhaps the main justification for its publication: providing an introduction that is up to date with the current state of research. Thus—and this could be where it surpasses or complements earlier guides—the book benefits from and presents to the reader some of the research community’s (relatively) recent insights regarding Nietzsche’s understanding of drives and affects, ressentiment, the will to power, and nihilism, to name a few central topics.

Let me now turn to discuss briefly a few matters I found problematic. I will limit myself to three. Commenting on Nietzsche’s criticism of the “English psychologists’” genealogy of the origin of the concept “good” (GM I 2), Welshon claims that, by contrast,

By Nietzsche’s hypothesis, goodness did not originate in being useful for others but in being someone who was good, and actions were good not because they were useful for others but because they were the actions of good individuals, those who were “noble”. (83)

But this is to confuse the concept of good, in the origin of which Nietzsche is interested, with the property of goodness, in the reality of which, Nietzsche, given his anti-realism, which Welshon recognizes (75), did not believe. Such imprecision might lead the beginner astray.

Another potentially confusing instance occurs in the context of discussing Nietzsche’s views on truth in GM III 24. To unpack Nietzsche’s claim that ‘truth is an ascetic value’ (220), Welshon first reminds the reader of Nietzsche’s perspectivism and its implication of the impossibility of knowing the brute, unadorned facts. Now, since science and scholarship are confident that they can know the truth, rather than mere interpretations, ‘they mimic and reiterate asceticism’s mistake of mistrusting sensory experience. Science and scholarship’s confidence that their findings are truths thus carry the vapors of religion…’ (221). First, however, even if science and scholarship reject perspectivism, this does not entail they mistrust sensory experience—what does science rely upon if not observation? Second, and more importantly, on Welshon’s reading, Nietzsche’s argument seems to be that since science and scholarship reject perspectivism, and since perspectivism is true (in some sense), it follows that science’s findings are not truths.

But this makes Nietzsche’s argument suspect: we can agree that science is perspectival in that it is always guided by specific interests, conducted in terms of certain concepts, etc., while rejecting the claim that its findings are not true. And indeed, as Welshon goes on to immediately claim by quoting GS 344, the issue here for Nietzsche is really science’s valuation of truth; an issue which, in itself, is neither here nor there regarding the reality of truth or of science’s ability to know it. Welshon concludes the paragraph by claiming: ‘Science must presuppose that truth is paramount in order to defend the knowledge it creates, but knowledge’s perspectivity entails that truth’s status is conditional and regional rather than unrestricted and universal’ (ibid.). This again seems to run together perspectivism, the reality of truth, and its value: the ‘conditionality’ or ‘regionality’ of knowledge under perspectivism is an epistemological matter, while truth’s paramount status is axiological, so science can value truth, even if all knowledge of it is perspectival, without any contradiction or tension.

An issue that commentators on the Genealogy have noticed concerns the question—already touched on above—of why the noble masters, robust and self-confident as they are, come, eventually, to accept slave morality (‘…consider to whom one bows down in Rome itself today…’ (GM I 16)). Welshon flags the issue in the discussion of the first Essay, and comes back to address it in his commentary on GM III 16, where he claims that the priests ‘had to convince [the masters] that they too [i.e. the masters] suffered because they too were guilty’, and to do so they used their ‘mastery of dialectic’ (211). This might be another case where the line between commentary and reflection is not strictly adhered to, since Nietzsche does not say anything about the priests ‘convincing’ the masters of anything. More importantly, it seems to leave the question unanswered. On Nietzsche’s view, dialectics (‘a symptom of decadence’, EH, Wise, 1) and the whole game of giving-and-taking reasons is but a surface phenomenon, an expression of the unconscious works of drives and affects, so it is unclear how the masters, constituted as they were by healthy drives, and dismissive of dialectics (cf. TI, Socrates, 5), could be convinced into slave morality and its attendant forms of asceticism.^[2]

All in all, despite my relatively minor misgivings, Welshon has provided us with an informed and engaging introduction which all newcomers to Nietzsche’s text could profit from.

REFERENCES

Works by Nietzsche

On the Genealogy of Moral, Trans. W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale, NY: Vintage, 1967. [GM]

Gay Science, Trans. W. Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1974. [GS]

Twilight of the Idols, in The Anti-Christ. In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Trans. J. Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. [TI]

Ecce Homo, in The Anti-Christ. In The Anti-Christ, Ecce Homo, Twilight of the Idols, and Other Writings. Trans. J. Norman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. [EH]

Other Works

Conway, Daniel, Nietzsche's 'On the Genealogy of Morals': A Reader's Guide, Continuum, 2008.

Guay, Robert, Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality (Edinburgh Critical Guides to Nietzsche), Edinburgh University Press, 2022.

Hatab, Lawrence, Nietzsche’s On The Genealogy of Morality: An Introduction, Cambridge University Press, 2008.

______, “Why Would Master Morality Surrender its Power?", in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality: A Critical Guide, ed. Simon May, Cambridge University Press, 2011, pp. 193-213.

Havas, Randall, Nietzsche’s “Genealogy”: Nihilism and the Will to Knowledge (1995).

Janaway, Christopher, Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche’s Genealogy, Oxford University Press, 2007.

Leiter, Brian, Nietzsche on Morality, Routledge, 2002 (2^nd ed., 2015).

Owen, David, Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2007.

Reginster, Bernard, The Will to Nothingness: An Essay on Nietzsche's On the Genealogy of Morality, Oxford University Press, 2021.

This book’s subtitle is based on a question the physicist Stephen Hawking once asked: “What breathes fire into the equations…?” If understood as asking what makes some propositions laws of nature, Barry Loewer’s book provides an answer: the activity of science. Not God, powers, dispositions, essences, capacities, or primitives. Loewer instead develops a sophisticated “Humean” answer that grounds the origin of nomological modality in scientific practice.

Thirty years ago, Loewer defended a theory of laws of nature inspired by David Lewis (1996). Since then, he has become a champion of all things Humean in the metaphysics of science—from laws to chances to counterfactuals to explanation—and he has helped shape the field as we know it today. Bouncing off Lewis’s rich project, Loewer is, like Lewis, an example of a (these days, rare) systematic philosopher. At the core of his system is, well, the system, the “best system” theory of laws. According to this theory, which traces its origins to J.S. Mill and Frank Ramsey, the laws of nature are the result of the most powerful and compact summary of the fundamental facts of the world. This long-awaited book is a kind of best system manifesto, which motivates and advances the theory based on his three decades of reflection upon it.

The result is an absolute treasure. Choosing his words carefully, Loewer’s writing is concise and tremendously accessible. He avoids jargon and wordiness. The book is short—I read it in a day—and readable. Nonetheless, it is philosophically subtle, wide-ranging, and absolutely chock-full of argumentation. Loewer deals with important big picture themes, contrasting Quine and Lewis, but also dives into the weeds of the vast secondary literature on laws, answering many objections and questions. The outcome is a nuanced and novel development of his “package deal account” (PDA) of laws of nature. Throughout the reader can sense that they are in the hands of someone who has thought carefully and deeply about the topic.

When I was young, the only short accessible book on laws was David Armstrong’s What Is a Law of Nature? With no Humean counterpart, the universe seemed unbalanced. No yin to the yang. Last year, putting the universe further out of harmony, Eddy Chen published a lovely little book on laws that emphasizes the non-Humean perspective (Chen 2024). With the arrival of Loewer’s book, balance has finally been achieved in the philosophical literature on laws of nature, and we now have excellent and up-to-date Humean (Loewer) and non-Humean (Chen) introductions for anyone interested in the topic. Loewer’s book will be an instant classic.

The book has eleven chapters. It begins with some reasons why one might seek alternatives to non-Humean theories of laws. Then it sympathetically describes Lewis’ version of systems laws, and in a chapter each, tries to separate those objections that successfully can be answered from the genuine problem that motivates the creation of the PDA, the problem of perfectly natural properties. Before proposing PDA, Loewer considers another way of addressing the problem of perfectly natural properties, Super-Humeanism, which in Loewer’s mind goes too far in pruning away ontology. Seeking a kind of middle ground, which I’ll come back to, he unveils the latest version of PDA. The next two chapters deal with incorporating chance into PDA and understanding the special sciences. The book finishes with a discussion of realism, relativism, and reference and then summarizes the main highlights of the view in the final two chapters. Throughout, Loewer interacts extensively with the philosophical literature.

Go back a generation or two. Reacting to problems with “empiricist” theories of laws of nature, David Armstrong, Fred Dretske, and Michael Tooley introduced sophisticated theories united by the fact that they introduced pre-Kantian metaphysical constraints or entities. As these introductions did not seem susceptible to scientific investigation, they were viewed with suspicion in some quarters. For these people David Lewis’ system approach was like a breath of fresh air. Instead of depending upon some kind of invisible, mysterious constraint, lawhood was now decided by a feature of scientific practice. The propositions dubbed laws are distinguished, Lewis claimed, by optimally balancing the often competing virtues of simplicity and informativeness. Whereas these virtues are (arguably) symptoms of lawhood for the non-Humean, for Lewis they are constitutive of lawhood. Trading a metaphysically controversial entity for something commonly found in scientific practice was agreeable to many.

However, the trade didn’t live up to expectations. Lewis’ theory was often advertised as an “empiricist” alternative to non-Humean theories, but that was never an accurate description. After all, it is a kind of ideal observer theory because the systems laws are the result of the best optimization when all the facts are in, even future facts. Much more problematic, Lewisian laws are still tied to a metaphysics that is invisible to scientific practice. For what does the system systematize? Facts organized in terms of natural kinds. But how does a scientist tell if they have a natural kind in their hands? They can’t. This raises the possibility that science devises a fantastic system—the scientifically best system—and yet picks the “wrong” laws because the propositions are written in the wrong language, the language of non-natural kinds. But as van Fraassen (1989) famously asked, how “could we designate this an evil day for science” (53)?

Enter Loewer. He dispenses with a metaphysically privileged set of natural properties and lets science decide what the natural kinds are. Same goes with chances and even spacetime structure. We now compare not only systems of laws but packages of laws, kinds, and spacetimes. As it was in 1996, this move is attractive because science only contemplates laws that mesh nicely with choices of kinds, chances, and spatiotemporal structure. Murray Gell-Mann didn’t posit fractional charge independently of a choice of dynamics and spacetime structure, of course.

Without perfectly natural properties, what are all the packages packaging? Rejecting the promiscuous realism suggested by Jonathan Cohen and me, which allows multiple systems to bloom, Loewer wants there to be ideally a single system with one set of fundamental properties that form a supervenience base for everything. Not wanting to choose that base in advance of systematizing, he borrows from Quine’s epistemology of science the idea that we start “in the middle”, i.e., with macroscopic facts about the world. Why some macroscopic facts and not others? The answer appeals to our natural history, not philosophy.

These two moves were proposed by Loewer in 1996. What’s new? A lot. While this is no tear-down of the original PDA, it is a substantial remodel. The foundation remains the same, but we’re getting a new kitchen, bathrooms, and floorplan. In the intervening thirty years between the article and book, a vast secondary literature arose offering new products, finishes, and fixtures—many by students and colleagues of Loewer. Loewer sifts through this rich inventory and outfits PDA with his new selections. The result is a PDA that most would agree is much improved, whether you like the overall design or not.

For aficionados of the PDA, here are a few important modifications. Now the systematizer can add macroscopic predicates into what gets systematized, in addition to the microscopic predicates upon which these supervene. Despite the redundancy between the two descriptions, the macro predicates may earn their keep by simplifying the overall system. That freedom then sets up a major move: adding as a criterion the unification of the microscopic with the macroscopic special science generalizations. One chooses the laws for the downstairs in part based on good fit with the laws upstairs. Loewer also frees the PDA from various previous constraints that are now viewed as unnecessary. He lets the system posit necessary connections between distinct spatiotemporal regions and therefore abandons Humean recombination, and he is agnostic on whether there are some non-Humean powers or even spacetime at the most fundamental level. Overall, readers will find a substantially redesigned version of PDA, providing those who work on laws plenty to chew on.

What “breathes fire” into the equations for Loewer is scientific practice. But as porridge can be served too hot or too cold, systems laws can be crafted as too far from or too close to scientific practice. One over-arching theme throughout the book is Loewer’s attempt to prepare a product at the right temperature. How much heat does practice breathe into the laws? On the one side, there is the danger of doing a priori science, as Lewis does in distinguishing before systematization what the natural kinds of the world are. That danger of ignoring scientific practice motivates PDA. These laws are too cold.

But on the other side there is the danger that actual scientific practice is perhaps too messy to produce the set of fundamental laws that Loewer desires. Albert (2000) famously explains systems theory with an imagined audience with God. You don’t ask God to tell you the full story of the world because that would take a long time and be very hard to use, so you ask God for something pithy, that could fit on a t-shirt, and that could help you make your “way in the world” (23). With this kind of picture in mind, many advocates of systems laws have embraced a “pragmatic turn” meant to explain why the laws are so useful to us (see Hicks, Jaag and Loew 2023). On these accounts, the laws are still objective because what propositions best optimize the virtues is objective; however, now many of the virtues have a pragmatic aspect to them. We are told to find the propositions that maximize our predictive ability, informativeness for human agents, and more. We could imagine going even further and finding in practice a Nancy Cartwright-like picture of patchwork laws (Cartwright 2019) or even expressivism (Ward 2002, Callender 2023).

Loewer wants none of that. Those laws are too hot. He thinks the “overly pragmatic” (27) understanding of laws would not count the laws of general relativity or quantum field theory as laws because they are “useless for pretty much any practical purpose” (27). He doesn’t want the rule for my printer—kick it three times and implore the gods that you only want one page—to emerge as a fundamental law of nature. When you have your audience with God, he would have you ask for something like a theory of everything written in terms of fundamental ontology and fundamental laws. He is, as he has put it to me in conversation, a fundamentalist first, Humean second. The current PDA is for him the “just right” temperature. It is designed to produce laws that Descartes would recognize as such (if we brought him up to speed). Readers will watch the above balancing act play out throughout the book. Some may want scientific practice to breath more into the laws, others less. Wherever they fall in philosophical tastes, there can be little doubt that Loewer’s articulation of systems theory is a significant achievement in the philosophy of laws of nature.

REFERENCES

Albert, David. 2000. Time and Chance. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Callender, Craig. 2023. “Humean Laws of Nature: The End of the Good Old Days” in Hicks et al, 16-41.

Cartwright, Nancy. 2019. Nature, the Artful Modeler. Open Court.

Chen, Eddy Keming. 2024. Laws of Physics, Cambridge University Press.

Cohen, J., and Callender, C. 2009. “A Better Best System Account of Lawhood”, Philosophical Studies 145, 1–34.

Hicks, Michael Townsend, Jaag, Siegfried, and Loew, Christian. 2023, editors, Humean Laws for Human Agents. Oxford University Press.

Loewer, Barry. 1996. “Humean Supervenience”, Philosophical Topics 24, 101-127.

Van Fraassen, Bas. 1989. Laws and Symmetry. Oxford University Press.

Ward, Barry. 2002. “Humeanism without Humean Supervenience: A Projectivist Account of Laws and Possibilities”, Philosophical Studies 107, 191–218.

Part of what motivates Hazlett in the first goal above is the idea that epistemology has historically been focused on belief, and made great progress, but similar issues arise with respect to other attitudes, such as desire, and Hazlett wants to see how some familiar ideas might apply in these other cases. So beyond the two goals above, Hazlett also seeks to explain how two other epistemic notions—knowledge, rationality—also apply to desire, given that they can be (in)accurate. In this way, the book will be of interest not only to those working on desire, or in metaethics, but also those working in epistemology and interested in foundational questions about its remit.

The book is fantastic on all these topics, and there is much to learn from it. The claims and arguments that Hazlett defends are always both clear and sensible, and even those who disagree will find them well worth reckoning with. The book is also a real joy to read—it is extremely well-written, well-organised, and always exceptionally clear.

In the rest of this review, I’ll say a little more about the accuracy condition on desire and the problem of nihilism, offering some critical comments along the way.

First, then, let us return to consider Hazlett’s accuracy condition on desire:

AD: A desire that p is accurate if and only if (and because) it is good that p and inaccurate if and only if (and because) it is bad that p. (14)

Since the idea of accuracy is most familiar with representational states like belief, we might wonder whether AD implicitly commits us to the view that desires are reducible to evaluative beliefs. But Hazlett accepts AD while resisting that bolder view (15-18). Why? Surprisingly, Hazlett doesn’t resist this view by saying that desires and evaluative beliefs differ in their phenomenology, or in their functional role (16-7). Instead, he says that the difference between desire and evaluative belief is a difference in content (17). On its face, this is puzzling: I would think that on a plausible view, facts about content are fully determined by facts about phenomenology and functional role, so that two states of mind could not differ in content without also differing in some further respect.

But let’s set that aside and focus on Hazlett’s claim about content. He says, “believing that it is good that p requires deploying the concept of goodness”, whereas “desiring that p…does not require deploying the concept of goodness” (17). So the idea is that desires are somehow made accurate by the presence of goodness, even though goodness is not in the content of this attitude. We might wonder about this. How is it that this attitude can be made (in)accurate by a certain property, if the attitude isn’t even about that property? Hazlett answers this challenge by analogy with belief. He says that a belief that p is accurate just in case it is true that p, so that truth is the accuracy condition for belief, but this is so despite beliefs not ordinarily deploying the concept true (27-29). The idea is then that the relationship between desire and the good is the same as the relationship between belief and truth.

This analogy is somewhat attractive, but I think we should nonetheless be a little careful (see also Gregory 2021, 14n). A rival description of the accuracy condition for belief just says that a belief that p is accurate just in case p, without mentioning truth at all. On that view, the accuracy condition for belief would align with its content after all, and we wouldn’t have a good model for how those things might diverge. Hazlett might insist that this would be mistaken, so that the accuracy condition for belief must mention truth, rather than just reiterating the use of p. But then one wonders if we should likewise insist on formulating all accuracy conditions in terms of truth: perhaps a desire that p is accurate just in case it is true, that it is good, that p. But if we say this, we have again lost the idea that the relationship between truth and belief might be a good model for the relationship between goodness and desire. In short, it is not clear whether our desires can be made accurate by goodness unless that is because they represent it. Hazlett hopes to illuminate this possibility by analogy with belief, but this comparison is far from simple.

I now turn to Hazlett’s second main concern in the book: the problem of nihilism. As I understand it, the puzzle consists in the tension between the following three claims. First, AD, according to which desires are made accurate by goodness. Second, roughly, the claim that it’s irrational to have an attitude you believe to be inaccurate (121-122). Third, the thought that even for nihilists—who believe that nothing is good or bad—it is not irrational to have some desires.

Hazlett rejects what he labels the “Humean” solution to the puzzle, which is to just deny AD and say that desires have no accuracy conditions at all. Hazlett also wants to retain something like the second and third claims above. So what is Hazlett’s own solution to the puzzle? In effect, it is to point out that although AD says that desires are made accurate by goodness, and made inaccurate by badness, it need not also say that desires are made inaccurate by the neutrality of their objects. So Hazlett endorses AD but thinks that the view allows that nihilists can rationally have desires: nihilism says that everything is neutral, and AD, as Hazlett endorses it, says that there is nothing inaccurate about desires for neutral objects (Chapter 7).

I find Hazlett’s claims here puzzling in at least two respects. First, Hazlett focuses on nihilism understood as the view that nothing is good or bad but instead only neutral. But I take it that the arguments for nihilism really motivate a wider error theory about everything normative, so that as well as nothing being good or bad, there is nothing that we ought to do, nothing that is (ir)rational, and so on. Like facts about goodness, these other normative facts are equally hard to fit into a naturalistic worldview. But if this broader kind of nihilism is true, then no desire could ever be irrational. So there seems an easy explanation of why nihilism fails to imply that all desires are irrational: nihilism does not just say that nothing is good but also that nothing is irrational.

My second concern about Hazlett’s solution to the problem of nihilism is that it relies on Hazlett’s claim that although desires are accurate when aimed at the good, and inaccurate when aimed at the bad, they are neither accurate nor inaccurate when aimed at the neutral. This seems implausible. To see this, note that elsewhere Hazlett says that accuracy requires your desires to have strengths that are proportionate to their object’s goodness (42), so that accuracy requires you to more strongly desire world peace than custard tarts. Now imagine a series of objects, each slightly worse than the last, ranging from great to terrible—perhaps are you looking to buy a pizza, and the menu contains an extraordinary range of options from delightful to disgusting. Hazlett’s view says that your desire for any pizza should be proportionate to the goodness or badness of that pizza unless that pizza is precisely in the middle of the scale, in which case any strength of desire for it is equally acceptable. So perhaps my desire for a standard boring margarita pizza ought to be modestly positive, because that pizza is modestly good. If I desire this pizza any more, or any less, I will be making a serious mistake. But now imagine that we add a few slices of banana—enough to make the pizza definitely worse, but not enough to make it positively inedible, so that it ends up exactly neutral in value. Now, Hazlett says that I am free to desire this pizza to any extent I like without making a mistake. And yet, if I add another slice of banana and so tip the pizza over the edge into being positively bad, I am now again required to have a very specific weak negative desire to avoid it. This discontinuity seems implausible. Indeed, on one plausible view, the placement of the neutral point on the value scale is largely arbitrary (for relevant discussion see e.g. Gregory in progress, Ch. 5; Broome 1993; Schroeder 2021, sect. 1.2.1; Wolfsdorf 2019, Ch. 3).

In short, I am not sure that Hazlett’s solution to the problem of nihilism withstands scrutiny, and I wonder whether AD can so neatly be divorced from prior work on which desires are reducible to belief. But the issues raised throughout the book are deeply interesting and deserve further discussion, and again, the book is excellent and well-worth engaging with: I recommend it highly.

REFERENCES

Broome, John. 1993. ‘Goodness Is Reducible to Betterness the Evil of Death Is the Value of Life’. In The Good and the Economical: Ethical Choices in Economics and Management, edited by Peter Koslowski Yuichi Shionoya. Springer Verlag.

Gregory, Alex. 2021. Desire as Belief: A Study of Desire, Motivation, and Rationality. Oxford University Press.

Gregory, Alex. In progress. Fitting Happiness. Oxford University Press.

Schroeder, Mark. 2021. ‘Value Theory’. In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Fall 2021, edited by Edward N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2021/entries/value-theory/.

Wolfsdorf, David Conan. 2019. On Goodness. Oxford University Press.