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Essence And Explanation, Albert Casullo

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

In Necessary Beings, Bob Hale addresses two questions: What is the source of necessity? What is the source of our knowledge of it? He offers novel responses to them in terms of the meta- physical notion of nature or, more familiarly, essence. In this paper, I address Hale’s response to the first question. My assessment is negative. I argue that his essentialist explanation of the source of necessity suffers from three significant shortcomings. First, Hale’s leading example of an essentialist explanation merely asserts that the nature of an entity explains some necessity, but leaves unexplained how it does so. Second, …

On The Transcendental Freedom Of The Intellect, Colin Mclear

Department of Philosophy: Faculty Publications

One well-known point of emphasis in the critical philosophy is that only transcendental idealism can safeguard the possibility of the spontaneity and agent-causal freedom of rational beings. If such freedom were not possible, then in Kant’s estimation there would be no hope for conceiving of rational agents as morally responsible; for if rational agents were totally in the grip of the deterministic causal nexus of the Spatio-temporal world then moral requirements could not apply.

However, as the epigraph above makes clear, Kant also considers the causal nexus of phenomenal nature to threaten the status of human beings not just as …