THE CONCEPT OF ENTITLEMENT AND ITS EPISTEMIC RELEVANCE

Crispin Wright has recently suggested that, in addition to the notion of justification, we also possess a non‐evidential notion of warrant, ‘entitlement’, that can play an important role in responding to various skeptical questions. My concern here is with the question of whether entitlement constitutes an epistemic kind of warrant. I claim Wright's argument for this thesis at most shows that entitlement has a pragmatic character. Having identified the sources of the troubles of this argument in its underlying assumptions, I examine and criticize a number of attempts that have sought to substantiate those assumptions. I offer some suggestions as to how one can improve on Wright's account and make some general observations about the prospects of showing that entitlement is an epistemic type of warrant.     

HUSSERLIAN INTENTIONALITY AND THE CHINESE CONCEPT OF MIND

The phenomenology of Edmund Husserl is, in one sense, a theory of pure consciousness that aims to set forth an absolute, ultimate, rigorous ground for the sciences based on the field of pure consciousness. Husserl believed that, on the basis of this field of pure consciousness, he could secure eternal significance for the spiritual life of man. Intentionality is the key element in this theory of pure consciousness and it plays a crucial part in the realization of Husserl's philosophical goal. By contrast, traditional Chinese philosophy was not concerned to seek an absolute, ultimate ground for the sciences or to derive a set of moral norms and a theory of value for human life from logical and scientific truths. Rather, Chinese philosophy sought to adjust the relationships between man and nature and between man and man in their ordinary, secular existence. It placed no value in the ideas of pure logic, pure science, or pure consciousness. Traditional Chinese philosophers inquired into the experiential, intuitive 'mind' ( xin ^a). This approach to 'mind'was understood by the Chinese to require rigorous logical proof or scientific theory:— anyone can perceive one's 'mind'in daily life and, by analogy, anyone can 'perceive'other 'minds'. If Husserl's intentionality is the transcendental reason of Western philosophy, the 'mind'is the practical reason of Chinese philosophy. What, then, are the essential features of Husserl's 'intentionality'and the Chinese 'mind'? What are their respective theoretical features? Can they be brought together and compared in a philosophically significant fashion?     

THE CONCEPT OF HUMAN DIGNITY AND THE REALISTIC UTOPIA OF HUMAN RIGHTS

Abstract: Human rights developed in response to specific violations of human dignity, and can therefore be conceived as specifications of human dignity, their moral source. This internal relationship explains the moral content and moreover the distinguishing feature of human rights: they are designed for an effective implementation of the core moral values of an egalitarian universalism in terms of coercive law. This essay is an attempt to explain this moral‐legal Janus face of human rights through the mediating role of the concept of human dignity. This concept is due to a remarkable generalization of the particularistic meanings of those “dignities” that once were attached to specific honorific functions and memberships. In spite of its abstract meaning, “human dignity” still retains from its particularistic precursor concepts the connotation of depending on the social recognition of a status—in this case, the status of democratic citizenship. Only membership in a constitutional political community can protect, by granting equal rights, the equal human dignity of everybody.